{"id":861,"date":"2012-09-19T21:06:11","date_gmt":"2012-09-19T21:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=861"},"modified":"2012-11-07T16:45:27","modified_gmt":"2012-11-07T16:45:27","slug":"tedeschi-trucks-band-part-2-a-comparison-and-a-closer-look-at-the-bands-chemistry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=861","title":{"rendered":"Tedeschi Trucks Band – Part 2: A Comparison and a Closer Look"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0“<\/strong>Revelator,” TTB’s debut album, won the 2012\u00a0Grammy\u00a0for Best Blues Album<\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n

COMPARISON<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 So what other current American vernacular music group might be a contender for the best band on the scene today? Plenty of you may make staunch cases for innovative and artful bands like Wilco, My Morning Jacket, The Hold Steady, The National, The Drive-By Truckers and others.<\/p>\n

But another band, like TTB, plumbs and propels roots-music genres with rare artistry. Alison Krauss & Union Station also boasts a great female lead singer\/instrumentalist and a master string instrumentalist, and provide an interesting contrast as an acoustic band. This band has two strong lead singers in Krauss and Dan Tyminski, whose sinewy bluegrass voice dubbed George Clooney’s\u00a0singing in the Coen brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou?<\/em>\u00a0He and Krauss also greatly aided that soundtrack album\u2019s remarkable advancement of bluegrass music into the mainstream. Union Station\u2019s dobro\u00a0player Jerry Douglas is among the most resourceful and\u00a0fluent stylists in contemporary music and banjoist-guitarist Ron Block is no front porch picker.<\/p>\n

Krauss\u2019 wide-ranging Grammy-studded career speaks volumes for itself — recently highlighted by her stunning 2009 collaboration with Robert Plant, Raising Sand,<\/em> which won the Album of the Year Grammy. She\u2019s a rare and exquisite singer and interpreter and an expert bluegrass fiddler whose done as much as anyone in recent memory to bring traditional country and bluegrass to wider audiences.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019re comparing groups here. AK & US has a far longer and celebrated track record as a group and they matched TTB in their genre category by snagging the 2012 Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album for Paper Airplane<\/em>. AK & US brilliantly combines bluegrass, country and folk musics with a contemporaneity\u00a0that honors and expands those traditions. Comparably, TTB mixes blues, rock, R&B, gospel and jazz into their own meaty stew.<\/p>\n

And Union Station\u2019s Jerry Douglas is a truly eclectic innovator whose use of a slide resonator guitar, or dobro, underpins his kaleidoscopic spangled, bluesy style, as does Trucks\u2019 bottleneck slide. Both players draw deeply from jazz as well. Douglas\u2019 usually plays his evocative instrument standing but it hangs from his strap flat up like a lap steel. So few have comparably mastered the dobro\u00a0that he\u2019s been heard on\u00a01,500 (count \u2018em) recordings. He\u2019s a walking one-man soundtrack, with his own load of country and bluegrass Grammies. John Fogerty calls him \u201cmy favorite musician.\u201d<\/p>\n

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(L-R) Jerry Douglas, dobro; Alison Krauss vocals and fiddle, Dan Tyminski vocals and guitar.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Photo: AP\/Mark Humphrey<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet neither Krauss nor Douglas in Union Station has the stylistic and expressive range and dynamic power<\/em>\u00a0of Tedeschi-Trucks, though admittedly we\u2019re comparing a largely acoustic group to an electric one.\u00a0 And yet, TTB also plays pianissimo superbly.<\/p>\n

Tedeschi\u00a0has commented: \u201cIt’s amazing when you have two drummers. You can get really super quiet or you that you can get like a freight train is coming, you know (laughs). So I think having that dynamic range was really important was because I think people are really moved by dynamics as well as melody.\u201d 2<\/p>\n

