Music

When I reviewed André 3000’s New Blue Sun in November, I was qualified in my praise. “It’s more successful as a symbol than as an album,” I wrote, meaning that for me the major thrills come with seeing someone whose idiosyncratic music was made possible by technical skills and self-assurance put himself in a position where he had very few skills and was embracing his own insufficiency. This isn’t to say that I don’t like New Blue Sun; if anything, the emotional power of some of its songs has only grown for me. The pipsqueak lament André plays in “I swear I wanted to make a ‘rap’ album…” and the way the sighing waves of Surya Botofasina’s synths clear the stage to let him play it, is so tender, nearly naïve, incredibly earnest. Hearing it still makes something within me acknowledge the pain and sadness I typically don’t let myself feel.

Still, long stretches of New Blue Sun are quite boring, and unintentionally so. The songs sometimes suffer from the ensemble’s uncertainty and their mutual deference. Unsure of where to go next, they end up treading water until someone takes the risk of heading in a new direction. Stasis, stillness, and blank space are often virtues in improvised music, but they have to be the product of a collective choice. It’s understandable that the band would find themselves in these moments. While the rest of the group had played together in any number of configurations, the presence of André must have affected the dynamic. How couldn’t it have? These sessions were tracked in his name, which has to mean something, even if only subconsciously. And, so obviously that it feels insulting to mention it, he’s André 3000. Despite his years spent outside of the spotlight, he’s still a superstar, and one whose music with Outkast—full of personality, command, and confidence, even when André and Big Boi were using those means to express their own uncertainties and vulnerabilities—it would have been impossible not to have in mind. Nobody would’ve expected him to do the “Hey Ya” count-in, but surely you’d expect him to take command.

André’s refusal to do so suggested to me at the time that he understood the kind of music he was making, even if he wasn’t yet able to play it at the level he wanted to, which is part of what made me value the record so highly. The list of influences he provided for press included John and Alice Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Yusef Lateef, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Laraaji, among others—artists whose music doesn’t always have a lot in common, but (with the possible exception of John Coltrane, depending on era) all people who, to varying degrees, value collective performance or overall “feel” more than virtuosity. To put it way more simply: André has obviously spent a lot of time listening to Carlos Nino’s music. New Blue Sun is a Carlos Nino record, and as a Carlos Nino record, it’s decentralized by design; as I wrote a few years ago, Carlos isn’t a bandleader so much as a weather system whose presence influences events without dictating them.

This presents a genuine problem when one member of the band has sold 25 million records. Even leaving aside whatever effects André’s popularity might have had in the studio (I’m probably overstating this, considering the pedigree of everyone else in the room), it’s impossible for the shine of André’s star not to get in the eyes of even the most celebrity-resistant listener. A lot of people, particularly people involved in non-mainstream scenes as musicians or critics, complained that New Blue Sun wouldn’t get anything like the same attention if André weren’t a celebrity. That’s true, of course, but it also wouldn’t be the same record. I think it’s probably impossible to receive any kind of music outside of any context, including the context of “I have no idea what this is and where it came from,” so it’s unrealistic to me to assume anyone could hear New Blue Sun without filtering it through the lens of André’s popularity. That’s a complex lens, though, and it has a lot to do with how the listener feels about celebrity generally, André 3000 specifically, experimental music, dilettantism, naivete, music history, and a million other things. What it means, though, is that you couldn’t possibly hear this album in any other way.

For the record: I’m more prone to celebrity worship than I’d like to admit, Outkast are important to me in a way only a couple dozen other artists have been, I love exactly this kind of experimental music (which is to say: I like when joy, peace, and vulnerability are the impetus for exploration), I find it very gross when anyone insinuates themselves into the center of something they don’t understand, I think naivete is often a musical virtue that sometimes suggests a willingness to put oneself at artistic risk in ways more seasoned playing sometimes doesn’t, I respect and usually love the titanic playing of Coltrane and Dolphy and Pharoah and everyone else, and a million other things.

So, I like New Blue Sun; what I wrote in November still feels true to me, which doesn’t always happen. I’m probably someone who is predisposed to like this music, for all of the above reasons, but nevertheless I do sincerely like it. I think it’s made in good faith and it abides by the principles of the scene in which it’s participating, which is more than you can say about most celebrity pivots. Maybe more importantly, I don’t think I would’ve liked it if André had taken the wheel more, if he would’ve tried to assert his personality more, if it had felt like a true solo record—though of course, if he had, it would’ve ceased to be an authentic product of the world that birthed it. His refusal to be the leader is an extra-musical effect, but it’s nevertheless part of how I hear the album, and that particular aspect of the hearing is, for me, the best thing about it.

Rachelle and I saw André and the New Blue Sun group last week at Luna Luna, a big warehouse on the Boyle Heights side of the L.A. River. It’s filled with carnival rides designed by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockney, and other very famous artists who were at the height of their popularity in the mid-late 1980s. These artists were commissioned to create these rides for an installation in Hamburg in 1987 that was huge by art-world standards and small by carnival standards. They executed their work in varying degrees: Haring’s merry-go-round is fully designed, he’s asking you to sit on life-size renderings of his characteristic little humanoids; Basquiat whitewashed a Ferris wheel, then painted icons on it that have the distinct feel of his work (a chicken roasting over a fire, a Black leprechaun, a monkey’s literal asshole) but are spaced out in a way that makes them look more like stickers on a very large vehicle (which, I guess, they kinda are). The rides are presented with quite a bit of historical context—there’s tons of writing about the carnival, loads of photos of opening day (I spotted Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider in one)—and avant-garde-circusy context (a marionette made of a vuvuzela, piped-in music that Shazam couldn’t identity but sounded like Steve Reich in a nostalgic mood). 

