Derek_Trucks

Derek Trucks

I didn’t pay much attention to Derek Trucks when his name first started getting tossed around about a decade ago. Being kin to the Allman Brother’s Band (nephew to drummer Butch Trucks) and being neputized into service for the band as the ghostly replacement of Duane, I assumed that he was another one of those electric blues-loving mama’s boys to the baby boomers like Jonny Lang or Kenny Wayne Shepherd, showing up every once in awhile to noodle a fretboard and grimace appropriately at one of those very special tributes to B.B. King that Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt seem to put on every two months.

But Trucks really is a bit of a new breed, covering Coltrane and Miles on his first album and sitting comfortably alongside modern jazz fusion players, and also branching out from Americana by playing with the likes of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn. Playing slide behind Kahn’s South Asian Qawwali, he echoes Duane Allman on the 1972 Dickey Betts composition “Les Brers in A Minor”.

Even more than all this, Trucks brings the rare quality of an obsessive and inward-looking mastery of the likes of Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughn; it’s not just virtuosic mimicry, it’s got the soul of an artist down innit. And The Derek Trucks Band give more than a nod to one of the zeitgeists of his own generation, the jam band. Pretty much a perfect fit for The Field Of Heaven.

He and his wife Susan Tedeschi both had thriving independent careers before they met, and they still do, touring together for only part of their respective schedules. I reckon she’s half Bonnie Raitt and half Janis Joplin, so much so that I briefly but genuinely mistook her for the former on a quiet song on one of Trucks’ records and the latter on this belter from their performance at Mountain Jam on June 5:

Here’s another one from that show, with more crowd, in case any of you have forgotten what a chilled American festival is like. It’s at a ski resort, and they mention a mountain in the name; it’s like a preview for Fuji.

They’ve been traveling with an 8-piece band this summer, taking along two drummers in Allman Brothers Band tradition, and since they are playing upstate New York 13 days before Fuji and Billings Montana 13 days after, with no other dates abroad, seems we can expect the same for their appearance here. They’re quintessential rural America journeyman performers, so a trip to the land of the rising skyline is a treat indeed.

-Kern