Is André 3000 in his jazz era?
Around halfway through a set during his Blue Note residency last Thursday, André 3000 took some time to survey his tools. The musician crouched over a rug arrayed with around a dozen varieties of the flute — the instrument that's come to symbolize the dramatic creative pivot that culminated in his 2023 instrumental opus New Blue Sun — plus assorted digital woodwinds. There was something devout in his posture, as though he was waiting for the moment to tell him what it wanted. The mostly seated audience at the intimate New York club watched with rapt attention as he settled on a Chinese gourd flute featuring a bulbous eye-catching sphere near the mouthpiece. Standing up, he blew a march-like pattern, soft yet insistent. Surya Botofasina, one of his core collaborators both on the album and an ongoing tour in support of it, added gentle washes of synth, and the piece — an improvised soundscape unique to that moment — gradually bloomed
How exactly did we get here? More specifically, how did it somehow feel entirely logical to be sitting in one of NYC's most prestigious jazz clubs — a room where over the years I'd heard giants, , and — as half of a chart-topping, Grammy-winning rap duo and a deeply attuned four-piece ensemble offered up an hour of searching, abstract and often flat-out gorgeous pieces, to an adoring crowd that seemed utterly content with the "no bars" disclaimer that André has provided for the entire project? Put more simply, why does an André 3000 "jazz era" — a notion that might have seemed like a stretch a decade ago, when the dazzlingly proficient MC had just announced a splashy victory-lap reunion tour with his counterpart — now register as something almost fated?