André and his group were set up on a small stage in front of Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, with small sections of seating fanned out around them and an arch of dynamic klieg lights set up behind them. They were arranged like a rock band—Niño and Deantoni Parks on percussion in the back, Surya Botofasina on keys off to one side and facing André in the center, guitarist Nate Mercereau on the other doing the same. Before they took the stage, New Blue Sun played from the PA. 

As a live act, the New Blue Sun ensemble does two things that I love: They improvise at very high volumes, and they improvise at very low volumes. Before the show, Botofasina told me he didn’t even think of what they do as improvising so much as spontaneous composition, but even that phrase doesn’t feel quite right. For me, anyway, “composition” is too tied up in the world of musical notation and the idea of permanence—when you compose something, you’re creating a discrete musical object; something is produced; it’s probably too much to say “matter is created,” but that’s what it feels like. What I’m getting at is that something that’s composed necessarily has a form, even if that form (appears to be) formless. It also has intention: Think of the writer’s hand moving across the page. 

There’s obviously nothing wrong with that, but the music here didn’t really feel like it was being created so much as it was being coaxed. This isn’t really an aesthetic description—plenty of the music was quiet and patient, but it felt this way when it was incredibly noisy, too—so much as a description of the kind of interplay at work. A guitarist in a jam band or a saxophonist in a trad jazz group is looking to express themselves within the container of everyone else’s playing (even if the band is making it up as they go); a free jazz band, generally speaking, throws away the container and turns everyone into the soloist. Here, it felt like the band was more concerned with discovering and sustaining an atmosphere or a mood, a collective expression, than they were in any kind of individual expression. 

That includes André himself. Unlike on the album, his instrument was clearly in the spotlight. He played consistently and fluidly, switching up flutes, teasing melodies out of dissonance, occasionally drifting into something sweet enough to sound like a pop melody in another context. He’s moving more comfortably across the rhythm of the music, too; at one point, he played a tight series of low notes that rumbled over the band in a way that made me think about the last few moments of his verse in “Humble Mumble,” when he turns away slightly from the song’s meter to rap “Speeches only reaches those who already know about it, this is how we go about it.” Even if it hadn’t been his show, he would’ve been the star, his the performance you’d be most likely to remember. At one point, he moved over to a small xylophone, then searched for and ultimately found a complex interlocking pattern with the percussion and Botofasina’s keys. Later, he barked like DMX.

It’s heartening to see André warming to his role in this band and playing this kind of music. At times on New Blue Sun, he didn’t seem to know what to do with the deference he was given; at Luna Luna, he was purposeful when he filled space or chose to leave it empty, and even when the ways he filled that space didn’t feel musically successful, he delivered them with a confidence that’s sometimes absent on the record. That occasional naivete works in New Blue Sun’s favor, in a space that could be and was shaped after the fact, where meekness can be properly framed as a virtue; I’m thinking again of the the uncertain way he plays “I swear I wanted to make a ‘rap’ album”’s main theme. 

That melody was the only bit of New Blue Sun I recognized in what was played at Luna Luna. It came near the very end, after André told the crowd they were about to “lift off” and the ensemble shifted into a very loud, very heavy drone. Botofasina and Mercereau each played a single sustained chord that clashed with the others’, André bleated through a pungi, his flute master and flutemaker Guillermo Martinez blew a conch shell, Dexter Story and Parks beat at cymbals, Niño shook a dried tree branch for percussion, and the Ferris wheel started turning. Flea, who I had a clear view of throughout the set, was on the literal edge of his seat. I can’t remember André changing instruments, but he must have, and he started picking at the first few notes of “I swear I wanted to make a ‘rap’ album,” pulling on them, testing out different phrasings, never quite settling into the three long notes that resolve the initial pattern. 

I’m not sure if André is a virtuoso, or if he’s even very good at all by traditional metrics. At this point, I don’t really care, and I don’t think it matters in order for the music to work properly. In this specific musical context, what matters is only the chemistry he has with the musicians on stage with him and their collective ability to make that chemistry bubble up and become audible. He knows his instrument deeply enough to be able to do what he’s trying to do with it most of the time, and he trusts his flutes—and his band—enough to give it a shot anyway when his abilities fail him. 

The music Niño and his friends have made on their last few records doesn’t require a whole ton of talent, though everyone involved has plenty to spare. It mostly needs buy-in, which is to say sincerity, as well as a willingness among the players to trust one another and a commitment to the vibe above all else. These are not fashionable values, or at least they don’t seem that way when you write them out. When I first heard about this project, I worried a bit that André might not understand the very specific thing this music is trying to do, and that the music itself wouldn’t know how to accommodate him. The least complimentary thing you can say about a musician is that they’re credible, but the weight of celebrity has a way of crushing any attempt at genuine engagement with a niche scene. But André is an authentic participant in this music, which still feels like an underappreciated aspect of this whole project. The symbolic power of his credibility elevated New Blue Sun via extra-musical means. Now, fully jelled with his group, he’s simply making great music.