Derek Trucks is an American, guitarist, songwriter and founder of the Grammy Award winning The Derek Trucks Band. He became an official member of The Allman Brothers Band in 1999 and formed the Tedeschi Trucks Band in 2010 after marrying fellow musician, Susan Tedeschi.
Derek Trucks as a teen, sitting with Livingston Taylor
Trucks was born June 8, 1979, in Jacksonville, Florida. His uncle, Butch, is a founding member of The Allman Brothers Band. According to Trucks, the name of Eric Clapton's band; Derek and the Dominoes had "something to do with the name [Derek] if not the spelling”. His younger brother, Duane, is a drummer and his great-uncle, Virgil Trucks, was a professional baseball player.
Trucks bought his first guitar at a yard sale for $5 at age nine and became a child prodigy who played his first paid performance at age 11. After taking lessons from his father and from Jim Graves, a well known local musician, Trucks began playing slide guitar on his Gibson SG electric guitar. Before his 13th birthday Trucks had "jammed" with Buddy Guy and gone on tour with The Allman Brothers Band. He formed The Derek Trucks Band in 1997 and by his twentieth birthday, Trucks had played with artists such as Bob Dylan, Joe Walsh and Stephen Stills.
After performing with The Allman Brothers Band for several years as a guest musician, Trucks became a formal member in 1999 and appeared on the albums platinum-certified DVD Live at the Beacon Theatre and Hittin' the Note. At age 24, Trucks was ranked 81st in Rolling Stone's 2003 list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". In 2011, Trucks was ranked 16th in Rolling Stone Magazine's, 2011 list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
From left to right: Doyle Bramhall II, Derek Trucks, Steve Jordan, Eric Clapton, Willie Weeks in 2007 at the Crossroads Guitar Festival
Early in 2006 Trucks began a studio collaboration with Eric Clapton called The Road to Escondido and Trucks and his band were invited by Clapton to perform at the 2007 Crossroads Guitar Festival. After the performance, Trucks toured with Clapton with the collegial support of The Allman Brothers Band's members. As a result, in 2006, Trucks found himself playing in three bands in 17 countries. Trucks built a studio in his home in January 2008 and he and his band recorded the album Already Free. It debuted at #19 on the Billboard Top 200 Chart, and #1 on the Internet chart, #4 on the Rock chart and #1 on the Blues chart. In 2008 Trucks toured with The Allman Brothers Band, Trucks performed with his own band and as part of the Soul Stew Revival. In late 2009, Trucks' band went on a one year hiatus and dissolved in 2010. Trucks then formed the Tedeschi Trucks Band with his wife. The band performed at a number of music festivals in 2010 and wrote and recorded new material
The Wall Street Journal has described him as "the most awe-inspiring electric slide guitar player performing today".
Trucks' primary influence is blues-based music though he has explored jazz and other genres for a time. Delta blues and Southern rock continue to be strong influences in his compositions and performance on the guitar. His playing was more often inspired by older bluesmen like Howlin' Wolf and Albert King, jazz musicians Miles Davis, Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, and Wayne Shorter.
In recent years, the influence of traditional Southern Sacred Steel can be heard in Derek's slide work. Trucks credits Allman Brothers' primary founding member and guitarist Duane Allman and second-generation blues man Elmore James as the two slide guitarists that most significantly influenced his early style. Additionally, Freddy King, and B.B. King were some of the original blues and roots musicians that Trucks mentions as influences.
Trucks developed a love of Pakistani and East Indian qawwali music, and was moved by the sound of artists like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, prompting him to study at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California which is where he learned to play the sarod, leaving lingering strains of Indian music in his guitar work.
While learning to play the sarod, he also found himself schooled in discipline, which in one manifestation, shows in Trucks' posture on stage. He was taught by Khan to focus entirely on his performance, which he attributes to his lack of movement around the stage, where he rarely moves from the same spot for the duration of each song.
Trucks has been hailed as one of the greatest slide guitarists since Duane Allman. In 2007, Trucks was pictured on the cover of Rolling Stone (#1020) in February 2007 and was referred to as one of the "New Guitar Gods" and "The Jam King", Trucks'.
Trucks at the Hard Rock Cafe 2009
Asked about his choice of becoming a slide guitarist, Trucks has explained initially, it was because he learned to play at a young age, and that the strings were painful, and his small fingers too tender to adapt quickly, and the slide made it easier for him to advance on the guitar. Once he learned the basics on the guitar, Trucks found only an elite few musicians to pursue the slide guitar above all else. That short list includes Duane Allman, Ry Cooder, Sonny Landreth and, Trucks feels the person to come the closest to be the late Lowell George. Because of this, Trucks sees greater possibilities in taking the sound in a new direction, which has intrigued him.
Trucks uses open tuning, mainly open E – a practice familiar to most other slide players. Duane Allman's bottleneck slide was originally made from a Coricidin bottle, but since such pill bottles are not manufactured anymore, Trucks explained in an NPR interview that the only way to get them is to look for them in antique stores, or buy the re-issues. Trucks has used the use of a replicate of the late Allman's bottleneck slide, made of Dunlop Pyrex to approximate the sound closest to that of Duane Allman.
Trucks, playing his resonator guitar in 2007
When playing older Allman Brothers material, Trucks sometimes takes parts originally played by Duane Allman, most notably the long slide guitar solo that takes up much of "Dreams". In other cases, there are no direct correlations between what Trucks plays and what previous guitarists in the band have done. Butch Trucks said in 2009, "My nephew is just scary. I have played with a lot of really good guitar players. And with every one of them, I start figuring out what they are going to do [...] even with Duane. There are certain patterns they play that lead to something else and you kind of get used to what they are going to do. After all the years of playing with Derek, I still don't have the faintest idea of what he is going to do. Every time he starts off his solo in "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed", he comes from a different direction. He never does the same thing twice".
