André 3000 is taking his show on the road, again.
The rapper-turned-flutist is beginning another tour this week in support of his debut solo recording, last year’s New Blue Sun. The two-month North American jaunt will feature André and his band — Carlos Niño, Nate Mercereau, Surya Botofasina, and Deantoni Parks — performing the kind of collective group improvisation that was featured on their spacey, atmospheric album.
It’s been nearly a year since the album’s surprise release, so the world has had time to get adjusted to André Benjamin, experimental jazz musician instead of André Benjamin, one-half of arguably the greatest rap duo of all time. And André, likewise, has had some time to get used to being back in the public eye after years of trying to escape from it — a situation he compares to diet soda in our wide-ranging conversation.
GRAMMY.com called up André to discuss the tour, but things went in many different directions. We talked about his new musical life in detail — including why he jokingly refers to himself as the Lil B of out-there jazz. And we also delved into his old one. Does he ever write raps, even if only for himself? What is it like to have millions of people who only know you as the 23-year-old young man you were when OutKast's Aquemini created a whole new lane in hip-hop, as opposed to the 49-year-old man you are, who’s more into sharing stages with alums of Yusef Lateef’s jazz bands than with Big Boi or Killer Mike?
We got into all that, and a lot more. Check it out below.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You're going out now for a new leg of shows in support of New Blue Sun. This tour is different. The venues are arts centers, concert halls, even an opera house or two. Last time it was jazz clubs and the occasional church. How are the audiences different in these sorts of venues, and how are you different as a musician and as a performer?
The venues, I think they're just getting larger because now people are finding out about it, and we've been blessed to keep getting booked in a great way. The only way the venue changes things is the sound. It may inform what we're doing.
Like, recently we did these caves in Napa Valley, and that was more intimate. It was caves, so you used the environment and the wall reverberation. That helps make decisions on what you're doing. But we've also gotten to a place now where, like you're saying, you’re performing in a larger church, and that church may have a longer [reverberation]. You do less in bigger spaces, because you're waiting for the sound to come back to you and fill it. Also, we've grown to bigger festivals, so we’re playing out in fields. And that’s even a different experience, because at that point you're playing out. We do more, you get louder.
It just depends, because it doesn’t change the original intent and formula of what we’re doing, which is listening to ourselves and responding. So the venue is just another effect or another instrument, in a way, that we have to pay attention to. It gives us guidelines of what we want to do in the space.
What role do you play in the dynamics of the band? Are you the one saying, time for a new section or an ending? Who's handling the cues?
No, [laughs] we don't have cues. As a whole, we feel it. We feel when it's resolving, or we feel when it's building. Sometimes it gets really silent, and then someone may start. We don't have a, “Hey, you go do this.” It's not that at all. It is a total collective of feeling what's happening at the time.
I may start a riff or a melody, or Nate may start like something, or Carlos may start something, or Surya may start something. And we just listen and chime in. But there are no cues like, okay, we're going to do this.
The only cue we may have is when we get together in our huddle before we go out, to ourselves, as a collective. We may say, “Let's start full on,” and whatever that means, we just dive completely in. Or we’ll say, “Let's just start in silence,” and we may sit there for 30 seconds to a minute completely silent, just listening to the crowd shuffle around. But that's our only cue a lot of times, and that's usually venue by venue or what we're feeling from the crowd. Other than that, once we start the ride, we're on our own G.P.S..
To the extent you can put it into words, what's going through your head when you play? I know you're not a trained musician who thinks in terms of notes and chords.
Sometimes, not musically at all. Sometimes it's concepts. I may be thinking pattern-ly or lines. Like if I just came from a museum or something, and I saw an artist and they used these kind of lines, [I’d think], how can I play like that? What does that sound like? And I'll try to mimic it.
Sometimes it’s just feelings. I may be agitated and try to play what that is. Because I'm not a trained musician, I have to find other ways to get to it, so I'm trying to use it as a way to describe what I'm feeling or what I'm trying to say.
As long as I have an intent, I think that's most important. I have a goal. Sometimes I'm trying to agitate people around me, or trying to play like a bird. More concept playing, and I try to translate that.
One thing that your old music and your new music has in common is rhythm and phrasing. What connections do you see between how you would rhythmically phrase things as a rapper, and how you phrase things on the flute?
That's good you say that, because I think my strongest point, because I'm not a trained musician — I don't know keys or certain harmonies, I'm all using my ear — but I can translate rhythm from what I've done before. I can translate rapping.
It’s almost as if a rapper became a guitarist, you’d probably be a better rhythm guitarist than anything, because he's played with rhythm. So yeah, a lot of things are rhythmically for me. I respond to that, because I've been in that space, and my mouth is doing that. It's rhythm.
