DEREK TRUCKS

Listening to Derek Trucks, whether he’s in full-bore flow or just adding subtle flecks of colour, is listening to someone who combines a high level of guitar mastery with a quite wonderful musicality. Every note and chord is there for valid musical reasons rather than for flash, and he never overplays. He has the right DNA, of course, literally and figuratively, being the son of Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks and having spent years with that legendary band.

By all reports something of a child prodigy, perhaps it was an angel-on-the-shoulder moment that led to him first picking up a guitar slide because his hands were too small to play guitar conventionally. Today, as a slide player, there are few who can touch him, and even fewer whose solos can seem to lift the listener off the ground.

Listen to this: Midnight In Harlem (Tedeschi Trucks Band, Revelator, 2011)