Two jubilant kids are dancing amid a gaggle of homegrown hippie girls in the wings of the Savannah Civic Center in Georgia. The Civic has seen better days; it’s the kind of venue where a lot of history has happened, the ghosts can tell some stories and the blackout curtains in the elegant cinderblock hall hang with a definite sense of exhaustion.

Still Sophie and Charlie’s exuberance shines brighter than the spotlights illuminating drummers J.J. Johnson and Tyler Greenwalt who are locked in an extended mono-a-mono solo-jam-groove during the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s set. Ebullience and timing is the order of the moment, and the children – ages six and 10, respectively – are swept up in the churning rhythms around them.

The children’s father is Derek Trucks, the world class slide guitarist who, besides this latest project, has his own eponymous band, has served as Eric Clapton’s foil and is a key member of later incarnations of The Allman Brothers Band. (Founding Allmans’ drummer Butch Truck is Derek’s uncle.)

“That’s my girl,” says Susan Tedeschi, beaming at Sophie. While mom is the proud recipient of four Grammy nominations – including the prestigious Best New Artist Award – a gold album for Born To Burn (and a career as a blues guitarist/vocalist that is second only to Bonnie Raitt), it’s family that drives this woman.

Onstage, Derek – Susan’s husband of 11 years – is getting ready to unfurl another one of his utterly liquid, densely molten slide solos. Like his children who are undulating to the music alongside girls in cut-offs and peasant blouses, Derek was raised on the side of the stage, watching and absorbing the music of the Allmans – and that osmotic knowledge shines whenever he takes his guitar in hand.

The Tedeschi Trucks Band is an old school soul review filtered through the blues and enough classic R&B, roots and jazz to make it intriguing to even the most single-minded musico.

Equally compelling, though, is the seamless way the pair integrates genres, musicianship and songs. The Tedeschi Trucks Band is about serving the music and finding nuances that could go unrecognized. It makes for a juicy evening of live music and a varied feel on their 12-song album Revelator, released this summer on Sony’s Masterworks imprint.

Revelator is the kind of record they don’t make any more: organic in a creative sense, joyous in the playing. The songs – not quite a cycle, but certainly a charm bracelet of the complexities of faith when you know how bad things can hurt – dig past the gloss and into the ache and the perseverance it takes to live an engaged life. Susan’s voice, like Derek’s playing, has never sounded better: honeyed smokiness and desire marked with a tart note of fearlessness.

The band includes Oteil Burbridge on bass, Kofi Burbridge on keyboards and flute, Greenwell and Johnson on drums and percussion, vocalists Mike Mattison and Mark Rivers, and a horn section composed of Kebbi Williams on sax, Maurice Brown on trumpet and Saunders Sermons on trombone.

“We didn’t want it to be me and Susan and a bunch of guys – that idea of a bunch of players behind us,” says Derek before the show, seated on a folding chair in a walk-in closet-sized dressing room. “This time, it’s being a part of a group, almost like part of the Allmans back when – when they got offstage, it was like church. They had their handful of hits, but what had happened between those players that night?”

Derek says that while Duane Allman largely took the Allmans’ improvisational explorations as “deep as you could take it,” it was the group mind and its trust in the moment that truly lead the band. “Arethea [Franklin]‘s [album] Amazing Grace was like that, too; they didn’t really know – and that’s the beauty,” Derek offers as another example. “You can prepare, but you have to be open, to listen – then be ready.”

Susan reiterates that the members of their new band – all of whom have spent considerable time in the studio and on the road – consider one another family. Their shared experiences of knowing how to navigate the trials and tribulations of band dynamics make for a tight unit.

“[These musicians] could be playing anywhere, but they recognize that there’s something more going on here,” she says. “The stories they’ve all lived are real and if there’s a void of truly honest music right now, this is about ‘What’s on your mind? What do you want to do and say?’ We [all] created Revelator from the ground up, to be about things that are real.”

Having experienced the weight of success and the burden of creating a record within traditional confines, the pair decided to take a different tact. Meeting with producers, playing with musicians they knew and loved, writing with other songwriters, the experiences collectively seemed to point toward the studio Derek built at their home outside Jacksonville, Fla.

