Tedeschi Trucks Band: Live From the Fox Oakland

Jeff Tamarkin on July 6, 2017

If you want to say that, on any given night, Tedeschi Trucks Band is probably the best working rock band in America, then you won’t get an argument here. In several years, they’ve developed a polyglot approach that is both absolutely classic and wholly contemporary—and basically never fails. The thing is, they’re so consistently on their game that they could record pretty much any show and it’d be representative of TTB at their finest. The 2,800-seat Fox Theater, in Oakland, Calif., is the ideal-sized venue for this band as noted on the concert/documentary Blu-ray that serves as this set’s disc three—any larger and they’d begin to lose the vital intimate connection they share with their audience. It’s a joy to watch, to see the close-ups of Derek Trucks’ slide work, Susan Tedeschi’s emotive vocalizing and seriously steamy guitar and the crisp horns and hard-boiling rhythm section. The set is split more or less evenly between original material and choice covers, paced perfectly—it may not make much sense on paper to hear Derek and the Dominos’ “Keep on Growing,” Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” and The Beatles’ “Within You, Without You” back to back, but it works because every component is so well versed and elastic. The film is smartly sequenced as well—the obligatory backstage interviews, rehearsal footage and such are used to spice but never overstay their welcome. The filmmakers understand that we really just want to hear these folks play. Both visually and aurally, this document is a time stamp of one ceaselessly creative collective at a key point in its evolution.

Artist: Tedeschi Trucks Band
Album: Live From the Fox Oakland
Label: Fantasy