"Playing on one string can almost emulate the human voice"

As the Tedeschi Trucks Band deliver a quadruple album bonanza, slide guitar maestro Derek Trucks reveals the source of his gargantuan tones and emotive power...

- By Amit Sharma

On the new Tedeschi Trucks Band album, I Am The Moon: I. Crescent 0 - the first of four themed albums released this summer - there are moments that could very well document Derek Trucks at his world-beating best. Widely considered to be the finest slide player to emerge since the likes of Duane Allman, Sonny Landreth, and Ry Cooder, the 43-year-old Trucks is still finding new ways to make his guitar speak. These latest recordings with the Grammy-winning 12-piece band he leads alongside his guitarist/vocalist wife Susan Tedeschi are evocative in a way that can transport the listener to different times and places.

Take the 12-minute instrumental Pasaquan, for example, which reveals a distinctly edgier and moodier player than the Southern rock poster boy most of us are familiar with and stands as the definitive guitar hero moment on this first chapter of the I Am The Moon series.

Talking to TG from his home on a typically balmy Floridian summer's day, Derek explains how it was The Allman Brothers Band - the very group he was recruited by at the end of his teens - who inspired this wildly intense musical direction, with angular dissonance in place of his signature seductive sweetness.