“I was so tired of being told how to make records by people who didn’t make records,” Susan says. “They don’t come at it the same way. [Being at home] meant we could live in the music. We’ve never spent a tenth of the time on any record than we did this one – I wasn’t trying to do all the vocals on the last day, dead tired.”

She pauses, a wash of warm brown hair framing her face. “I felt great about the time and the intent that went into Revelator,” she says. “It was about the songs, what we were trying to say and not someone telling us: ‘We need more uptempo things. What can we push to radio?’ We weren’t gonna do a lot of fluff, but we wanted it to be uplifting.”

Picking up where his wife left off, Derek says. “We’d go to the things that give people hope ‘cause times are kind of rough.”

Susan quickly concurs. “Some of the things we didn’t go with are the darker stuff, [the songs in] minor keys – those got left behind,” she says. “A lot of these songs are brighter, hopeful. We’ve both worked really hard for what we have and what we are, but we wanted the music to lift people up without being a fluffy hippie love record. No one’s pretending it’s all great. We’re drawn to people who’ve been through the darkest days and survived. The surviving is what gives you the…”

Susan pauses. She doesn’t want to reduce the songs to sandwich board, up-with-people jargon-n-bromides, nor does she want to play the high drama card for brokered tension. Exhaling, she recites the lyrics from Relevator’s haltingly supple “Simple Things” to make her point.

“‘Life without sorrow, love without pain’ says it all,” she surmises. “Safety, education, health care: basic things, but honestly, they’re all you really need – or want. People are so overstimulated they don’t feel anything any more.”

Indeed, throughout Revelator there is a higher sort of ecumenicalism that borders on sanctified.

“It’s why [we don’t play as loud as we used to], it brings [the audience] in and it overwhelms them,” she says. “They can feel the truth in the music and they respond. When we play ‘Midnight In Harlem’ live, I can’t tell you how many people are crying.”

The gentle stride of “Midnight in Harlem,” with Derek’s slide threading through cushions of Hammond B3 and a shuffling backbeat, is a song of healing on the run from what hurt you. It is a prayer as it is much as a purge – the intimacy and vulnerability of owning the love you can’t kill is knee-buckling.

That intimacy is the result of deep support and trust which has grown over time. These are world-class musicians who’ve come together because their humanity fits.

“I knew there was an outside chance,” Derek explains of initial bid for his bride. “I’d told people, ‘I’m gonna be single ‘til I find someone whose record collection has Coltrane, Howlin’ Wolf and Mahalia Jackson – and then I met her.”
“And he introduced me to Sun Ra,” Susan adds, smiling.
“That Sun Ra move doesn’t work much,” Derek says sheepishly.
“We were both on the road 250 days a year,” says the girl who stole the slide guitarist’s heart. “We wanted to play together, but we were both trying to start careers – and I kept telling him I was too old for him.”

Here they are, two kids and two tour buses later, embarking on a musical journey together after making profound achievements marks on their own. That confidence and the journey are proven out in Revelator’s hybrid seamlessness.

Indeed, Revelator is spell-weaving. There’s the steeled beauty in the acoustic “These Walls,” that evokes John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” The New Orleans funeral horns that open “Until You Remember,” are a church-feeling witness to a love that’s burned out by the one who’s coping with being abandoned. Adult, honest, wide open and raw, the album’s emotional current is carried by the blues.

“I think the hardest solo I ever took was ‘Until You Remember’,” Derek confesses. “There’s this 20-second space and the melody is so beautiful. You just want to play guitar over it, but it’s not about playing over that – it’s about reflecting the emotion of it. The simplicity was daunting.”

Finding Zen in the arrangements was certainly a piece of the album’s puzzle. “There really wasn’t a wasted note,” Derek says. “Everybody came with so much heart and intention. If it’s not meant to be there, then it wasn’t there. A few things that stood out: the musicianship, Susan’s vocals and the intelligence of the band. We let the songs dictate what needed to happen and we really listened.”

Indeed, Susan’s voice gathers its strength from its clarity, evenness and ache.

Grammy-winning producer/engineer Jim Scott – who both drummers had worked with and endorsed for his laidback personality and strong sonic sense – aided the recording process. (Scott’s credits include work with Wilco, Lucinda Williams and Red Hot Chili Peppers, among many others.)

