A lot of Grammys in the Tedeschi Trucks family

For those among you who never had the pleasure, the Tedeschi Trucks Band is about as close as you will ever come to approximating a 1970s spectacle known as the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour. That was a road band of epic proportions gathered by multi-instrumentalist Leon Russell in support of an album of the same name that featured an emerging British soulster (and colorful air guitarist) named Joe Cocker. Russell, as the story goes, invited a multitude of his studio-musician friends to come along. We’re talking in the neighborhood of 40 musicians onstage.

Although not nearly as lavish an enterprise, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks roll with about a dozen or so side musicians, a workday considered by some to be epic in today’s tight-fisted music-industry economy. And whereas Mad Dogs was a frenetic revue fueled by excesses, Tedeschi Trucks functions like an all-in-one unit in support of its two co-stars: Tedeschi’s gorgeous and straight-from-the-heart vocals, and Trucks’s electric slide guitar. Not a three-ring circus. The Tedeschi Trucks Band sounds like a logical conclusion — one of those things that was meant to happen. But in 2010, married and on the verge of starting their joint musical venture by combining their respective groups, neither Tedeschi nor Trucks really needed each other professionally.

Imagine Buddy Guy with Bonnie Raitt’s voice: Susan Tedeschi had been running her own bands, some of them Grammy-nominated, since the age of 18 and opening for large acts such as the Stones and the Allman Brothers, a band that Derek Trucks belonged to. At 19, his slide-playing was already being lauded in a way that would land him among Rolling Stone’s list of the top 100 guitar players of all time. Now deep into this year’s Wheels of Soul Tour, I marvel at a couple and an entire band — no, more like a collective — who can put music before ego.