Husband and wife Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi take their family on the road.

By Brenda Pike
Berklee.edu Correspondent
December 4, 2006

Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi blend their bands for a finale.
Photo by Bill Gallery

"Who skipped class today?" The first words Susan Tedeschi spoke were greeted with cheers. The crowd of students filling the Berklee Performance Center had waited twenty minutes for the Susan Tedeschi/Derek Trucks clinic to begin in late October, but no one had peeled themselves away to make it to class. An alumna of Berklee, Tedeschi knew the story. She'd been so eager herself to enter the professional world revealed in such clinics that she graduated a semester early.

Tedeschi and Trucks gave their presentation several hours before their show at the Berklee Performance Center that night. It was the first time the husband and wife had toured together. Previously, their different styles—her music has been described as urban blues, his as slide guitar with an international flavor—had pulled them in different directions, as did their busy touring schedules. Just that year, Trucks had been on the road with his own band, with Eric Clapton, and with the Allman Brothers (whose drummer is his uncle).

Trucks is the youngest musician to make Rolling Stone's list of the 100 best guitar players of all time. But he's surprisingly humble. When asked what defines his style of playing, he said, "I play in Open E, so the tuning makes a little bit of difference, the string tension. And I play with my hands, no pick. That's probably the biggest difference. But everyone has a different attack. . . . There's a lot that goes into it. Usually things you don't even think about."

Trucks was swamped with students asking about the more technical side of his playing, such as what gauge string he uses (.011, .014, .017 on the top three, .026, .036, .046 on the bottom) and how Open E influences the way he plays. Said Trucks, "Stuff that's really easy to get in standard tuning is maybe a little more difficult in Open E. Stuff that's easy in Open E might not be obvious in standard tuning. It gives you a little different take on things."

	Susan Tedeschi
	Photo by Bill Gallery

Unlike Trucks, who began playing guitar at the age of 9, Tedeschi only took up the instrument after she graduated from Berklee. Now she incorporates the guitar into most of her music, but playing beside such greats as Trucks, Bob Dylan, and Santana is still a humbling experience. Tedeschi said, "I was petrified with Dylan. But we both played in the wrong key for a while, so it was great."

Tedeschi's band performed a cover of a traditional bluesy song, "Evidence," on which she performed both electric guitar and vocals, and an original r&b ballad, "In the Garden," which she cowrote with Tommy Shannon of Double Trouble. Once she began singing her personality was transformed. While being questioned by the students she wrung her hands in apparent nervousness. But when the music started, her glasses were pushed to the top of her head and her shoulders loosely swayed to the beat. An enormous voice burst forth from her.

Trucks's first song was a take on a classical Indian piece, which his bandmates fleshed out with bells, maracas, flutes, congas, and standard drums. In Trucks's hands, the guitar not only handled the melody of the instrumental piece, it took on even more of the responsibility of vocals and at times sounded like humming. One could hear Trucks's wide range of influences—not all of them guitarists—in the flexibility of his music.

"Even if you don't dig in and figure out what people are playing, a year or two down the road, you play something, try to figure out where it came from," Trucks said. "It's just some influence that you've had along the way. And it's usually not on the instrument; it's usually a vocal player or a drum player. Classical players, sitar players."

Trucks and Tedeschi obviously relish the opportunity to be together as a family on this tour. Their two-year-old daughter, Sophia, and four-year-old son, Charles, are on the road with them, and Trucks's mother is also along as a nanny. Generally the kids travel with Tedeschi when she is touring, a feat that she admits is difficult, but rewarding.

"If you're a woman and you're wondering 'How am I going to have a family and a career?'—it's very difficult, but you can do it," Tedeschi said. "It's a challenge, but it's fun."

At the end of the session, the two bands merged for a finale. Tedeschi and Trucks played side by side, the keyboardists sharing their two instruments, the bassists grinning at each other as they tried to find elbow room, one drummer on the drumset and the other experimenting with a rack of percussion instruments, and the conga player joining in. The stage was crowded, but happily so.

Brenda Pike is content editor in Berklee's Office of Communications.