Beyond good genes, aging gracefully in rock'n'roll entails imagination, the ability to look beyond the usual grist for fresh inspiration and context. As far as the solo careers of legendary rock front men go, former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant's path has never been more admirable in that respect.

Plant's solo stage has lasted far longer than that of his original band by this point, and while he has never commanded the same sort of profile on his own, he has never succumbed to becoming an oldies act or a trend chaser. His appreciation for a wider world of music and flair for gathering younger musicians around him has lately yielded Strange Sensation, which played a rare club show at Manhattan's Irving Plaza.

Strange Sensation is a five-piece band that enables Plant to meld his abiding influences -- '50s blues and rockabilly, '60s folk-rock -- with a connoisseur's love of North African and sub-Saharan grooves. The show started with the lone beat of a frame drum, leading the moody Led Zeppelin totem "No Quarter" from the English moors closer to Moorish Spain. Reportedly beset with a cold, Plant was a bit flat in the stark opening, but such fluid music allows the singer to warm to the task.

Unlike, say, the Who's Roger Daltrey -- who is more or less forced to take a scorched-earth policy to his vocal cords, as if he were still a golden god -- the 56-year-old Plant has the advantage of arrangements that let him sing with the grain of his graying voice. The version of Zeppelin's "Black Dog" was slow and grinding. Plant delivered the tale of hip-level hard luck like an age-old talking blues, with the band channeling the rhythm from an even more primordial place.

Plant and company -- particularly rhythm guitarist Justin Adams, a player who has steeped himself in the West African griot tradition a la Ali Farka Toure -- realize that these droning, minimalist grooves are so deep that they're timeless and not so simple. Another Zeppelin rocker, "Heartbreaker," was blurred into a hopped-up country blues, with the country as much Mali as Mississippi. Natural and organic, the re-arrangement was a far more involving way to tap the past than if Plant had some simulacrum aping the roar of yore.

Much of the new Strange Sensation material -- drawn from 2002's ingeniously re-imagined covers set, Dreamland, and a new album of original material, The Mighty Rearranger -- is rooted in circular, camel-train grooves. Yet the loping verses of the new single "Shine It All Around" (which sounds as vital and contemporary as anything on the radio) flowed into rock choruses of sunburst guitar. "Freedom Fries" rocked the Casbah a little harder, as Plant sounded fit vocally and lyrically on this raucous, ululating evocation of enduring Middle Eastern myth.

The Celtic side of Plant's musical personality came out with "Tangerine," which retained its Welsh camp-fire aura from Led Zeppelin III, complete with folk-jazz instrumental egress. A new song written in a similar style, "All the King's Horses," had the same acoustic nocturne appeal. Even with some vocal strain, Plant lent Tim Hardin's "If I Were a Carpenter" an earthy quality that it hardly ever receives. From "Dreamland," Jesse Colin Young's "Darkness, Darkness" was dusky and soulful, with ringing electric piano and guitars that wailed in the background like a muezzin from across town.

Strange Sensation remade "When the Levee Breaks" to smolder as if Memphis Minnie had been set down in Marrakech. Plant prefaced his solo Elvis homage "Tall Cool One" with an ode to "the man from Tupelo," and the current band's sinewy twist on rockabilly stomp sounded infinitely superior to the '80s midi-rock of the original. After its swirling electronic intro, the exciting new "Tin Pan Valley" exploded with riffs that would've surely made Plant's erstwhile partner Jimmy Page smile.

As an aficionado of the blues in all its worldly forms, Plant knows that there are basically two songs to be sung -- cries of either libido or lament. With a dramatic "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" getting the latter out of the way, Plant threw good sense to the wind. He and his charges attacked the back-door blues "Whole Lotta Love" with rootsy gusto, turning the iconic Zeppelin number into just another variation on that universal theme of yearning and burning.

Rhythm And Blues
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