Susan Tedeschi went back to her old school on Saturday and headlined the first Homecoming Block Party that Berklee College of Music has staged, playing a 16-song set in Boston with her husband and Tedeschi Trucks Band co-leader Derek Trucks joining her partway through.
The timing was not accidental. Berklee had announced days earlier that it was creating the Susan Tedeschi Scholarship, awarded to a student with demonstrated financial need. Tedeschi is a Boston-area native who studied at the college and graduated in 1991, then formed her first band in the city and worked out the sound that carried into her solo records.
Trucks came out midway for four songs: What in the World, Hero, the title track of her 1998 album Just Won't Burn, and Little by Little. The rest of the set she played with a band of Dennis Montgomery on keyboards, Ted Pecchio on bass, Oliver Wood on guitar and Tyler Greenwell on drums.
The song choices leaned on the blues and folk repertoire she came up on rather than on the Tedeschi Trucks catalogue. She opened with Got My Mojo Working, played the Elmore James standard Outside Woman Blues and Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, and paired John Prine's Angel From Montgomery with the Grateful Dead's Sugaree before closing on The Feeling Music Brings.
That last title is the sort of thing a college would commission if it could. A homecoming set by an alumna who left Berklee in 1991 with no guarantees and came back with a scholarship in her name is the institution's own argument made in public, and she played it as a gig rather than a ceremony.
Tedeschi and Trucks have spent the year turning up in each other's shows and in other people's. In August the two of them sat in with Alabama Shakes in Cincinnati, and earlier this month Tedeschi Trucks Band debuted a Wildflowers cover in tribute to Dolly Parton at Wolf Trap.
The band's own autumn routing continues through October, with a four-night stand at the Chicago Theatre among the dates logged on the tour guide, and the pair keep landing on both the rock and rnb-soul side of the ledger depending on who is on stage with them.
The facts
- Susan Tedeschi headlined Berklee's first Homecoming Block Party in Boston.
- Derek Trucks joined her for four songs during the set.
- Berklee created the Susan Tedeschi Scholarship days earlier.
- She graduated from Berklee in 1991.
- The performance ran to 16 songs.
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