“Everybody in Coltrane’s band had multiple shotguns pointed at everybody else’s face”: Derek Trucks on channeling the intensity and free spirit of jazz in his guitar work, and recording with the genre's giants

One can certainly be forgiven for hearing the name Derek Trucks and immediately jumping to thoughts of slide guitar.

He's indisputably one of the world's best blues slide players – those skeptical need only watch the ever-viral clip of him leaving both B.B. King and John Mayer slack-jawed during a live slide workout. But to put the Tedeschi Trucks Band co-leader and latter-day Allman Brothers Band co-six-string-anchor in a blues box, so to speak, would be a grave mistake.

Though the blues is and always has been a huge part of his guitar vocabulary, Trucks has also often been vocal about more far-flung influences, such as qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The guitarist has also often noted how greatly jazz – its intensity and free spirit – has informed his playing over the decades.

“Everybody in [John] Coltrane’s band had multiple shotguns pointed at everybody else’s face,” Trucks told GP with a laugh in a 2008 interview. “There was just something so relentless and edge-of-the-earth about it. When my band approaches certain tunes, that is what we are trying to do.”

Trucks was a prominent contributor to Guitars, a 2008 album by legendary jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, who played in Coltrane's band throughout the early- and mid-'60s.

In the 2008 GP interview, Trucks reflected on the experience of recording with Tyner and other jazz luminaries on Guitars, revealing how he was kept on his toes by the players he idolized.

“You have [bassist] Ron Carter and [drummer] Jack DeJohnette, who are legends individually, and with McCoy in the room it's a generation deeper,” the guitarist recalled. “I felt like I had my hands tied a little bit because I was playing through a really tiny amp, which was in a different room.

“I tend to not like recording just hearing myself through headphones, but you have to let go and realize that this is a completely different realm,” Trucks continued. “You are playing with acoustic piano and upright bass. Also, anytime you are playing with musicians that you have never played a note with before, the first 20 to 30 percent is just the feeling-out process, learning how people phrase things. And that’s often the beauty of it.

“Sometimes, you get the most inspired moments when you first make those connections, because you get thrown into the deep end and you either sink or swim.”