Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (2014) [HDTV 1080i]

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (2014) [HDTV 1080i]

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Robert Plant shouldn't have been at the New Orleans Jazz Fest. He and his Sensational Space Shifters have been recording a new album in England, with no plans to tour.

But as Plant explained during his closing set Saturday (April 26) at the Samsung Galaxy Stage, Jazz Fest producer Quint Davis kept calling, urging him to bring the band to the festival. Davis – and, undoubtedly, a sizable check – persuaded them to, in Plant's estimation, travel 5,674 miles for a single show.

The trip was worth the trouble. The Golden God of yore is grayer now. On Saturday, his lavender shirt was sensibly unbuttoned, but he flaunted a pair of decidedly rock 'n' roll pointed-toe boots. He prowled the stage with a predatory glint in his eyes. And his clenched howl is still remarkably, and gloriously, intact.

He reportedly was the lone holdout to a Led Zeppelin reunion that would have been the highest grossing tour of all time. He prefers to chart his own course down roads less traveled, specifically the back-country trails that lead to forgotten corners of Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and ramshackle bars in New Orleans' Bywater neighborhood. Thus, on Saturday, he and the Space Shifters exhumed a meditation by high-lonesome Kentucky folk singer Roscoe Holcomb and bluesman Bukka White's grim "Fixin' to Die."

Not that Plant is above circling back around to familiar haunts. But when he raids the Zeppelin catalog, it is to mine it for fresh material. "It's great to keep changing it and turning it around," he said. "Here's one of them songs."

By "them songs," he meant, of course, a nugget culled from one of rock's great canons. A ringing acoustic guitar and mandolin ushered in a faithful "Going to California," recast as "going to Louisiana" for Jazz Fest.

The "big-legged woman" of "Black Dog," by contrast, was almost unrecognizable; that particular Zeppelin warhorse was disassembled and draped in the droning of a traditional African stringed instrument that sounded like a violin. "Tin Pan Valley," from his 2005 album "Mighty ReArranger," actually rocked harder. Spooky slide guitar haunted "The Enchanter," from the same album.

He dug back even further in his solo catalog for "In the Mood," from his 1983 album "The Principal of Moments." The mood of that song, and album, released just three years after Zeppelin's demise, clearly signaled that he was not interested in mimicking his former band's heavy/light dynamic.

He spun a tale about a favorite blue-eyed dog that accompanied him in the Welsh mountains many years ago. The dog was afraid of water, "so I had to carry the bloody thing everywhere." Nonetheless, he loved the dog, in part because it "didn't remind me of anyone I was hiding out from." In thanks, Plant "wrote a song about him with some old friends. It's a good afternoon song, especially with the smell in the air."

With that, the Sensational Space Shifters broke into "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp," a highlight of Zeppelin's acoustic-minded third album. The drummer's strikes on his floor toms put the "stomp" in the song.

With no warning, Plant casually slipped into the lyric, "If I say to you tomorrow," the opening line of Zeppelin's "What Is and What Should Never Be." It turned out to be the most faithfully reproduced of his old band's classics – and thrillingly so – right down to the swinging rhythm tapped out on a ride cymbal during the verse, and a fully amped coda.

The music of New Orleans enthralled Plant as a boy in England. In Zeppelin's glory years, he and his bandmates indulged their fondness for the city by throwing lavish parties. Such local legends as Snooks Eaglin, Earl King and Gatemouth Brown performed, Plant recalled fondly. "What a gas. What a town. What a bunch of people."

The six Space Shifters illuminated his explorations or cast them in shadows, from the African roots of the blues to rock 'n' roll. Guitarist Justin Adams electrified "Fixin' to Die." The whole band engaged in a dirty blues vamp; Plant inserted exclamations that soon came into focus as something quite familiar: "Don't you mess with me….because you need coolin'…ohh, back to schoolin'…cause way down inside…."

With that, "Whole Lotta Love" sprang fully to life, inducing chills and whoops of approval from the vast crowd. They detoured into Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love?" before the African violin brought them back to "Whole Lotta Love."

For the encore, Plant proposed they render "an English folk song that we carry around in a little box. Sometimes it peeks out." This "sea shanty," he said, comes with "a sense of humor."

The "folk song" turned out to be "Rock 'n' Roll," dressed up with droning violin and fuzz-tone keyboards. Once and for all, Plant reaffirmed that his bark still has its bite; his "eww, yeah!" exclamations harkened way, way back. During a brief bout of boogie-woogie piano, he exclaimed, "Suck it!" then grinned like a schoolboy caught being naughty.

He finished with a plug for the band's just-completed album, due Sept. 8. It'll be in all the record stores, he noted, before remembering, "Oh, there aren't none."

He had caught himself in a rare moment of nostalgia.

By Keith Spera, nola

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (2014) [HDTV 1080i]

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (2014) [HDTV 1080i]

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (2014) [HDTV 1080i]

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (2014) [HDTV 1080i]

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (2014) [HDTV 1080i]

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (2014) [HDTV 1080i]

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (2014) [HDTV 1080i]

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