We Need to Talk About Andre 3000
WTFlute: players, rappers, and visionaries from a longtime observer of OutKast's star-child.
Some of the funniest graffiti I’ve ever seen was in practice rooms at Berklee College of Music, where I did time as teenager early in a decade-plus long study of musicianship, theory, and jazz literature, on saxophones, flutes, and other winds — the usual earnest whiteboy jazz arc.
One graffito was a theme and variations: the slogan “jazz rules, rock drools” reproduced over and over again down the wall, the ruling and drooling parties flipping back and forth as each occupant registered their allegiance as if they were punching in for a work shift. Another was a quote from our founding father Charlie Parker — “First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that shit and just play” — which someone had vastly improved by crossing out the word “play” and substituting it with “do drugs.”
One time I was in the room, running scales, modes, and nodes, a local alto sax player in the next room, also named Chris, put my ability in perspective: he sounded, without exaggeration, like Charlie Parker with a better tone. A few years later, in 1988, Peter Watrous would write in The New York Times, “Listening to the 18-year-old alto saxophonist Christopher Hollyday play is a bit like hearing a baby speak in a grown man’s voice.” Truly, the righteous musician’s path is beset on all sides by mental illness.
Such were my thoughts this week when news came that one of the brightest, highest-charting rappers of the last 20 years had just released his first solo album, that this album was 90 minutes of flute-based improvisational works, and it was not at all meant as a joke. I pondered whether my baggage disqualified me from commenting on this, decided yes, and went ahead anyway.
In the early-’00s, I twice interviewed Andre 3000 and Big Boi, the visionary duo of OutKast for Spin. This was in the golden age of magazine journalism, when a story meant spending a day or two with the subjects, and from this it was clear that both men were blessed—hip, prodigiously talented, with a rare dedication to their creative community—and that Andre 3000 was arguably the coolest young man of his generation.
Here’s how he made his entrance.
I was sitting in a north Atlanta studio that the group had dubbed Stankonia with Big Boi (né Antwan Patton) as he reminisced on their early days as a group that was pathologically committed to being different. “We dyed our pants, we dyed our hair blond and orange,” Big Boi said. “And this was back in 1991 when no black kids were doing that — not even females.”
When I wondered aloud whether they looked crazy, Big Boi answered, “Hey yeah we looked crazy!” Which is when, like a dialogue-cued Lenny and Squiggy, Andre entered the room, twanging “What’s goin’ on, brah?”
The 25-year-old was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, a fake-pearl necklace, some leather forearm accessories he later identified as “cufflets,” and a wild-ass, leopard-skin Tyrolean hat of the sort that Bootsy Collins would wear if he joined the Von Trapp Family Singers. After dissolving into hysterics at his partner’s day look, Big Boi collected himself, sighed, sat back and greeted him with an impromptu term of endearment: “Timothy McVeigh,” he said, bestowing a pound. “Whassup?”
At the time, OutKast was releasing Stankonia, an album that featured Andre rapping “I stank I can, I stank I can,” as he invited us to climb aboard the “underground smellroad” in a song titled “Chatanigga Choo-choo.” An album with “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)” with the gallivanting Miami Bass, punk-rock drive, and the hippest modern-warfare metaphors since the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy.”
It was clear then, and clearer still three years later with the group’s split album Speakerboxxx/the Love Below, that Andre had an eerie grace to him. He seemed exquisitely attuned to the larger culture yet possessed of a Zen-like detachment from his place within it, even when he was at its steering wheel. Did I expect to review his solo flute album in 20 years? I did not. Then again, I’m someone who advised him against releasing a bananas drum-machine-and-acoustic-guitar rock’n’roll track called “Hey Ya” as a single.
Over the past decade, social media has featured public sightings of Andre in troubadour mode—graying goatee and Afro, playing various end-blown flutes like Shakuhachi and contrabass—a groovy, Venice Beach version of Sonny Rollins woodshedding beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. Apparently, these were merely the outer signs of Andre’s ongoing immersion in improvised ambient music, an immersion New Blue Sun invites us to join.
Those who do will find an inviting space, and, to fans of albums ranging from Brian Eno’s work with Harold Budd and Laraaji, to Paul Horn’s ambient albums, to British producer Floating Points album with Pharoah Sanders Promises, a familiar one, with Yusef Lateef and Alice Coltrane the more jazz-historical reference points. This is music from a gauzy, hazy emerging zone of post-jazz improv, ambient electronic music, and new age that is drawing a wide range of artists and listeners into its gravitational orbit.
