Young Trucks mixes a magic cocktail.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

This is starting to feel like Allman Brothers Outreach Month.

Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes was here April 15 with his band, Gov't Mule. And tonight, Allman Brothers slide guitarist Derek Trucks will hit town with his group.

Trucks, who splits his road time between the two groups, is on tour now promoting "Soul Serenade," which the Derek Trucks Band recorded in October 1999 and February 2000, between "Out of the Madness" (1998) and "Joyful Noise" (2002).

Reviewing "Soul Serenade" for Harp, Ken Micallef wrote that Trucks' guitar sound, "though owing a scary debt to Duane Allman, is also his own, a singular snarl of blaring blues notes, ripping bottleneck runs and frenetic blues-rock-jazz logic."

Micallef was making a point about Trucks' stylistic diversity, but what he wrote makes "Soul Serenade" sound a lot more java-jangly than it really is. Jim Farber was closer to the truth in a brief review for Entertainment Weekly. He said Trucks "shuns the show-off `shredder' style in favor of a melodic and erudite brand of jazz-rock."

And Jim Macnie got it just right in his Downbeat review when he wrote that the Derek Trucks Band builds "thorough improvs via melodic motifs, creating an atmosphere of thoughtfulness and spirituality. John Coltrane and Duane Allman cast equally long shadows."

The thing is, all three reviewers heard different things in the same album, and all three are right. Produced by Trucks and influential jazz producer John Snyder (Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, Junior Wells and others), this is a jazz album and a blues album. And it rocks.

The album opens with "Soul Serenade/Rasta Man Chant," the band's 10 1/2 -minute interpre- tation of songs by King Curtis and Bob Marley. Both songs are classics in their genres, and the Trucks band fuses them in a down-in-the-Delta way that will become a classic in its own right.

Once Bill McKay kicks in on the organ (listen for it at about the two-minute mark), and drummer Yonrico Scott and bassist Todd Smallie lay down a steady beat, and flutist Kofi Burbridge starts fluttering around like Charles Lloyd playing the shakuhachi, the music swirls and floats between the two tunes in a liquidly rhyth- mic way that's almost hypnotic.

It just builds and builds and subsides, ebbs and flows, never losing the strands of the looped-together melodies.

That one track by itself would be reason enough to buy this album. But there are six more, including Henry Glover's "Drown in My Own Tears" with a vocal by Greg Allman, Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue," Wayne Shorter's arrangement of a traditional "Oriental Folk Song" and two collaborative originals: "Elvin" and "Sierra Leone," with Trucks playing sarod on the latter.

Despite the differences in melody, style, instrumentation and rhythm, the seven tracks flow from one into another seamlessly, as if they were all laid down in a single session or a single collective breath. Which they almost were.

"Soul Serenade" was recorded in two brief sessions, three days in '99 and five days in 2000, virtually free of overdubs except Allman's vocal and Trucks' sarod track.

"We would set up in the studio and run down two or three tunes in a row ... like in a show," Trucks said. "The re- cord went down really quick and really painlessly."

The good news is that Trucks - the nephew of longtime Allmans drummer Butch Trucks - already is a veteran touring musician. He got his first playing gig at age 11, formed his first band at 12, finished high school through on-the-road schooling - and he's still several years to the good side of 30.

If he and his band keep on truckin' as they do here, they'll lay down a lot of good tracks before they're done.

Paul Denison can be reached at 338-2323 or [e-mail].

CONCERT PREVIEW

Derek Trucks Band

When: 9 p.m. today

Where: McDonald Theatre, 1010 Willamette St.

How much: $17

CAPTION(S):

Derek Trucks, slide guitarist for the Allman Brothers and nephew of Allmans drummer Butch Trucks, will bring his own project, the Derek Trucks Band, to the McDonald Theatre today.