When you were rapping, you had other groups in your Dungeon Family collective and people you probably considered your peers. Who do you consider your peers now when it comes to the type of music you and the group are making?
A long line of historical bands like Sun Ra, the Chicago Art Ensemble. Even rapper Lil B. I was joking to myself: I was like, I'm almost the Lil B of this type of music. Lil B is, they call it based rap. My son actually turned me on to Lil B.
I'm informed by all kinds of things. I'm informed by Coltrane in ways. Eric Dolphy, for sure. Pharoah Sanders, Yusef Lateef. These are all people that for years I considered gods, not even knowing that I would be going in this direction, but I responded to these people. So I think when I play, I may reference them and not even know it, because it's in me.
Sometimes we have OG players sit in with us that may have played with Yusef. We invite them on stage and after we play a set, some of the feedback that I've gotten has been really interesting about what I'm referencing and what I'm doing and who I sound like. And I'm like, wow, I'm not even trying to do a thing. But sometimes, it’s in your skin what you listen to or your sense of melody because you’ve listened to a certain thing for so long.
I'm curious to go back to the Lil B thing. What sort of parallels do you see between his approach and what you're doing?
Because a lot of what he's doing is made up or improv or really reactionary. It's not this studied, perfect thing. Because I came up in the ‘90s, we came up with Nas and Wu-Tang and some of the [people] considered the best rappers around. It was about clarity. It was more of a studied kind of thing.
A person like Lil B is not studied at all. But the way the kids respond to him, it's because of that. It's kind of like a punk way of rapping, and I like it. [And what I’m doing is] almost like punk jazz or punk spiritual jazz. It's pure feeling.
For me, it's really physical, because I'm coming from a different way. It's always been like that for me when it comes to instruments. Like, if I pick up a guitar, it's shapes in my hand, or if I'm on a piano, it's shapes on my fingers.
So when I'm playing a wind instrument, I'm physically trying to will something to happen. Some of my favorite players are physical. Kurt Cobain was physical — he wasn't the most perfect player. [Jimi] Hendrix wasn't even the most perfect player, but sometimes it was physical, what he was doing. Or Thelonius Monk, he hit the piano like it was drums. It's this physical thing that I like,
Did you connect more to Hendrix’s physicality during the time you literally had to become him for a couple of months [during the filming of the 2013 biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side]?
No. That was such an odd thing I had to do because I had to pretend to be left handed, which was very odd for me. No, it was a true acting situation.
The past year or so, what has it been like being a public person again? Are you treating it any differently than your first go-round?
It’s almost like [laughs] superstar lite, like Coke Lite or Coke Zero. It’s like Superstar Zero. You’ve got the fame, but it's not as intense as it was before. It's different. A lot of people are weirded out about the direction, so it's not the same intensity of the whole world on board with you — which is kind of cool for my age and tastes. I like this pace a lot, compared to just being all over everywhere all the time.
Then there's this other thing, too. The album has been out a year, and we recently dropped this film that we did to the album that came out a year ago, but we just released it on YouTube. So a lot of people are just now discovering the album. It's like, “Yeah, we heard something about this flute thing,” but they never heard it. Now that this video is out, a lot of people are hearing it again, or for the first time. So it's a cool thing that you kind of get this second wave of people that are just now hearing it.
Some of the ways you talk about playing remind me that your initial artistic plans, before rap, were in visual art. What connection do you see between the type of music you're doing now and the visual art you were doing when you were a teenager?
I don't necessarily see a connection from what I was doing when I was younger, visually. But as I've gotten older, now I do my own personal art study. I've never been to art school or anything, but now on YouTube, I have my own personal art history classes, and I'm learning: “Whoa, okay, Basquiat, he liked Cy Twombly. Cy Twombly, he just made these gestures on the canvas. Oh, I see Basquiat makes these gestures on the canvas.” Now I totally can see or even get influenced from a visual or physical thing, because a lot of those gestures were physical things.
It wasn't like I'm trying to make the most perfect figurative image. I'm trying to relate something. A lot of that, I can take from or be inspired by when I'm playing. Sometimes it's the only thing I have, because I don't know a certain progression or a certain series of notes. I know I'm physically doing a thing, and if I know that's matching what my ears are hearing in that key, I feel like I'm in the right place.
One thing I'm always interested in is how rappers think about rap. I've talked to artists who are like, “If I was walking down the street and saw a stop sign, I would come up with 100 rhymes for ‘stop sign,’ and it got so intrusive that I had to consciously cut that off.”
