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Another beautiful early summer’s evening got me out to the Ottawa jazz festival on June 23rd, 2014 where the Tedeschi Trucks Band was enough to fill my boots for the night. And why not? Derek Trucks alone would get me off the couch, no question about that. I have known about this kid since he was actually a kid, sitting in with the Allman Brothers when he was just fourteen or so years old at my first ABB show. When he eventually joined the Allman’s as a full-time member I stopped skipping their shows plus I’ve always been excited for any opportunity to hear him play with his own band, even if I’m not always in the mood for a Susan Tedeschi song.
And what’s best is that Derek surrounds himself with such great musicians. The quality of the players in the original Derek Trucks Band and then in the combined Tedeschi Trucks Band is off the hook, and not only that, they always seem to blend together so very well.
The sibling tag-team of Oteil Burbridge on bass and his brother Kofi Burbridge on keyboards (and flute) is the epitome of these two points, and while I have definitely seen the two of them play behind Derek* by the time of this jazz fest show Oteil had left the group while the wonderful Kofi remained.
Anyway, this was a great show on a lovely evening. I surely kept a beer gripped tightly in my fist all night as I hobnobbed with a gaggle of arboreal friends and ate up the glory of highly-finessed modern roots and blues. My gosh, I could listen to Derek Trucks play guitar all day long. He’s just one of the most deliciously unique slide players out there, and his palpable Indian classical influence doesn’t hurt things one bit. Man, he’s just so good.
(Incidentally, I recently rewatched Being There with Peter Sellers and get this: The kid on the street corner…you know, the one who tells Chance the Gardener to “…tell Rafael that if he’s got something to say to me…” (whilst Deodato’s Also Sprach Zarathustra grooves along in the background)? Well, that kid is in fact fifteen-year old Oteil Burbridge! I checked imbd and note that it stands as his only acting credit, so I assume he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Crazy.
I know Oteil had moved on from the Tedeschi Trucks Band by this time and so he’s not really that relevant to this ticket story but c’mon, as if I wasn’t going to mention it.)
*Joyously watching the Burbridge brothers back up Derek Trucks is a memory so irrefutable to my mind that in the process of trying to write this ticket tale I ended up spiralling down a three-hour rabbit hole that is chronicled in a pair of rather tangential, suspect, and somewhat contradictory stories from Bluesfest 2012.
Todd Man Out 