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Man, the 2010 edition of the Ottawa Bluesfest was just so very outta sight. I mean, Jimmy Cliff, The Flaming Lips, Gord Downie, Rush, Further, Weezer, Iron Maiden…it was just stupidly good. And (of course) July 15th was no exception, with the Bluesfest hosting a stop on the first-ever tour of the newly-minted Tedeschi Trucks Band featuring (again: of course) Susan Tedeschi and her husband Derek Trucks performing on the Hard Rock Stage*.
Now, Derek Trucks is just a freakin’ monster and I love his playing absolutely to death. He first popped up on my radar when he sat in at my first Allman Brothers concert as a fourteen-year-old prodigy and his work with the Allman’s since joining the band as a full member just four days after his twentieth birthday eventually elevated him close to the top of my list of favourite living guitarists. Derek had long ago developed a slide vibrato that was insatiably delicious and when he started incorporating East Indian slurs and chromaticism’s his sound became unmistakable.
And though I never give her the credit that she actually deserves (generally due to the company she keeps), Susan Tedeschi is pretty darn good at what she does too.
But really, my memories about this show mostly focus on stage left, where bass player extraordinaire (and fellow Allman Brother) Oteil Burbridge locked in with his brother Kofi – who himself was standing behind his big Hammond organ – and the two of them laid down a devastating pocket for the rest of the crowded stage to wallow in for a stunning ninety minutes. I want to tell you there was some serious, serious musical talent standing on that stage, but I can’t imagine that the pinnacle of that mountain wasn’t the Burbridge boys.
I mean, Oteil can play man! In the jam scene only Victor Wooten can stand beside him, and if you expand across all rock and jazz genres I really can’t think of many living bass players who could…Hadrien Feraud certainly, and…well…I’m drawing a blank (let’s keep Phil Lesh out of this). And his brother – rest his soul – was pretty fantastic too. But when the two of them got together with a bunch of other talented players and they all embarked on a mission together, well, they were just a breathless joy to watch.
I barely looked at Derek Trucks. Okay, that’s a complete lie, and a pretty obvious lie at that. But rest assured, in between long, drooling gazes at Derek’s wiggling slide and pickless open-handed string-brushing I got sucked in to just the most uplifting, soul-cleansing, all-smiling sibling sideman combo you could possibly imagine.
And it’s a damn shame that no one will ever see it again. Kofi Burbridge: 1961-2019.
(Spoiler alert: You may eventually came across an entry that is eerily similar to this one, one I wrote about a Tedeschi Trucks Band set from the 2012 Bluesfest. Well, truth be told I’m pretty sure all my memories from that future diatribe are actually memories of this show, and there’s a fair-to-middling chance that I wasn’t even at that 2012 TTB show in the first place. Err…second place. Anyway, fear not dear reader for the pixels are not wasted; this show was definitely worthy of multiple writeups, even if they do merely span a blurred memoratic smear of the space-time discontinuum.)
*The Hard Rock Stage was only at the Bluesfest for a couple, maybe three years and you know, I’m not sure Ottawa’s Hard Rock Cafe itself was open for a whole lot longer than that. And no wonder: I have in my possession an official Ottawa Hard Rock Cafe pint glass with the city’s name spelled wrong: “Ottowa”. How mis-managed can a place be? They certainly must have been doing something wrong because even a HRC-head music memorabilia-ophiliac like me was only in the place what, maybe three, four times? I still rarely miss an opportunity to tour through a Hard Rock, and when I tour through I tour through. Though most people treat Hard Rock’s like they are restaurants I treat them like they are museums. So don’t be surprised if I lean over your surf & turf to get a closer look at Marc Bolan’s bell-bottom trousers.
Todd Man Out 