Review: Tedeschi Trucks Band, Gary Clark Jr. rethink the blues at Greek

Derek Trucks played his final gig last week as a member of the Allman Brothers Band, the Southern rock institution known for elevating its lead guitarists -- including Trucks and Warren Haynes, who’ve performed together for 15 years -- to jam-band royalty.

Trucks wasn’t the only one retiring: Motivated at least in part by Trucks’ and Haynes’ decision to leave, singer Gregg Allman recently announced that the band would call it quits after completing its annual engagement at the Beacon Theatre in New York.

So early Wednesday, according to reports, the Allman Brothers Band capped a 45-year career with a version of “Trouble No More,” the Muddy Waters blues standard the group recorded for its 1969 debut.

That’s heavy stuff, the kind you’d think a musician might need time to chew over. Yet by Thursday night, Trucks was back on the road, kicking off a U.S. tour with his other group, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, which stopped Saturday at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.

Forty-something hours, evidently, were enough to process what had happened.

In fact, it wasn’t hard to see Saturday why Trucks, 35, was raring to go -- and not just because the show reunited him with his wife, the big-voiced singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi.

An 11-piece outfit complete with three horns, an organist and two backing vocalists, the Tedeschi Trucks Band pulls from funk, soul, folk and pop in addition to the blues; it’s a deeply skilled groove machine that gives Trucks the opportunity to roam more widely than the Allman Brothers Band. And like Saturday’s opening act, Gary Clark Jr., the group functions as a bridge to what we can now call the post-Allmans age.

At the Greek, Trucks’ playing was plenty fiery in “Bound for Glory,” a gospel-inflected cut from the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Grammy-winning 2011 debut, “Revelator,” and a pummeling version of “The Storm,” from last year’s “Made Up Mind,” that also featured Kebbi Williams on saxophone. The guitarist let rip too in a growly cover of the Bobby “Blue” Bland hit “I Pity the Fool.”

But Trucks seemed most engaged -- and his playing most distinctive -- at less pyrotechnic moments, as in the mesmerizing, raga-like solo that led into “Midnight in Harlem,” a slow-rolling R&B ballad beautifully sung by Tedeschi. For the traditional “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning,” Trucks switched to acoustic guitar, lowering his volume but not his precision. And in “Idle Wind,” he softened his tone to match Tedeschi’s tender vocal and Kofi Burbridge’s gentle flute.

Could you hear Trucks’ relief at not having to tie himself once again to “Whipping Post”? Maybe if you listened hard enough.

Similarly hailed as a savior of blues guitar, Clark appeared to share Trucks’ complicated feelings about that role in his impressive set, which began ordinarily enough, with the standard “Catfish Blues” and Clark’s stomping “Next Door Neighbor Blues.”

But then the 30-year-old zoomed through the crisp soul-rock of “Ain’t Messin ’Round,” from his expansive 2012 album “Blak and Blu,” and revved up Albert Collins’ “If Trouble Was Money,” only to undercut its classic-of-the-genre status with an insistent two-note solo that had more punk than blues in it.

Later, Clark showed off a Smokey Robinson-style falsetto in the delicate “Please Come Home” and quieted his three-piece band entirely for a hushed rendition of the hip-hop-inspired title track of “Blak and Blu.”

At no point Saturday was Clark rejecting the rock-star idolatry his stage presence invites -- one difference between him and Trucks, who seemed genuinely pleased to have his wife by his side to do all the talking. But as with the Allman Brother-no-more, Clark’s sly, shape-shifting music suggested a discontent with old ideas.

It was saying yes to more trouble.

Twitter: @mikaelwood