Her band also has a strong second lead vocalist, Mike Mattison, the lead singer of Trucks\u2019 band before his wife joined. Mattison\u00a0has taken a back seat to her; yet Tedeschi is so compelling and dynamically varied that few want to stop listening to her. By contrast, the sweet, angelic purity of Krauss\u2019s soprano, lovely as it is, calls for auditory contrast much sooner,\u00a0to my tastes.<\/p>\n

A CLOSER LOOK AT MUSICAL CHEMISTRY<\/strong>\u00a0— Tedeschi\u00a0and Trucks met in New Orleans when her band opened for the Allman\u00a0Brothers Band’s 1999 Summer Tour. These great individual talents now\u00a0compound each other. One apparently jealous concertgoer\u00a0complained that Tedeschi spent too much time focused on Trucks playing onstage rather than playing to the audience. To me this reflects the couple\u2019s intense synchronicity, wrought by their working together as two great musicians, in love. More than just a singer, she\u2019s also a fine blues guitarist who obviously appreciates and feeds off of her husband’s instrumental brilliance. Such evident marital chemistry is pretty rare to witness onstage and a key to the heights this group has achieved so swiftly.<\/p>\n

All of these elements are vividly evident in the turbo-charged performance of \u201cSpace Captain\u201d from the 2010 Crossroads Guitar Festival.\u00a0Here, sans guitar, Tedeschi is<\/em>\u00a0playing to the audience, exhorting them to clap along. As the song builds to its climax with Trucks\u2019 solo, Tedeschi call and response-style interjections push the performance to an extraordinary peak of intensity and, given the \u201clearning to live together\u201d refrain, a kind of white-hot striving for some idealistic pinnacle of human possibility. This You Tube vid — uploaded on February 3, 2011 — had an amazing 733,506 hits when I last looked. http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3Eb_UXDxUbs<\/a><\/p>\n

Clearly the song that has caught the imagination of YouTube surfers. With Warren Haynes adding the Allmans\u2019 double-lead guitar effect and David Hidalgo and bassist Conrad Lozano of Los Lobos sitting in, not to mention the wailing horns and the double drive of the two drummers — \u201cSpace Captain\u201d soars virtually to the distant utopian planet they’re singing about. *<\/p>\n

This band has a familial chemistry that, like many marriages, may not last a lifetime, but for now it’s incendiary. So you can\u2019t help for rooting for the old marital institution in this case. This union benefits millions more than themselves and their family.<\/p>\n

Tedeschi\u00a0says she and Trucks felt affinity the first day they met: When I heard him play, I was like, “Gosh, he plays kind of like I sing,” she recalled to the Arizona Republic recently. \u201cAnd he thought the same thing. In a lot of ways, when we sit down and play, it’s almost like we finish each other’s sentences, but musically. We have a really strong connection there. And Derek also has a connection with (bassist) Oteil\u00a0Burbridge, because he’s been playing in the Allman\u00a0Brothers with him for over a decade. So they have that ESP quality. And then, of course, Oteil\u00a0has that with his brother, Kofi (the band\u2019s keyboardist\/flutist), because they’ve been brothers their whole lives. And I have it with Falcon (drummer Tyler Greenwell’s nickname). Falcon has it with JJ and before you know it, the whole band has ESP between each other. 3<\/p>\n

Part of the group\u2019s success is that, for all its instrumental prowess — all three horn players receive solo spotlights sooner or later —\u00a0 it does not consider itself a jam band, and their song orientation has helped them reach a larger audience even though in concert their tunes typically stretch to 10 and 15 minutes. But there seems to be\u00a0a discipline, a self-awareness and sense of form to the groups improvising, led by Trucks\u2019 almost invariably well-structured solos and incisively crucial accompaniment their songs.<\/p>\n

Consider a close listen to \u201cUntil You Remember.\u201d A mournful brass obbligato opens, gently mocking the prayerful supplication that follows. The song then proceeds unassumingly, the singer beginning to seem self-pitying, rocking between F and D and A-flat and E flat, with the forsaken woman singing almost to herself.<\/p>\n

