Over the past decade, André 3000 has lived without anchors, gently floating in a breeze. Blink and you might miss him: There he is in Japan, flashing a bright smile and a peace sign, his other hand holding a custom wooden flute. There he is again, this time in an airport terminal, playing a few spare notes to pass the time. Wait, is that André in SoHo with a latte? Casually walking around like he’s not who he is? It’s why you’ve seen him in scattered social media clips in recent years: The brother is so admired that any glimpse of him needs to be preserved.
But here’s the gag: André isn’t BigFoot. He isn’t some mythical being living in the hills. He’s very much aware of his legend as an award-winning actor, one-half of the GRAMMY-winning rap duo OutKast, and master of the show-stopping guest verse. Despite the fame, he’s still a journeyman, a student of nature and creativity — searching, navigating, listening to the wind.
Wind is the most essential element of his new solo album, New Blue Sun, an instrumental offering co-produced by Carlos Niño that brings André’s flute playing to the center. André took an interest in wind instruments at least 20 years ago. Though he experimented with guitars and bass, he liked how flutes and saxophones sounded. A jazz fan, he read that John Coltrane played clarinet before he played the sax, so he bought a clarinet and started playing it. He points to the end of 2003’s “She Lives In My Lap” as a gateway to his wind instrument playing. He belts out a few screechy wails to conclude the song. In 2019, André was featured on the James Blake track “Where’s the Catch?” There, he starts playing the bass clarinet with Blake on piano. The engineer captured the session and they put it out.
“I’ve been interested in winds for a long time, so it was just a natural progression for me to go into flutes,” André says. “I just like messing with instruments and I gravitated mostly toward wind.”
The album features a core group of today’s best healing music players: Niño on bells, chimes, cymbals, drums, gongs, plants and percussion; Nate Mercereau on guitar, guitar synth and live sampling; and Surya Botofasina on keyboards and synthesizers. André plays several different wind instruments on this album, including a digital wind instrument, a Maya flute, and others made of wood and bamboo.