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Susan Tedeschi And Derek Trucks
I’ve already done a pretty extensive overview of Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi here. I was curious to see what kind of crowd they would draw here, as I don’t believe they travel abroad much, so whatever fans they have in Japan would be hell-bent on catching this show.
I’d call it mid-size, with plenty of space to move around and even get pretty close to the stage with, say, a steaming hot cheese pizza in your hands. Hard to get people to the hinterlands after dark (and when it’s raining to boot), when the big names are playing at Green and White, in this case Roxy Music, Zach De La Rocha’s One Day As A Lion, and MGMT.
But they’re a jam band, and they had a full two hours allotted (9-11pm), which, when I came upon them about a third of the way through, they were stretching out into. They brought a six-piece, guitars and bass complemented by keys and dual drummers (with the addition of what I swear were two dudes singing the female soul backups in the shadows).
Bringing two drummers all the way to Japan, when they seem to largely play the same parts together, is so very extravagantly American. Why would you do such a thing? You might ask. Well, I made a discovery: dual drummers actually loosens things up quite a bit. Their hits are always wending and winding in and out of each other microseconds apart, and the effect is a much more relaxed vibe. I reckon this was the Dead’s secret as well. One of them at least.
It also creates an effect I saw earlier at Matt & Kim, of all places. Kim mainly uses her floor tom to give the kick drum an extra boost, so she essentially has two levels of power on the downbeat. So too with two drummers playing two kick drums.
Yup, I make connections between things, and other things. That’s what I do.
-Kern
photo by kitamura. more here