Every night I pray\/ that you’ll come back today\/and hold me like you used\u00a0 to<\/em><\/p>\n

every night I spent\/just waiting on your scent\/needing just a trace of you<\/em><\/p>\n

Then from F comes the falling pedal C sharp major chord which conveys both angst in the chromatic accidental and hope in the major tonality. Tedeschi implores:<\/p>\n

I know it ain’t refined\/but I’ll hold your place in line\/\u2019til you remember that your mine.<\/em><\/p>\n

The pedal C sharp tolls over each of these phrases. That harmonic blues descent, combined with Tedeschi\u2019s brave vocal response, is the majestic backbone of the song. Trucks then lashes the chord changes with blood-on-my-fingers guitar, even though it\u2019s a mere few moments, rather than a drawn-out solo.<\/p>\n

There song aches with an acknowledgment that, for all the singer\u2019s willful passion, she may wait a long time for the beloved to truly remember \u201cyou\u2019re mine.\u201d So \u201cUntil You Remember\u201d dwells in painful awareness, moral choices, loss, loneliness and desperate faith — a devastating distillation of all-too-common human experience.http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8RRWQsZN1cc&feature=related<\/a><\/p>\n

As with most of their originals, poised understatement and emotionally charged climaxes show the group\u2019s artistic maturity.<\/p>\n

A recent concert goer named Vuke\u00a0perhaps over-enthused online about a Sept. 7concert\u00a0at the Bob Hope Theater in Stockton California: \u201cDerek Trucks was as you’d expect from a lad that grew up with the Allman\u00a0Brothers Band…as good a guitar player as I’ve ever seen…(that includes Jimi, Eric, BB, Albert King, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Page). I’ve seen them all and it simply doesn’t get any better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the effect of his playing is Trucks’ electrified finger style plucking and deep-seated harmonic resonances, drawing from Elmore James, as he has noted:<\/p>\n

“There was something unleashed in his playing, that acoustic guitar with the electric pickup. When he’s singing, you hear his voice through the electric pickup.”<\/p>\n

James also informs Trucks\u2019 concise choice of notes: Of\u00a0James’ solo in a 1960 version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin,'” he commented: “It’s real simple, but every note is in the right spot \u2013 funky and nasty. Say ‘Play that Elmore lick,’ and everybody knows what to do.” 4<\/p>\n

Trucks normally plays that bottleneck in an open E tuning, which allows him a sort of modal and enharmonic freedom, and a sharp chromatic potency. But he can also play with deft finger fretting, often on the slower tunes.<\/p>\n

This sophistication reflects the jazz and eastern music influences Trucks brings to the band. I didn\u2019t warm up immediately to Truck\u2019s style but now the slight chill effect of his slide tone sounds slightly akin to John Coltrane\u2019s very tight reed sound, which conveyed an unlikely taciturn melancholy under all his expressionistic flights.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the guitar-as-sitar intro to \u201cThese Walls\u201d and the raga-like interlude on the live version of \u201cMidnight in Harlem\u201d on Everybody\u2019s Talkin\u2019<\/em>.\u00a0 The band\u2019s jams on the second disc are often rave ups, like Stevie Wonder\u2019s \u201cUptight\u201d and the gospel classic \u201cWade in the Water.\u201d The second disc of the live CD was criticized in a recent Down Beat<\/em> review for including a certain amount of album \u201cpadding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of these\u00a0moments may feel less than riveting to a home listener, but far more often the cover song arrangements and the solos display consistent wit, fire and imagination — possibly\u00a0better appreciated as musical theater, especially bassist-vocalist Otiel Burbridge (who recently\u00a0announced he was\u00a0leaving\u00a0for\u00a0his family.).<\/p>\n

From its searing peak moments to its most genre-stretching jams, this band represents a deep expansive redefinition of the blues.<\/p>\n

