XDA

Went to Chautauqua with the lovely Pamela to see Susan Tedeschi who was very good. We had a good time. Tedeschi is a 36 year old blues singer and journeyman guitarist from Massachusetts, of all places, who sounds like a combination of Bonnie Raitt and Janis Joplin and has a voice that drips sex but with a lot of power. She is married to Derek Trucks, current guitarist with the Allman Brothers Band and nephew of longtime drummer with the band, Butch Trucks (interesting name).

She had a full band--bassist, drummer, tenor sax and keyboardist (who kept shoving in Happy Birthday in all his solos--whose birthday we never discovered, certainly not Tedeschi's). She handled lead and really gave it a go. Since I've been seeing some of the greatest guitarists ever recently, I was less impressed with the output than with the effort. She's nearly as good on regular lead guitar as Bonnie is on bottleneck. Whatever her ability on lead, the guitarist Gods certainly should be jealous of her rich, ripe voice. A minor quibble was that her microphone was not cranked up appropriately so that it was difficult to hear the words from time to time as she hid her talent under the straw.

I'm not sure about her choice of outfits. There's unpretentious and then there's what she wore--faded jeans and what looked like a homemade halter top (maybe). Nice shoes, though. She played a blonde Gibson Les Paul and changed it out with a gaudy Fender (Telecaster? Tough to tell from my seats). Sounded the same to me, anyway. The keyboardists had a Korg electric piano and a huge stretch in his right hand as well as a Hammond B-3 with the leslie on full, all the time. I thought he was in danger one time of throwing out one arm with the cross over between piano and organ. He straightened it out.

Highlights were from the new album and the album that got her noticed, Just Won't Burn from 1998. Nearly all of the songs had us restless and dancing in our seats, but there's no place to dance in the Music Hall. I really liked It Hurts So Bad (where she does her Janice Joplin impression), Evidence and Angel From Montgomery (even though it morphed briefly into an insipid Grateful Dead song) and she did a Dylan song, Lord Protect My Child, proud. All in all a good night and I'd see her again, especially if her sweet voice boomed out.