Review of the Tedeschi Trucks Band concert at the Karlín Forum
Country star June Carter has backed down for her husband, singer Johnny Cash. “I had to stay in his shadow. I could have made more records, but I preferred marriage,” she claimed. The Tedeschi Trucks Band, which arrived in the Czech Republic for the first time on the eve of the national holiday, shows that the coexistence of musicians looks different today.
Even at the beginning of the millennium, their obligations could not be counted on the fingers of one hand. When singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi went on tour, in addition to hotel and venue equipment, she researched nearby water parks or zoos, anything to occupy two young children. She took Ty on the road more often than husband Derek Trucks, a guitarist so sought-after that he toured the world with three sets.
Four bands and two children in one household – it was too much. And so the successful performers first got married, after which they also combined their careers 12 years ago. Since then they perform as Tedeschi Trucks Band. They won a Grammy Award, they performed in the White House and this Thursday around 1,600 people arrived at Prague’s Karlín Forum. They got a special combination of blues, southern rock and soul. And the opportunity to experience almost a jam band.
In America, that was the name given to bands that, to put it simply, sold more tickets than records and played for many hours, with an emphasis on improvisation. Once upon a time, the Grateful Dead, later, for example, Phish, tried out dozens of songs and introduced different ones each time. The songs used to have a freer form, the evenings were accompanied by a relaxed atmosphere. Devoted communities of listeners arose around them, whom the musicians allowed to record and distribute everything, first on tapes and later on the Internet.
The Tedeschi Trucks Band does not fulfill all the hallmarks of a jam band. Despite this, his Prague premiere lasts three hours with an intermission, of the approximately 150 rehearsed compositions in the repertoire, they sound different than the previous days in Germany or Scandinavia. And on stage, he not only jams, i.e. improvises, a mass of sound made up of 12 people flows from him. The husband and wife with electric guitars are surrounded by two drummers, a bassist, an organist, a three-piece brass section and a trio of vocalists who also use percussion or acoustic guitars. Not everything can be heard, not everyone plays interestingly. Husbands are great though.
Cleaned grave
The blonde guitarist in glasses, Susan Tedeschi, who since the 1990s has preceded Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones and competed for the Grammy for discovery of the year with Britney Spears, sings all evening. The fifty-one-year-old American has a crackling, determined voice, albeit of a small scale, but of powerful intensity. He leans into it with soulful emotion, on the verge of screaming: surely also to be heard over two drums, guitars and an organ. In the lower positions, she resembles Bonnie Raitt, she sings from her repertoire in Prague Angel of Montgomery – probably as a tribute to the author, for the pandemic, the late John Prine.
Tedeschi usually accompanies himself on a turquoise Fender Telecaster electric guitar. When with her in the late 1990s she assumed on the album cover of Just Won’t Burn, it still had mainly stickers on it. Famous guitarists from John Lee Hooker to BB King could now be seen signed in black marker on the instrument. Susan Tedeschi played with both, she was especially close to the latter. She and her husband accompanied him until 2015, when King died.
The admiration continues: as soon as the first wave of anti-pandemic measures ended in the US last year, Tedeschi and Trucks first of all went to the unveiling of King’s remodeled grave in the state of Mississippi. “Someone’s shoe was plastered on it, I couldn’t let it go. I was holding his Lucille guitar with one hand and cleaning the grave with the other.” described Trucks.
He won’t say a word for the entire Thursday concert. He doesn’t have to: the guitar speaks for him. Trucks is one of the world’s best slide guitar players, as the style is called, where the performer slides along the strings with a bottleneck, i.e. a metal or glass tube placed on the finger. In the Karlín Forum, he postpones it sporadically, for example to a song Until you rememberwhere the tapping and plucking of the fingers creates a constant trilling, always up to the chorus beginning with a major seventh chord.
Mostly, however, Trucks operates with a bottleneck. For the specific sound of his Gibson SG guitar, he adds thicker strings strung in open tuning, which means what vibrato sounds like. He chooses unexpected notes, sometimes he records figures taken from wind instruments. He supports knowledge of the so-called microtonality in Indian music less than before – years ago he learned to play a fretless instrument called a sarod, the sound of which he imitates in Prague only in a composition Idle wind.
Trucks probably works with dynamics most prominently. In compositions I look worried or Storm, where he achieves vibrato using the so-called tremolo lever and changes the pitch, the band always quiets down. The guitarist thus begins quietly, in the lower register, for several minutes the solo progresses to an ecstatic climax.
The Storm as performed by the Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Mountain Jam festival in the Northeast USA. Photo: David Weber | Video: Mountain Jam Festival
So many connections
The rest of the lineup remains a little behind expectations. The brass section lacks a more imaginative arrangement, after a break of more than half an hour, the musicians are only slowly warming up, towards the end the songs and solos merge easily. Everyone from vocalist Mike Mattison to tenor saxophonist Kebbi Williams is given space, but there is another distinct personality missing. As was guitarist Trey Anastasio of Phish, with whom they were filming, or keyboardist Kofi Burbridge, who died three years ago. In his place in Prague, Gabe Dixon plays, who alternates between Hammond organ, the sound of a New Orleans jazz piano and electric clavinet keyboards while singing.
Among the highlights of the evening, lacking in own hits, is a stompy song based on a fast two-chord riff Why does love have to be so sad. It also has a symbolic meaning: it is taken from the album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, which was released in 1970 on Susan Tedeschi’s birthday. And that under the banner of the one-off project Derek and the Dominos, after which Derek Trucks is called for a change.
Eric Clapton made that record with Duane Allman, the slide guitar player who tragically passed away shortly after. Derek Trucks became his successor, when in 1999 he joined the Allman Brothers band, where his uncle was drumming, in 1999. A few years later, Trucks began to accompany the second author of the album, Eric Clapton, with whom he also performed in Prague in 2006.
Cover of Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad as performed by Tedeschi Trucks Band with guest guitarist Trey Anastasio. | Video: Tedeschi Trucks Band
And the connections continue: Clapton named the then-album after the hit Layla inspired in part by his own unrequited love, in part by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi’s romance about Leila and Majnun. The Tedeschi Trucks Band also turned to the same material this year. Based on her motifs, he released the two-hour, four-vinyl album I Am The Moon.
The songs from it formed the backbone of Thursday’s concert, even if it wasn’t about the words. One could rather observe how the Tedeschi Trucks Band freely develops the legacy of the Allman Brothers, combining slide guitar and two drums throughout the pattern. In terms of genre, however, it goes back more to the time when the Allman Brothers were more of a blues than a southern rock group.
Combined with occasional touches of gospel or funk, it is also a return to the concept of rock music from the early 70s, when it was close to blues, soul or R&B. And when did the musicians of that time process the pre-war American musical heritage in their own way. It all comes together in the sound of the Tedeschi Trucks Band.
Concert
Tedeschi Trucks band
(Arranged by Liver Music Agency)
Forum Karlín, Prague, October 27.