As both leaders are serious guitarists, the band\u2019s spiritual power may emanate partly from what rock critic-historian Robert Palmer has called The Church of the Sonic Guitar. The electric guitar has captivated generations partly because, as an ancient non-Western music theory goes, the instrument\u2019s myriad untempered and unleashed vibrational overtones come from \u201ca system of ratios or tonal portions that not only exist independently in nature but may underlie reality itself.\u201d 5<\/p>\n

The speed with which The Tedeschi\u00a0Trucks Band has traveled so far in the last year also strongly suggests they may be\u00a0carrying much of this nation\u2019s very troubled Zeitgeist — in a more existential way which the music embodies, and transcends, as only great music can. It feels that way also because of how this band — of multiple racial hues — recasts America\u2019s native culture which, like so much of our tragic and heroic history, emerges from the South. Yet the real forsaken lives that dwell in the blues today, the struggles of race and class, come from just about everywhere. If this motley-but-inspired crew doesn’t speak for the 99%, who does?<\/p>\n

The band\u2019s African-American Harvard-educated singer Mike Mattison (who wrote \u201cMidnight in Harlem\u201d and \u201cBound for Glory\u201d among others) touched on this in the liner notes to Road Songs,<\/em> the two-record live album that the Derek Trucks Band released shortly before that band\u2019s hiatus, which led to the expanded new band.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike any southern band worth his salt, the DTB\u00a0knows that the blues are the fount of American music itself \u2013 and that’s how we treat it,\u201d Mattison wrote. \u201cAs a Northerner, I’ve learned that the South is like the blues is like the Derek Trucks Band: Everyone thinks they have it pegged it, but you don’t know what it means until you’ve lived in it a while.\u201d 6<\/p>\n

I’m sure Mattison\u00a0would say as much about the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Does American music gets any better than this today? What do you think?<\/p>\n

____________<\/p>\n

* \u201cSpace Captain,\u201d an old Joe Cocker song, was also Tedeschi and Trucks\u2019 powerful contribution to Herbie Hancock’s ambitious international\u00a0 Imagine <\/em>recording project, which demonstrated a great sense of jazz dialogue amongst the musicians.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1 http:\/\/reviews.ticketmaster.com\/7171\/1567745\/tedeschi-trucks-band-reviews\/reviews.htm?page=38<\/p>\n

2 Read more: http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/music\/lists\/100-greatest-guitarists-20111123\/elmore-james-19691231#ixzz26HGQ8UoI<\/a><\/p>\n

3 http:\/\/www.guitarworld.com\/interview-derek-trucks-susan-tedeschi-discuss-tedeschi-trucks-bands-new-album-revelator#slide-2<\/a><\/p>\n

4\u00a0http:\/\/www.azcentral.com\/thingstodo\/music\/articles\/2012\/08\/27\/20120827interview-susan-tedeschi-tedeschi-trucks-band.html#ixzz25d3Mv3iJ<\/a><\/p>\n

5 ibid.<\/p>\n

6 Suarez, Ernest “‘Already Free,’ Trucks Rolls On The Guitar Hero Pays Homage to the Past”<\/a>. The Washington Post<\/em>. http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2009\/05\/28\/AR2009052801213.html. Retrieved 2009-10-03<\/a>.<\/p>\n

7 Rock ‘n Roll: An Unruly History<\/em>, Robert Palmer, Harmony Books, 1995, 195<\/p>\n

8 liner notes by Mike Mattison, Roadsongs,<\/em> The Derek Trucks Band, Sony Masterworks CD, 2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0“Revelator,” TTB’s debut album, won the 2012\u00a0Grammy\u00a0for Best Blues Album COMPARISON\u00a0\u2013 So what other current American vernacular music group might be a contender for the best band on the scene today? Plenty of you may make staunch cases for innovative … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-dT","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=861"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1120,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions\/1120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}