Watching Kahil El’Zabar at 229 and thinking of the older musicians: creative music in expansion.

Seniority and the strange acceleration of creativity 

There’s a quiet revolution happening in plain sight: musicians who once embodied youthful rupture now carry their art deeper into age, as a new perspective on creativity. The surface story—legends touring stadiums—is easy to tell. The more interesting truth is internal: as the body slows, the internal listening ear gains momentum; experience pares away the unneeded flourish. What we call “seniority” is not only longevity or the calendar’s count; it’s the psychic sediment of decades—losses, reconciliations, changing technologies, the way audiences age with you, or refuse to, and how a musician learns to play to their own mortality without melodrama.

Kahil El’Zabar approaches seniority as ritual. On Tuesday, at the 229 in London, he played a beautiful set with his longstanding band, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble (Kahil El’Zabar – multi-percussion, voice; Corey Wilkes – trumpet, percussion; Alex Harding – baritone sax, Ishmael Ali, cello).  We had to go again, after seeing him in Paris in 2023 in an extraordinary performance including guests Joseph Bowie and David Murray on stage.

This year, after some 45 minutes he took a ‘pause with a cause’ and joked about needing a senior citizen rest. The gig had been great so far, there was a familiar, trance inducing rhythmic flow that I remembered from before, if possible improved by a kind of slowing down that created a deeply spitritual feel to the music. He had just concluded an extraordinary solo on kalimba in a slow, moving version of the standard ‘summertime’ that had come to life with new fresh energy to my ears, no matter how many times I had heard it before. People had been singing happy birthday – it was his 72nd birthday, and his way of embracing openly his seniority was touching – he may slow down, but this does not detract from the searching intensity of his music.  There was nothing nostalgic about the occasion, more the sense of participating to a ceremony. Percussion and voice guide the ensemble through trance and release where groove isn’t repetition but deepening. The longer durations sound like time itself being kneaded—stretching, folding, letting overtones bloom. He had started with a profoundly meditative version of ‘he’s got his own world in his hands’ that set the ‘heritage’ quality of his ensemble firmly in place. And yet, while immersed the spiritual and traditional tune, I couldn’t stop thinking of other, more ambiguous meanings, like irresponsible people in power who have the world in their hands without taking full responsibility for their power. Something of the music stretched, opened internal worlds and reflections but, with that, included some kind of social massage for pained souls too.  El’Zabar’s sense of healing isn’t anaesthetic; it’s restorative abrasion. Here, the artist’s seniority here is the confidence to trust communal time and eschew novelty for depth. ​⁠ ​⁠

There’s so much more seniority influenced music around. Let’s start with rockstars.  Bob Dylan? Bruce Springsteen? Still going strong. Too much choice of senior rockers, Oasis themselves are young adults compared to the lasting heroes of the sixties and seventies.

Consider the Rolling Stones in their eighth decade. Their recent Hackney Diamonds tour was not a museum piece. The numbers of punters attending (and the cost of dynamically priced tickets) demand stamina:  the reviews describe not embalmed nostalgia but kinetic self-belief—Jagger as a “indefatigable dynamo”, Richards as the blues engine, Wood as grinning virtuoso. You could hear aging not as a limit but as a groove: the set lists braid new material into collections of hits, an ironic theatre where grand scale amplifies the core thing—time-tested riffs played with an older person’s economy of gesture. The crowd sees endurance; the players feel economy: less showboating, more intent, the way athletes turn cerebral as their bodies refuse maximal risk. In the Stones’ case, seniority becomes stagecraft—precision masquerading as abandon. ​⁠

Then Neil Young, who treats aging like an ongoing experiment in tone, ethics, and format. He moves through archival excavations and fresh recordings—electric raggedness, woodsmoke acoustics, live sets that sound like field notes. The point isn’t only output; it’s a stubborn refusal to fix the self into brand logic. Seniority here is an ideological tremor: preserve analogue richness, rage against technocratic filtering, accept imperfections as honest signal. Young’s late work often addresses time directly—what we owe to the land, to memory, to the friends now gone—and his creativity doesn’t narrow; it particularizes. He chooses subjects that reward a seasoned conscience, not the teenage blast. Even when he revisits past modes, it’s a return as argument: the past was a method, not a mood. ​⁠

And Van Morrison, a contrarian in temperament and a classicist in craft, has leaned into reinterpretation as a high-wire act. With Accentuate the Positive, a covers album at age 78, he doesn’t merely honour early rock and R&B; he writes himself into the lineage by rephrasing tradition with a veteran’s breath control, a conversational phrasing that treats famous songs as living rooms rather than statues. Senior creativity, here, means asking: what happens when the voice knows where it can and cannot go, and designs its phrasing around those contours? The result can feel more “present” than youthful fireworks—timbral intimacy, rhythmic patience, a band leader’s attention to how arrangements shelter the exposed voice. Critics noted the “charismatic exuberance” one might expect from someone half his age, but I’d call it something else: humility converted into propulsion. ​⁠

