It’s the elephant in the room at every outing of an aging legend — will they be able to pull it off, even at their age? John McCain can run for president even if he can’t lift his arms above his head, and 70-year-old saxophonist Charles Lloyd can go on the road with a band half his age and earn several standing ovations for a performance that any musician would be proud of. But you’d have to be willfully ignoring certain aspects of his performance not to notice the toll that his age is taking on his playing. Going back to his commercial and artistic breakthrough 1966 disc Forest Flower, Lloyd’s distinctive feature has been his restraint. Now it’s his undoing.

Even when gripping a high note so hard it squeals, Lloyd’s saxophone never gets louder than a dull roar. On record, even as late as the recently-released Rabo de Nube (from which the band performed a track), Lloyd’s fluttering and impossibly fast runs up and down the horn are quiet, but audible. Live, you can’t distinguish between notes no matter how hard you listen; only the accents pop out, the rest choked by what sounds like a lack of air. He never plays for very long, though to be fair, he never did. The band compensate during one of the many lengthy interludes where he steps to the side; pianist Jason Moran sometimes doesn’t even wait for Lloyd to reach the chair set up in the wings before kicking the intensity up several notches.

When reduced to a trio, it was a whole other gig, as Moran unleashed flurries of notes, intricate reharmonizations over Lloyd’s impossibly soulful and delicate compositions while bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland laid down a rhythmic bed that was constantly in flux, always in the pocket but never settling into a groove. When they soloed individually, which was often — Lloyd hardly directed them, so they played as long as they felt like — they were passionate and funky, young guys getting their rocks off but with a taste of the restraint Lloyd has no doubt instilled in them. And then he would return, and the battle to hear the harmonic science he was laying down would begin again.

There’s no question that Lloyd’s mind is as active as an eighteen-year-old’s. When the spirit moved him to play loudly, you could hear the ideas spilling out; on a bluesy tune, Lloyd concocted lines that referenced the harmonic approach from Sonny Rollins’ “Blue Seven” and danced around the upper and lower ends of the horn, and when he picked up the flute you could more clearly hear what he was getting at — richly melodic phrases that made the chord changes bend to Lloyd’s will. And on the second encore (!), Lloyd took to the piano for a flurry of his own inventive runs before reciting part of the Bhagavad Gita — one of the most serene and unexpected moments of the festival. But when large chunks of the gig were inaudible, the question of whether touring agrees with him at his age is a serious one that deserves addressing, not just for his audiences, but for his legacy.

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