Posted by On July 10th, 2012 I think I went to LeBreton Flats for the Ottawa Bluesfest, but I have very little to go on aside from a vivid memory. Y’see, I sat down to write a ticket story today and settled on a Tedeschi Trucks Band show at Ottawa jazz fest in 2014. I happen to still have the program for the jazz festival that year and when I flipped it open to jar my memory about any possible opening act I saw that the great Oteil Burbridge was not in the band for that show, though his late brother Kofi was still on the keys, and he was freakin’ awesome too. But I know I’ve seen Kofi and Oteil playing together in TTB so I went through my concert history and…no…it seems that the 2014 jazz fest concert was the only time I saw Tedeschi Trucks Band.
But that can’t be. As I said, I have a distinct memory of seeing the two brothers playing together. For sure I saw them at the Bluesfest. It was on the River Stage, I can see Oteil and Kofi grooving together on stage left, both of them all smiles for the whole show. And so I took to the internet and discovered that lo, the Tedeschi Trucks Band did play at the Bluesfest once and it was indeed on the River Stage. The show had been in 2012 and wikipedia tells me that Oteil was still in the band at the time so it was all coming together. Well, that was easy-peasy! I reached for the appropriate ticket binder and…
[sound effect: record scratch]
…I never went to the Ottawa Bluesfest in 2012. What?!?!?!? Impossible! Improbable! Unlikely! [I notice that I left town to see Phish for three nights in the middle of Bluesfest] Maybe! Okay, probably…
Anyway, after a couple hours of poking around and thinking, and asking, and researching, and wondering, and surfing the internet, and playing guitar, and watching tv, and going out for a walk, and oh yeah…pondering…I settled on the factual probability that I might just have attended Bluesfest on July 15 of the 2012 season (a suspicion that I cover extensively in my ticket story from that day) and I further settled on the absolute surety – based mostly on the undeniable memory I have of witnessing the groovy musical love of two talented siblings backing up the rootsy musical love of Derek and Susan – that I was also onsite to see the Tedeschi Trucks Band on July 10th.
And so here I sit typing.
Sayyyy…For a bunch of years the Bluesfest hired some of the teachers from their Be In The Band program – of which I was the first – to get a set of music together and play at the fest as the BITB Instructors Band. We would generally perform on the Black Sheep Stage following all the student bands on the final Sunday of the festival but there was this one time early on when we played on a Tuesday night instead. Google tells me that the TTB show in question was a Tuesday too so this could very well be the answer! If I had been onsite ostensibly to play a gig then I would have been unlikely to write it down in my ticket book*. And that would explain why I didn’t record being there on the Sunday either, though I was doubtlessly onsite to support my BITB kids on their big day. Well, that seems to explain that.
But really, if I could just linger for a final moment on the memory that got us here, that memory I have of Oteil Burbridge – surely one of the greatest electric bass players alive today – and his late brother Kofi. The band was big, like eight or ten people, so Oteil and Kofi were squeezed together over on the side of the stage behind Kofi’s keyboard. And though I’m a huge Derek Trucks fan I have little memory of him at this concert at all because I just couldn’t pull my eyes away from the joy – the pure, sweet, sonic joy – that was coming from those two guys on stage left. Like I mentioned before, not only could you see the brotherly love but you could actually hear it. The sonic love of two siblings doing what they adored, doing it together and doing it really, really well, and all in the service of creating a backdrop for the music of a pair of talented lovebirds in Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks.
My goodness, it was so good. Unforgettable…ticket or no ticket.
(edit: Well friends, it seems like my research skills aren’t quite up to snuff. I just stumbled upon a review I wrote for the Tedeschi Trucks Band playing at the Bluesfest on the Hard Rock Stage [aka the River Stage] in 2010, and my review focusses quite heavily on the brotherly interplay between Oteil and Kofi. So I was at that show, for sure. And though this revelation calls the previous seven hundred or so words into serious question a quick reread convinces me that the above arguments are rather sound so there is a chance that I might have been at this show too. Regardless, as my beleaguered readers know all too well I am hesitant to delete words once I’ve typed them so I’m retaining this writup and leaving the “facts” to eager historians and anthropologists of the future. Have at it, cyborgs.)
*I tell you, I wish so badly that I had meticulously kept track of all the gigs I’ve played. Now that would be a walk down vague-memory lane! I did at first – for the first dozen or so shows – until I graduated from high school and moved to Ottawa where the gigs started coming fast and furious. Ironically, between my classes and all the gigs I was probably too busy to write them down. Stupid classes.
Todd Man Out 