“Three Minutes to Blast Off”: André 3000 at the Blue Note
On Friday at New York’s Blue Note, 3 Stacks performed his fourth-ever jazz concert, showcasing his debut solo album, New Blue Sun, and hinting at the future.
by Brad Farberman
André 3000 never lived on 133rd Street in Manhattan. But he moved around a lot while growing up in Atlanta, so one year he told the other kids at school he was from New York. When they didn’t believe him, he remembered that the streets in the Big Apple were numbered, and explained that his former residence was on 133rd. His new friends bought it.
That’s one of the stories 3 Stacks told on stage at New York’s Blue Note on Friday, in between improvisations with his experimental jazz quintet. The point was that his latest transformation — the flute player running away from hip-hop stardom to make 2023’s New Blue Sun — was akin to trying on different personas as a kid. It was an act of imagination and curiosity, not guile or posturing. He was merely thinking up a new address.
Except he actually lives there this time. He’s now the nomadic jazz musician he thought he could be — “that flute dude,” he admitted from the stage — playing for 250 people in the West Village. (By comparison, one of Outkast’s final New York stops, in 2014, was at Gov Ball.) During the early set, flanked by players from the album — Surya Botofasina on keyboards, Nate Mercereau on guitar and both Carlos Niño and Deantoni Parks on percussion — André facilitated what was essentially an avant-garde jam session, finding alcoves for himself in pieces that prized feeling over form. Process-wise, it was something you’d expect to see at New York experimental destinations like Roulette or the Stone. But, as on the LP, the sound hewed warm, gooey and healing. Save for a thrilling moment at the end of the show, they were under the influence of ’70s Alice Coltrane, not ’60s Pharoah Sanders. The aim was levitation, not confrontation.
Also like on New Blue Sun, the music at the Blue Note was all of a synthy, spontaneous piece; it simply flowed. Only two songs from the album, “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time” and “Ninety Three ’Til Infinity And Beyoncé,” have true hooks, and only the former was given a reading. So the music was punctuated by a series of anecdotes from André, each one an inspirational tale and a nugget of stand-up comedy. He explained that even though he appears to wear the same overalls and T-shirt every day, the truth is that he has multiple pairs of each, so he actually smells good. He revealed that as a child, he used to crawl around on the floor like a panther, so “now I’m 48 and playing a song about panthers.” (The song is called “That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild.”) He talked about weeping after getting one of his flutes tuned and cleaned — it didn’t sound the same afterwards. And after introducing the band, someone in the audience jokingly asked for the flutist’s name. “Big Boi,” André deadpanned, to big laughs.
Though Friday was the fourth night of André’s first-ever jazz tour, it would be an oversimplification to view New Blue Sun as Dré’s initial foray into that world. From the swing of “Love Hater” to the muted trumpet on “Vibrate” to André’s free jazz saxophone solo in “She Lives in My Lap” — not to mention the instrumental version of “My Favorite Things” — jazz was all over 2003’s The Love Below. Plus, if you skip to the last minute of “Prototype,” you can almost hear New Blue Sun being born. Four pillowy synth chords ring out into eternity, accompanied by a single gong crash.
“Behold a Lady,” also from The Love Below, isn’t a jazz song, but some lyrics from the track seem to have predicted André’s current situation. “Today I might snow / tomorrow I’ll rain / 3000’s always changing but you stay the same / and I need that / hey, I need that in my life,” raps André. Then the following lines go even deeper: “When I feel washed up / and inadequate / and throw all my songs away / no matter how mad I get / you make me smile.” It’s hard to imagine 3 Stacks feeling so down on himself in 2003 — Speakerboxxx/The Love Below debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and won three Grammys, including Album of the Year and Best Rap Album. But the “throw all my songs away” part? He did that in order to find the music on New Blue Sun.
Near the end of Friday’s performance, something happened for the first time all set: the band locked into a funky beat, and the sound took on a more focused edge. Then, it was somehow communicated to the band that they only had three minutes left. “Three minutes to blast off,” André said into the mic, and the group started exploring yet another new direction — something wilder and noisier, and decidedly unstable. It pointed towards an exciting future for the music, and proved that throwing all your songs away could be a good thing.
