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Derek Trucks Band
Already Free
Review By Brian Baker
Prodigy can be a dangerous word to associate with a young musical talent. It can carry the connotation that the instrumentalist in question is touched by some divinity that has imparted unfathomable technical dexterity at an age that makes true musical understanding prohibitive at best. By picking up a guitar and making angelic sounds with it at age 9, Derek Trucks certainly fulfilled the definition of a prodigy. But more than his youth (he led his first band at 11 and sat in with Bob Dylan at 15), more than his astonishing proficiency (he lent his searing slide technique to the Allman Brothers Band as a full fledged member a decade ago at age 20), it’s Trucks’ deeply intuitive ability to inhabit and translate any and every genre of music that may be his greatest gift of all.
That gift is on magnificent display throughout the Derek Trucks Band’s fifth and perhaps best work, Already Free.
Filled to overflowing with scorching yet delicate guitar work, a propulsively slippery rhythm section, swelling keyboards and achingly soulful vocals, Trucks and his band of brothers don’t merely play the genres they clearly love so well. They breathe them in, hold them in their lungs and exhale them just like the air that keeps them alive. When Trucks and his talented cohorts play the blues (their stirring, swampy and relevant cover of Bob Dylan and the Band’s “Down in the Flood,”), gospel (their funky take on “Sweet Inspiration”), soul (“Something to Make You Happy”) or sweet Southern rock (“Maybe This Time”), each song in that style is genuinely and appropriately touched in some way by all of the others, not in some messy, mashed up hybrid but in a way that shows how deeply Trucks and company comprehend the subtle threads that connect all music. Trucks’ prodigious talent or gift or genius is in his innate ability to accentuate and personalize the tones and colors that are shared by the genres he loves while retaining the heart and soul of their traditions and histories.
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