These days, do you still think of raps, even if it's only fragments or lines? If so, do you ever write them down or save them? Where are you these days in terms of composing raps or having raps come to mind?
Yeah, I totally rap all the time. I think it's just in me. But it's not an obsessive thing where if I see a brick, I have to rhyme “brick” with something. It's more of: there's a thought that's important to me. Then if there's a next line that rhymes, I go there and I'll write it down. But I'm not obsessive, where I'm trying to find every word that rhymes with “brick.” It's not an exercise for me. It's just a means to an end.
It's funny because my engineer that I'm working with now, he raps, too, and he's a younger kid. He's asking me about how I do it. He was telling me his technique — he'll find all these words that rhyme with this word. And I was like, oh, that's cool. But when I do it, it's supporting the thought more than the rhyme. The rhyme is supporting the thought. It's not seeing how many things I can rhyme. But if I have a thought and I have a next thought, I am going to try to find that.
So it's more important to support what I'm trying to say, more than rhyming. There are rappers to me that are true rhymers. The biggest way I can explain it is, some painters are just painters — that's their form, is oil on canvas. And then some artists are concept artists, some artists are emotive. It's more about the emotion or saying something. For me, it's more about what I'm saying than how I'm saying it.
What’s next for you, recording-wise?
There's always new music to come.
Anything specifically you can say about that?
No. It's too early for me to even be able to describe what’s coming. But I'm always recording and trying to figure out new ways to do stuff.
I assume you hear OutKast’s music sometimes when you’re out and about. But do you ever intentionally listen to it?
Rarely. But recently, a friend of mine sent me a video of an interview that I was doing, and I was talking about a certain song that I hadn't heard in a long time. So I went back to listen to that song, and that sent me down the rabbit hole of all my guest verses and OutKast stuff. So one day I was in my hotel room listening to all this stuff for hours — five hours of albums and guest stuff. And it was surprising because you’re listening as a fan and not remembering where you were at the time when you did them. It's almost like you're having an out-of-body experience listening to yourself. Then you realize how much time has gone by and how different of a person you are, which is even crazier.
I can imagine! The first time I saw you perform was in 2001, which was four records into your career. But that’s almost 25 years ago.
Yeah. Twenty-five years is a long, long, long, long time. So you gotta imagine listening to yourself. It’s almost like looking back at high school pictures: how your hairstyle was, how your clothes were. It's all a trip because you're like, whoa, that was a completely different time.
And what's even crazier is that the audience a lot of times, they don't grow, or they only know what you've given them. So a lot of times in their mind they're still there, and it's kind of weird. Stuff that they're hoping for from you, you've already moved past that.
A lot of people don't understand — even when you put an album out, you're past it already. You may be onto something else. But they start right then, and they only know of that. They don't know the years in between. They don't know the growth in between. And they really don't care, which is understandable. As the audience, we only know what we get — we don't know the in-betweens. It's almost like seeing your nephew that you hadn't seen for years. You only remember him as your little nephew. Then he's taller than you the next time you see him.
It's like that, but on such a grand scale, I can't imagine what it must be like for you to have millions of people whose mental image of you is when you're 23 or 25.
Yeah. And it's funny because we're almost on two different wavelengths. Even when New Blue Sun dropped, one of the biggest stories, which I didn't understand at first — but then I had to understand — was writers saying, “We wait fucking seventeen years, and he puts this out?”
To them, they're waiting. But I never said that I was about to put out an album. So in my mind, I'm not trying to be what I was 17 years ago. To me, it's just, life has gone on. It’s almost crazy to think that someone would put something out 17 years later. At ten years, I'm like, “Oh, that's done.” Even for me, I thought I was done. I really thought I was done at a certain point. And here comes a different thing. So that was surprising to me. At first, I was like, why would y’all wait 17 years for anything? And then I'm like, oh, well, that's all they know. I wasn't waiting.
Over the last couple of years leading up to the album, there was this [clip] that became famous, of you walking around and playing the flute in public. Is that something you're still doing? Are you still practicing in public?
I do it still, but it's sad in a way, because now that I've put the album out, when I do it, people expect as if I'm performing in public. But it started as a thing for me. I like to walk. I like to hike. I like to walk, and carry my flute while I do. It was just a thing.
And so when people started sneaking videos and posting them, it was not a plan or anything. I actually love to play in nature. I love to play when I'm walking, when I find caves or when I find tunnels where the reverb is awesome. I love walking and finding places to play, but now it's almost like I have to sneak off and do it. I have to be away from the public in a way to do it, so it doesn't become a thing. So I don't do it as much as I used to.