The new folks at the Folk Festival
Derek Trucks is one of the new breed of musician at the annual Philly event
IT'S A SIGN of the artistic times that the Derek Trucks Band has performed in recent weeks (and uniformly won over crowds) at a mixed bag of music festivals, from the Strade Blues Festival in Italy to North Sea Jazz in Rotterdam.
The master guitar slinger will be the grand finale show capper Sunday at the 48th Annual Philadelphia Folk Festival in Schwenksville, which starts with a campers-only event Thursday.
Blues? Jazz? Folk? How many hats can one guy wear?
Like most of the younger musicians performing at our folk fest, the 30-year-old Trucks is really an appreciator and integrator of multiple musical forms.
Get him going (or better, listen to his music), and you'll hear the influences of sax greats John Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, of the Indian sarod master Ali Akbar Khan, of his Latin rock buddy Carlos Santana. And in Trucks' vision, all that's blended with the gritty, down-home shuffling blues of an Elmore James and the sultry, Southern rock style invented by the late Duane Allman, to whom Derek is intimately connected.
When not leading his own band of road warriors, or working in a combo with wife Susan Tedeschi, the tireless Trucks is the touring guitarist with the Allman Brothers Band, cofounded by his drumming uncle Butch Trucks, wherein Derek fills Duane's former slot. In that capacity, he'll be back here in just a few days as ABB headlines the Susquehanna Bank Center on Aug. 21.
Oh, and Derek also honored the man a couple years back via a lengthy tour with Eric Clapton, evoking those guitar-twining collaborations done by "Slow Hands" Clapton with Duane Allman as Derek and the Dominos, after whom Trucks is named.
But back to today and that whole folk-versus-blues- versus-jazz identity crisis.
"When we first started doing these festival events, we would try to psych out the scene, try to put the focus on one musical genre or another, to match the festival label," Trucks related in a recent call from (where else?) an airport. "Now we've settled on a take it or leave it, just do our thing philosophy.
"We've been fortunate that we've been mildly accepted by many genres, but not fully by any," he added with modesty. "And that's fine by us. We like to trade in a lot of different places."
Fer instance?
"When the jam band thing was hitting we were mildly in on that, because we improvise every night. I firmly believe in the great blues acts from Chicago and the Delta, and the great period in jazz from the 1940s to the '60s. But when you're 40 years past the prime, you've got to take it somewhere else. You can't just try to photograph the past, as some musicians do."
A child prodigy and a professional musician with his own touring band since age 14, Trucks sopped up whatever he heard in a wide-eyed and openhearted fashion.
"My parents had a great record collection. I'd fall asleep listening to 'Live at Fillmore East' and 'Eat a Peach' [two Allman Brothers classics]. I'd also hear a lot of B.B. King and Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis and Bob Dylan," whose "Down in the Flood" is righteously covered on the Derek Trucks Band's new, "Already Free" album.
"Then when I started being around a lot of musicians, I'd make a point to pick their brains, find out what their main influences were. You'd just stumble across some pretty wild stuff.
"I was lucky. At 14, 15, 16, your mind is pretty wide open," Trucks observed. "If someone plays you Sun Ra or John Coltrane, you spend a lot more time trying to understand it, rather than just going, 'Yes, it's great' or 'No, I hate it.' I might not know at first if I understood or liked it, but I knew there was more to the story and tried to figure it out."
Today's wider-reaching than the names suggest "jazz," "blues" and "folk" festivals offer the same kind of fortuitous exposure opportunities for attendees, Trucks enthused. "That's why I love playing these things. Maybe they've heard your name, but they've not been curious enough to come to your show. They're on the fence. So then they come for the festival or because they know a few other names. And while they're there, they check you out. It's a great way for them to test the waters, and for us to get in front of fresh ears.
"We did a festival show in Ponteverdra, Spain, a few days ago, at this beautiful old town square. I saw a few Allman Brothers shirts in the crowd, but otherwise, I don't think they knew me.
Then four or five tunes into the set, we felt this wave swelling up in the audience, this thing where everyone gets behind you.
Once that happens, it pushes you into a different gear. And makes this whole thing worthwhile."