While New Blue Sun credits Andre on digital wind instruments, contrabass flute, Maya flute, and “various wood & bamboo flutes,” I don’t really get much sense of a distinct voice as a wind player, or the impression that I’m meant to. I just read reporting that Andre picked up the Roland Aerophone Pro AE-30, or digital wind instrument, he plays on the album days before the recording. Since a digital wind instrument is to flute playing roughly what autotune is to singing, I imagine Andre’s role here to be holding space and nudging vibes with some of most chill musicians in the state of California.
There include percussionist Deantoni Parks, multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau, piano-keyboardist Surya Botofasina, who studied with Alice Coltrane at a Santa Monica ashram if reports are true, and multi-instrumentalist, producer, and scene maven Carlos Niño, who seems to play a role similar to the one Teo Macero played on Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way, although with a much more generous hand as an editor. (Macero would have lopped a good five minutes off the end of the first track.)
To me, Andre’s most discernible influence on this album is Charles Mingus, at least in the song titles. We have the heart-on-the-sleeve opening track title: “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time,” which recalls Mingus’s "The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jiveass Slippers.” Then there’s the psychoanalytic mouthful “The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off the Tongue With Far Better Ease Than the Proper Word Vagina. Do You Agree?” — answer: if you say so — in which we hear shades of Mingus’s “All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother” plus filthier sections of his memoir Beneath The Underdog. In “Ninety-Three ’Til Infinity And Beyoncé,” which references both the early-’90s hip-hop Souls of Mischief and Queen Bee, one discerns echoes of “If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger There’d Be A Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.”
One particularly, er, provocative title “Ghandi [sic], Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy,” warmed my heart with memories of a moment, many years ago, of sitting with Andre and Big Boi inside Eddie’s Gold Teeth, an Atlanta stripmall establishment with a murky aquarium and busted pool table, as Big Boi got fitted for some new fronts, and Andre sat before a widescreen TV playing a Court TV special on Jeffrey Dahmer.
Watching the special, Andre stroked his bearded chin thoughtfully as the narrator intones: ‘Dahmer began to experiment, giving his victims makeshift lobotomies in an attempt to create sex slaves.”
Now, that’s an outcast, I suggested.
“Mm-hmm,” Dre said, nodding. “In his own special way.”
This is the wry, whimsical observer I sense behind New Blue Sun, the man dropping self-aware bits of autobiography, including in the clearly ayahuasca-informed “That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther and Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control ... Shit Was Wild.”
Ordinarily you can’t review an album through its song titles, but these give the clearest sense of how much of an Andre 3000 endeavor New Blue Sun is, how much his benign, forward-looking presence lives throughout these concerted group improvisations, intently listening, participating without dominating. “That Night in Hawaii” is the song that most foregrounds Andre’s flute presence, in this case, a contrabass flute doubled or harmonized with effects pedals, which my musician friends liken to Jon Hassell’s processed trumpet with Brian Eno, or what jazz multi-woodwind player Rahsaan Roland Kirk would produce acoustically.
It’s unclear to what extent Andre can control these low-register purring tones, or what his intention is during, say, a linear drift outside the tonal fabric of “The Slang Word.” But it doesn’t much matter. In 1977, a tenor saxophonist titled his debut album as a leader with a blurb from leading jazz critic Leonard Feather, “Scott Hamilton Is a Good Wind Who Is Blowing Us No Ill.” The same applies to Andre 3000, exponentially: a rap presence and persona that has sold 25 million records and is, at age 48, releasing an album with no beats, no rhymes, and serious creative intent. He’s traveled several light years to this point: from Atlanta’s College Park projects to Tri City High School to multi-platinum rap success to a kind of Art Ensemble of Los Angeles. And the amount of stress involved in this path is probably hard to overstate.
Is he like Samuel Beckett, turning to a fumbling second language because his native tongue had become a prison? Is he Michael Jordan, signing to the White Sox’s Minor League affiliate for a single season as a right outfielder, before returning to lead the Bulls to one last championship? Or is he like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, cringey as it feels to reference a war movie right now, a man we see Martin Sheen’s Willard getting to know through a dossier on the assigned target, a man who left a high-ranking officer post to enlist with the green berets at 38 years old: “He could've gone for general,” goes Willard’s gravely admiring voiceover. “But he went for himself instead.” And when one of the most surefooted artists of the last 20 years turns to healing wordless ambient music, it’s worth listening to him.