Something that’s easy to overlook about the Tedeschi Trucks Band is that it is, in very real fact, a band. True, singer Susan Tedeschi and guitarist Derek Trucks are the names above the title. But if it were merely a matter of his jaw-droppingly precise playing and her lived-in, casually commanding blues yawp, they would impress and not much more. On Wednesday, the second of four sold-out nights at the Orpheum Theatre (the band returns Friday and Saturday), they left space to coalesce with the other 10 musicians onstage into a sympathetic unit not reliant on flash.
Again, that is. To anyone who’s seen them before, this was hardly a revelation. Tedeschi shared the vocals with keyboardist Gabe Dixon on the rolling and stuttering “Done Somebody Wrong,” a lopsided New Orleans blues that would have tipped over in less assured hands. Likewise, “Midnight In Harlem” — with its watery, free-form introductory fanfare by Trucks and saxophonist Kebbi Williams — was soft and dreamy but with clear movement. As dazzling as much of the musicianship was, it never left anyone behind and it was never for its own sake. There was never a moment Wednesday when the playing didn’t sound and feel like music.
Compounding the level of difficulty was the variety of modes the band mastered. Country inflections marked “Emmaline” (sung yearningly by Mike Mattison) and “La Di Da,” “Playing With My Emotions” was psychedelic blues that mutated into a Motown chorus, and “Space Captain” and “Last Night in the Rain” recalled the cosmic-swirling country-funk of Little Feat. And “How Blue Can You Get” was smoky electric nightclub blues, where Trucks’s rhythm guitar neither grabbed the spotlight nor receded into the background but proved subtle and supportive as Tedeschi — aptly, as it had been her song of defiant lament — took the solo.
Where the younger Tedeschi used to push her voice to prove herself, the singer on the Orpheum stage was confident and at ease in the knowledge that she could draw the audience in instead. She could be tender on Jerry Garcia’s “Sugaree” and a powerhouse against the gloriously lumbering, lowdown blues-rock of “Learn How to Love.”
And even when Trucks’s guitar spat fire, he remained fully engaged with the music. The whole band rose and fell with him in “Keep on Growing,” and despite tearing off on a blazing lead in “Outside Woman Blues,” he returned to the song’s riff with the group every few bars, never flying so wild that he couldn’t touch back down. Only once did he lose control: right before the encore, after the frat-rock of “I Want More” morphed into Santana’s volcanic “Soul Sacrifice,” complete with Tyler Greenwell’s and Isaac Eady’s tandem drum solos. As the song came in for a landing, the stoic, inward-directed guitarist revealed a giant grin on his face for the first time all evening. Then he winked to the crowd.
TEDESCHI TRUCKS BAND
At Orpheum Theatre, Wednesday (repeats Friday and Saturday)
Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@gmail.com or on Twitter @spacecitymarc.