The psychology of late rock: energy as memory, risk as editing 

In rock, youthful power often equals the spectacle of expansion—live fast, die young, play loud and snotty. Seniority flips the polarity. Expansion becomes editing: fewer notes, clearer mixes, tighter sets. The older mind syncs the body with the idea. There’s also a psychological pivot. In youth, the audience is your mirror; in seniority, time is your collaborator. The risk isn’t whether a new track charts; it’s whether a performance transmits the scent of the thing you’ve chased for sixty years. Surprisingly, that can make late rock feel honest, even when the arena is lit by brand sponsorship. It’s a paradox: mass-scale shows hosting a very private conversation between musician and their own continuity. One limiting factor, the money-making potential of selling these old, artistic souls can result in prohibitive costs of live tickets, under the pressure of dynamic prices, presales, VIP packages etc. Just an example – I basically couldn’t afford going to see Neil Young in Hyde Park last summer, the costs of a ticket was in the region of £ 200.

Jazz and the senior savant: breath, ritual, and the long arc of invention 

And then there is jazz, where seniority often explodes the myth that art decays with age.

Wadada Leo Smith, born in 1941, is unhurried and inexhaustible. He released at least 3 new records this year, all extraordinary creative music in small groups or duos, where every phrase of his trumpet is a poetic line. In 2024 his concept album ‘Central Park’s Mosaics of reservoir, lake, paths and garden’ with Amina Claudine Myers was in many bests of the year’s lists (mine too). In 2023 he released an excellent electric funk fusion record, fire illuminations, with his ‘orange Wave electric’ band. He’s 83, his late-career works are not mere summations; they are expansions of an already expansive sound system he’s been evolving for years —Ankhrasmation as living notation, suites that inscribe historical memory into sound, duets and quartets that risk silence as much as density. He composes with history as a co-performer, treating form as moral inquiry and timbre as testimony. Seniority becomes methodology: take long breath, trust space, make history audible without cliché. ​⁠

And Amina Claudine Myers, a pianist, organist, composer, and vocalist whose senior creativity offers a rare admixture—earth church, AACM lineage, blues memory, and contemporary composition. Myers treats harmony like a home you return to with different keys. Her recent collaborations (including with Smith) feel like conversations between memory and invention: gospel-tinged chords that open to free forms, spoken voice conjoined with fearless intervals, organ as ecstatic architecture rather than retro signifier. She’s proofed that senior creativity can be a widening of the emotional spectrum—softness alongside fire, lullaby alongside lament—without surrendering experimental rigor. In Myers’ world, seniority is generosity: the music invites, then dares.

Jazz seniority reads differently than rock – it’s a structural thing, it’s about developing artistry and passion at a healthy distance from market considerations. Rock’s mass spectacle conditions late work to be public proof: sell tickets, deliver recognizable, sprinkle newness. Jazz’s venues and economies are smaller, but the aesthetic contract is larger: the audience meets you in process, not product. In senior jazz, the process is the art—breath counting time, silence framing sound, ritual encoding ethic. Either it connects in the room, or it doesn’t; but if it does, the connection is intimate and exacting.

Jazz’s improvisational grammar rewards accumulated listening. The older you are, the more intervals you’ve learned to respect or violate, the more rhythms you can compress or dilate without breaking the room. Where late rock often excels at scale, keeping the straightforward pop sensibility, noise and melodies at the front, late jazz thrives on spirit, depth, contour. And it includes slowness and silences in the interval between notes, creating spaces and expressivity. In witnessing Kahil El’Zabar music live, it was clear that his hand weighs each beat; the mind hears each note before it lands; the group feels how silence sharpens the depth.

There’s fear, too. Not only of failure but of self-caricature. Senior artists face the risk of becoming statues—copying the posture that the world finds acceptable. Creativity at 70+, 80+, means refusing the stone. Either you slip into brand, or you confront the day. I suspect they wake up and ask a simple question: is there any music today I would regret not making? If the answer is yes, they work. If the answer is no, they rest. This question is seniority condensed: obligation to the inner listener, not to legacy management.

The social role of seniority 

Older artists do something essential: they model a way to age without abandoning play. In rock, this means permission to unashamedly enjoy the catalogue while still introducing new tracks into the bloodstream. In jazz, this means accepting that risk is not showy, but radical in the small—how a trio holds a fragile mood, how a solo trusts imperfection, how a band lets ritual restore coherence.

There’s a communal psychology, too. Audiences age with their artists, senior artists open to spaces of feeling—joy that’s been tested, anger without whine, sorrow with measure. Their concerts and records are not only entertainment; they are lessons in listening, and sharing, what goes on one’s inside as we near our own death and look back on our life experiences.