What might have ridden the guitarist Derek Trucks and his wife Susan Tedeschi to completely re-record an album as iconic in rock history as “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs”?

Doesn't such an update have to seem blasphemous?

And can't the Tedeschi Trucks Band just lose at such a risk?

When the original was published by Derek and the Dominos in 1970, it not only sounded like the last shining monument of a visionary decade. The collaboration of slide guitarist Duane 'Skydog' Allman with Eric Clapton ("Derek is Eric") had created a work in which the British white boy blues perfectly combined with its American roots. It was only on this album that Clapton made the music of his lifelong role model Robert Johnson his own. After seven years of listening, replaying and tireless blues propaganda, the lovesick tragic hero found his personal blues in “Layla” and was finally able to heroically savor his depth of feeling.

In spite of all the skepticism, no other band in an almost "cosmic coincidence" is likely to be predestined to create new sparks from the classic songs than the Tedeschi-Trucks-Ensemble. Not only had the blues-loving Chris and Debbie Trucks named their firstborn son “Derek” because of this album: “My father often played the record to my brother and me to fall asleep. It has burned itself deeply into my DNA, ”recalls Trucks. Later he was to take over the prestigious guitarist chair from Duane Allman with the Allman Brothers from 1999 until the dissolution in 2014. In addition, Trucks also accompanied Eric Clapton on several world tours and, to complete the series of underground connections: The release day of the album, November 9, 1970,happened to be Susan Tedeschi's birthday. The creative engagement with the “Layla” classic seemed almost predetermined.

With a welcome alienation effect

Recorded at a concert on August 24, 2019 as part of the LOCKN 'Festival in Arrington, Virginia, the special program was kept secret from the visitors until the very end.

All that was known was that that evening the group of twelve would be joined by two more guitarists, long-time Clapton accompanist Doyle Bramhall II and Trey Anastasio from the fusion band Phish.

Already with the first bars of “I Looked Away” it was clear that the reconstruction of the classical material would be done with respect and emphasis - expanded solely by gospel choir singing, powerful brass sections, smoky unisolo vocals and warming organ sounds.

But despite their wide-screen sound, the pieces sound intimate and have a structural depth of field.

With three guitarists and one female guitarist on stage, the “Layla” concert turns into a celebration of contemporary blues guitar: Trucks takes over the musical parts from Duane Allmann, while Anastasio plays the Clapton parts. Bramhall II and Tedeschi repeatedly push into the gaps in this sensitive dialogue with their licks. Especially the new version of “Why Does Love Got To Be so Sad?” Develops a thrust that is both numbing and beguiling at the same time.

A welcome alienation effect arises when Susan Tedeschi sings with a voice soaked in souls those lyrics in which Clapton previously processed his personal love drama with Pattie Boyd ("Layla"), the wife of his best friend George Harrison. He even chose a song like “Have You Ever Loved A Woman” by Freddie King because it was directly addressed to Pattie. But now there are suddenly completely new gender-specific perspectives in the songs that generate no less powerful meanings. Of course, Trucks had already transformed each other in the Clapton band, but also with Susan Tedeschi again and again individual pieces on the album such as “Key To The Highway” or the Hendrix ballad “Little Wing”.

So here is not the Hendrix original, which has now almost been covered to death, but the more powerful Dominos version of “Little Wing”, the godfather for trucks imploding decipherment. The end of the record is a studio recording of “Thorn Tree in the Garden”. Trucks comments on his wife's smoky rasps with just an acoustic guitar. Anyone who accuses him today of just copying the blues inventions of Clapton & Co., the forty-two-year-old slide magician confidently replies that it has always been in the history of the blues. "There is only one great musical memory here, from which everyone can draw and which everyone can redefine in their own way."