One Nation Under a Flute
AT THE HEART OF current music’s most surprising aesthetic transformation is an accidental and fortuitous connection that introduced a beloved popular artist to a community of outsiders and is revealing a new direction for the genre often referred to as “jazz,” a sound that now lies far away from its historical centers, definitions, and institutions.
The popular artist in question is André 3000, considered by many to be the preeminent MC of his generation, as one half of the legendary rap group Outkast. Ever since the late-2023 release of New Blue Sun, an instrumental album on which, in a radical departure from his hip-hop roots, André plays various wind instruments surrounded by a cadre of Los Angeles–based improvisers, he’s been recounting an anecdote: The story concerns how André Benjamin, then a few years into an unnervingly public (read: constantly spotted and Instagrammed) love affair with the flute, first met Carlos Niño, a veteran percussionist, bandleader, and one of the LA underground music community’s most trusted connectors. (He’d eventually co-produce New Blue Sun.) The two ran into each other at a Venice Beach grocery store—a meeting that André recalls Niño saying was cosmically foretold—and Niño invited André to bring his flute to an Alice Coltrane tribute show at a local club that night. André showed up and did not play, but stumbled into an existing world of LA musicians, whom he described to CBS Mornings as “the perfect family in which to stretch out and get to know your instrument.”
And not just his “instrument.” Among this group of players, André encountered a decentralized approach to musical creation and a reconsideration of its purpose. It was a path that André, whose entire Outkast career was spent successfully discarding hip-hop’s various straitjackets, was already treading for more than a decade. For proof, check the skronky tenor saxophone outro he played on “She Lives in My Lap,” a classic Prince-soundalike on Outkast’s 2003 Grammy-winning album Speakerboxx/The Love Below; the photos of André attending free-jazz shows during his time in New York City in the ’10s; or the rumors of his clarinet lessons during that period, which were confirmed when in May 2018 he dropped “Look Ma No Hands,” a bass clarinet–piano duet with the British R&B singer-producer James Blake. André 3000’s desire to reimagine his “sound” was already present; it only required someone to affirm and focus it.
In Niño, André found the perfect accomplice. The West LA native—known for producing community radio shows and live events since the ‘90s, and releasing a steady stream of “Carlos Niño & Friends” albums that unite multiple generations of the city’s genre-agnostic artists—has long been a seeker whose local musicking bonafides are matched only by his vision of collaboration as a balm. In the shadow of the pandemic, when the increasingly psychedelic nature of Niño’s “vibes first” musical approach began resonating with young listeners of so-called spiritual jazz—not to mention the hipster wellness community—Niño started releasing his “Friends” albums on Chicago’s influential International Anthem record label, expanding his reach. A perfect storm was brewing, for which 3000, a beloved figure to most open-eared musicians, was the ideal Prospero.
Listening to New Blue Sun, and especially its live performances—with the album’s core musicians: Niño, keyboardist Surya Botofasina, guitarist Nate Mercereau, and drummer Deantoni Parks—is to step into a musical zeitgeist that’s been oncoming: The internet helped mutate the old, hardened record-store-section definitions of “jazz” and “new age” and “funk” into multi-tag, post-genre zones for which the once blasphemous category “fusion” is inapplicable. The past two decades have seen many improvising musicians trade in their instruments for machines and found sounds, often using global and electronic textures that depart from the blues and brass bands that birthed jazz. And amid these changes, careful listeners discovered that this left-of-center music had a rich, often ignored lineage within the jazz tradition, as evidenced by the historically underappreciated stylings of the aforementioned Alice Coltrane, trumpeter Don Cherry, and the bandleader/composer Sun Ra, all of whose work is having new heydays. These legends long argued for improvised music’s transcendent roots—that its spiritual gravitas was at least as important as its traditional form. All the while, jazz-informed hip-hop producers like J Dilla, Ras G, and Madlib only thickened the sauce, with Niño and friends on hand to help stir the pot. Wynton Marsalis’s aesthetic nightmare has become one version of jazz’s future.