“The personality fit was immediate – he was easy,” says Derek. “He had the same recording console – a really late ‘60s Nieve that was built six months after ours. I could tell he was going to be a champion for Susan, because when you have a lead singer, they need to be the centerpiece.”
“He spent the time to get the right mic,” Susan validates, “and let me sing until I was happy as opposed to getting a few passed during tracking, then bringing me back after.”

Derek adds: “He was engaged. When he loved something, he was over the moon. When he didn’t, he [didn’t pull] punches, but wasn’t offensive. And he didn’t need to put his hands on things just to have his fingerprint on it.”

Scott also recognized the potential hazard of the band that Susan and Derek had assembled. Derek, with his long blond pony tail trailing down the back of his baggy Lightning Hopkins T-shirt, laughing acknowledges the added danger of the songwriting.

“The band is so good, you can fool yourself into thinking something’s way better than it is because they play so well,” Derek admits. “We realized we were gonna have to strip it all away – just me and Susan and an acoustic guitar and a songwriter. That was all. It had to be bare bones and holding water. If you can do that, then you can trust the songs.”

After spending a few days at the studio, surveying the room and figuring out where Susan would be, Scott built a vocal booth so she could track vocals live with the band.

“‘Until You Remember’ is all different live tracks,” Derek says of the process. “We pieced it together ‘cause the tempos were all so close. It was maybe four takes, but that’s the sound of the band playing. And that’s Susan singing with us.”

The group wanted to make the record the old-fashioned way: going into a studio environment where they could be together for extended periods of time – living, eating and playing around the clock. One of the band’s inspirations early on in the process came from a viewing of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen. For an 11-piece band, Tedeschi Trucks has the cohesion of a much smaller group.

“Yesterday, four of us went to Fiddler’s Crab and before you know, there were 12 of us there, all saying, ‘How’d it happen?,’” laughs Susan. "‘Cause we weren’t calling each other – we’ve just grown so intimate, we can feel each other without talking.

Whether going surfing, doing laundry or working out, the Tedeschi Trucks Band moves through life as a true family.

“Everyone there was all about being in the music, living it,” says Derek. “It was something we hoped to get to and you can tell – I think. You can feel the difference.”

There is, for instance, a suppleness that emerges on the album-closing “Shelter,” just as the wah-wah funk of “Love Has Something Else To Say” lands somewhere between Sly Stone and The Staple Singers, staccato horn bursts, and a cautionary note about the things that really matter in life.

For Derek, whose Derek Trucks Band was only recently profitable, and Susan, who was poised to find another level of success, the decision to put their individual careers on hold was based in passion, not business. While the freshness of starting a new project thrills them, they aren’t guaranteed that they will be successful.

“It’s a real risk,” says Derek of the new venture. “We have twice as many people on the road [as either our of solo bands do], so there’s a whole other level of what needs to happen to be responsible[to your bandmates]. And you’re taking this to [fans] who have some idea of what they think [the music is] supposed to [sound like], and some of them will leave [a show] because it’s not that. But this was more about finding salvation in the music. To be in a place where that is what it is.”

Susan agrees. “[This band] is about how the music moves you,” she says. “Coltrane, B.B. King, Sun Ra – I’ve always connected to music on a more spiritual and emotional level. I’m more comfortable singing than talking. There’s elation, the spirit moves you and you feel like you’re floating when it’s good. This band has that, too.”

The Tedeschi Trucks Band is something truly special for the couple who got together after Derek courted Susan by airplane on off-days while she was opening for the Allman Brothers in 1999.

“When you can call each other on when you’re deceiving yourself,” Derek offers, “and it’s not about one-upping – but helping – you know something here is special. That’s what this is built on. We all needed every moment, every triumph and every failure to get here.”
“And that’s why this is so important,” Susan explains. “We have a lot of blues roots, but it’s so much more. Still in times like these, the blues speaks to people. Bessie Smith was No. 1 in 1929 because people needed to hear that.”

Back onstage it’s late in Savannah but the musicians are still coiling around each, peeling off notes and smiling at each other’s moves. It’s joyous – holy, even.

And, sure enough, Derek and Susan’s children are still laughing and dancing in the wings.