The Derek Trucks Band plays an eclectic blend of blues, soul, jazz, rock, qawwali music (a genre of music from Pakistan and Eastern India), Latin music, and other kinds of world music, drawing on the wide variety of the different musical influences of each member. The Derek Trucks band, according to one All music reviewer, are a "group of musicians that share a passion for improvisation and musical exploration". Trucks, in a 2002 interview commented that "When you hear people like Coltrane, and the search that he was on, I think that's what it's ultimately about... I heard it on a Sun Ra documentary, he was always talking about making a 'joyful noise'".
Trucks playing his primary guitar, a Gibson SG
Trucks avoids processing and effects, preferring to get the purest tone possible by connecting his guitar (a modified Gibson USA SG 1961 reissue with factory Vibrola), which has had the tailpiece modified and a stopbar tailpiece installed, directly to his amplifier, a 1965 Fender Super Reverb loaded with four Pyle Driver MH1020 speakers. He modifies his tone with the controls on the guitar.
In early 2006, an equipment trailer with Trucks' gear was stolen. Some of the gear was recovered from a field outside Atlanta, including the 1965 Fender Super Reverb (an amplifier he's been playing with since he was a young boy), a 1968 Super Reverb (one of the backup amps), a Hammond B-3, two Leslie rotating speaker cabinets, a Höhner E-7 Clavinet, and a few other minor items. He said, fortunately, nobody was home at the time, he "was away gigging with the Allmans", so nobody was hurt.
Trucks regularly plays without a pick. He generally plucks or strums (together or independently) with his thumb as well as his index, middle, and ring fingers. An article from The Washington Post describes the sound, saying Trucks "harvests notes and chords that soar, slice and glide, sounding like a cross between Duane Allman on a '61 Gibson Les Paul and John Coltrane on tenor sax". He uses custom gauge DR nickel-wound strings on both his SG and resonator guitars: .011, .014, .017, .026, .036, and .046. Most of his guitars are tuned to open E. Although he still prefers Super Reverbs when playing with the Derek Trucks Band, currently Trucks is playing Paul Reed Smith amplifiers almost exclusively when performing with The Allman Brothers Band.
In 2001, upon learning of girlfriend and singer Susan Tedeschi's pregnancy, the couple married, and their first child was born by the end of the year in December, 2001. Named Charles Khalil Trucks, for saxophonist Charlie Parker, guitarist Charlie Christian, and author Khalil Gibran, he was followed in 2004 by their second child, a girl, Sophia Naima Trucks, who takes her middle name from a John Coltrane ballad, which was also the jazz legend's first wife's name. Again, Naima was unplanned, but welcomed as was her brother; as Trucks points out, it is nearly impossible with two full-time bands touring around the world to plan for children. The Derek Trucks Band recorded a cover of "Naima" on their first album, seven years before her birth. Trucks' marriage to Tedeschi has been an atypical domestic life, with both Trucks and Tedeschi frequently touring, although up to 2010, infrequently in the same place at the same time. The pair endeavored to perform as much as possible together, occasionally merging their respective bands whenever possible. This included others that often included Trucks' younger brother Duane Trucks, singer Mike Mattison's band Scrapomatic, and Tedeschi's former sideman, saxophonist Ron Holloway. Together, they billed their concerts as the "Soul Stew Revival". The difficulty in finding enough time for this led the pair to set aside most dates in December to spend time together. With both Trucks and Tedeschi touring throughout the better part of each year, their two children have been often with them, with Trucks' mother acting as a nanny when Tedeschi was touring. The children began growing through an age just a little younger than when Trucks himself began touring as a child.
Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks
Trucks and Tedeschi began combining the talents of their two bands during the celebration of New Years' concerts, seeking ways to spend more time together. The Soul Stew Revival can be heard on the internet, in streaming music, with various sources, such as their performances from the Bonnaroo Music Festival, in Manchester, Tennessee, on June 16, 2008. As of 2008, the Soul Stew Revival had officially grown to an eleven-piece ensemble for the summer including a three-piece horn section.
Trucks has estimated that he spent 300 days a year on the road, which required the couple to carve out additional time to tour as Soul Stew together. He commented, "There's a lot less sleep, but the kids are old enough now to be on the road and it's not a complete drain. It's a lot but it's great to have the family together." They have received such positive feedback, that they began booking concerts more frequently together. However, Tedeschi mentioned the difficulty of touring with school age children in an interview with All About Jazz in 2010.
Since both Tedeschi and Trucks have let go most of their backing band members, they have been able to spend more time with their children. Taking out more time to write songs with a recording studio has been an advantage. Although they continue to record piece work with a few former members, they permanently dismissed their horn players. They had previously attempted to move toward another component to their music with a horn section, but instead have found a fresh sound in backing vocalists.
“The Derek Trucks Band” was a very HOT Blues Band so I can only imagine how intense the “Tedeschi Trucks Band” is; I plan to pick-up a couple of their CD’s to add to my collection.
What are you listening to right now? And how do you prefer to listen to your music? I know that collecting vinyl has become pretty popular again. While I do have a vinyl collection that I add to from time to time, I rarely listen to it. As a matter of fact, I don’t have a working record player right now! All of the eight tracks and cassettes I owned are long gone, replaced by CD’s. I occasionally listen to CD’s in the player, but for the most part, I am an ‘iPod convert’. One small little device, so much music!
Until next time~
Musician By Night . . .
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