The question that the New Blue Sun live shows have been answering is what sort of future this might be. January’s debut performance in Brooklyn felt atmospheric and featherweight, like a mere extension of the album’s energy rather than its own statement. Yet at that show, André confessed to the star-studded crowd that the wholly improvised set had only minor references to the recording, and that this was the first time the band was playing in front of an actual audience. His candor demonstrated a comfort with failure and an openness of spirit uncommon to today’s major musical acts. On that night, some things did not work, with the music often timid and rudderless, but the group’s fearless readiness to both soar and fall together made it gloriously exciting. The performance also had a special guest: the eighty-one-year-old zither master and arch spiritualist Laraaji, another improviser wholly separate from any “jazz” history, but whose direct connection to Brian Eno’s ambient works and the New York downtown art scene and longtime participation in Niño’s “Friends” sessions made him a wise old head. In offering guidance through the ensemble’s moments of trepidation, the (Greenwich) village elder put into effect another community-building strategy.
In fact, following the New Blue Sun tour via social media reports—phones have been strictly banned, so videos are rare—it’s been interesting to observe a multigenerational parade of musicians joining at each stop, adding their own unique qualities to André’s quintet. Few of the guests are commercially famous (though saxophonist Kamasi Washington may qualify), but all are key participants in their creative communities. There have been old heads (percussionist Adam Rudolph in New York, Tribe saxophonist Wendell Harrison in Detroit, Pyramids bandleader Idris Ackamoor in Berkeley), artists on the verge of a serious breakout (the singer-songwriter-producer Liv.e in New York, composer/clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid in Chicago, bassoonist Joy Guidry in San Francisco, saxophonist Sam Gendel in LA), and many key collaborating figures of their home parish (Ben LaMar Gay and Joshua Abrams in Chicago, Atlanta’s Hornz Unlimited, LA’s Josh Johnson, Matthewdavid and Mia Doi Todd). A nationwide community Niño had been fostering for years, many of whom regarded the rapping André 3000 as a kindred spirit, was now on board to embrace him as one of their own and to find out, “Where could our squad goals lead?”
By the time André’s core quintet got to Knoxville’s Big Ears festival in late March, the answer seemed to be: as far as they wanted. Playing five shows over four days, the band was light-years ahead of its tentative Brooklyn performances; the only thing that remained was André’s banter, an absolute openness of musical structure, and the invitation for audiences to discard expectations. The full set I saw began in the familiar naturalist quietude of the album, with André purring like an ayahuasca-dosed panther, but soon moved toward something louder and noisier, simmering and shoegazey, with the flutes glimmering among waves of feedback and drone from Mercereau’s effects-laden guitar, and Parks’s percussion resembling the rumble of far-off weather patterns. There was no doubt the group was tighter and in it together—searchlights casting for unknown lands.
André’s final Big Ears performance featured one more guest, the British musician Shabaka, a central character in the London jazz scene who himself has spent the past couple of years transitioning from saxophone to flute. Shabaka’s exquisite new album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, casts a net not unlike the one André is unfurling; 3000 and Niño are in fact right there on the album credits, next to current jazz heavyweights, hip-hop and spoken-word lyricists, and electronic producers. The album’s vision is not of a jazz tradition being remade, but a new tributary being dug. Instinctively, Shabaka and André 3000 are on parallel paths, making connections between sonic manifestations of history, community, and spirit. The pair’s current musical synergy makes the knowledge that the young Shabaka mastered his saxophone by using his horn to imitate Outkast’s rap flows even more endearing; and, for some, the confusion of whether to call this sound “spiritual jazz” continuingly profound.
It’s a confusion that will not soon disappear. In early April, André 3000 and his group of West Coast spiritualists were announced as headliners on no less a traditionalist stage than this summer’s Newport Jazz Festival, where Shabaka, numerous New Blue Sun tour guests, and the Sun Ra Arkestra will appear. The lineup, which also features rappers, electronic musicians, and improvisers who’ve been mixing jazz chops with funk, soul, and global rhythms, is like something out of André’s head, or a Carlos Niño session. Maybe, in colliding André and Carlos, the universe was just finishing her riff.
