Many artists, once bursting with creative passion and enthusiasm, reach a mid-life/ later-career point beyond which they stop performing with the intensity of their youth. This ‘nothing left to prove’-type apathy has affected many of the greatest and most frantically-productive players. How great it is, then, to hear Charles Lloyd put forth music of such ferocity and intent. Rabo de Nube, recorded live just before his 70th birthday, shows Lloyd reaching and exploring as intensely as he did in the 1960’s.

The set is a tumultuous series of originals: modal vamps, free passages, minor blues, and occasional back beats. The band (made of post- young lions stars Jason Moran, Reuben Rogers, and Eric Harland) approach the material with vitality and manage to avoid the contrived damn-I-wish-I-was-in-the-Coltrane-quartet feel that can often ruin this style of playing. They make the tunes their own without betraying the aesthetic authenticity.

Lloyd’s phrasing is dense and chop-heavy in the best way. He seems to be full of ideas fighting to be let out all at once. His improvisations are in top form- rapid sequences span the range of the tenor, split notes and sonic embellishments are used masterfully, even a quick quotation of Monk’s “Epistrophy” appositely snuck in the middle of an extended free section. The energy level for most of the set is somewhere between very excited and feverish. By the third track, “Booker’s Garden,” the band has caught the saxophonist’s fire, as evinced in Moran’s explosive solo, and the audience’s enthusiasm for the show is apparent throughout.

Rabo de Nube is a strong showing from a legendary musician. It’s an assertion of improvised music with a purity of conception and execution that’s as exciting as it is artful.

-Craig Schum