The Brooklyn Rail

It’s the most expensive free jazz tour of all time. At least in my book, and likely in yours.

At 160 dollars this May, André Benjamin hit about the middle of the price point he has been asking from ticket buyers in support of his recent flute album, New Blue Sun (Epic, 2023). This was a small standing room show in Nashville, at Third Man’s Blue Room. At theaters the tickets have started at about 55 to 80 dollars. At the appropriately expensive venue Luna Luna, in Los Angeles, 200 dollars. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music on October 25, between 35 and 479 dollars. Art costs money.

Certainly André’s set was beautiful to behold. A rainforest soundscape kicked off the show, composed of synthesized textures and shaken percussion, while André panted into the mic, beat his chest, then ramped himself up into gorilla noises until it was time to crouch down and have a go at the thirty or so pipes, toys, and exotic flutes that lay at his feet. Four responsive and attuned players—anchored by Surya Borofasina on synthesizers and Carlos Niño on drums—provided intelligent beds of sound for ninety minutes while André blew, paused and listened, and blew again. His instincts on woodwind are strong, based in rhythms and hooks more than chops.

But the price! Since the 1960s, free music—no pun intended—has asked for a certain lived opposition to the pop star, a life of folding chairs and floor stages, and, for the lucky, the occasional grant or faculty position. No musician I’ve spoken to, no matter how adoring, can forget André’s fee.

Education is how I understood this departure from that model. In the first half of the show, in the middle of a quiet atmospheric portion, André began a sermon about the contract of improvised performance. “Whatever y’all brought to the building today, you’re throwing it back at us and we’re throwing it back at y’all,” he said. “What we’re doing is just grabbing out the sky and representing now. So everything you’re hearing right now, we’re making it up on the spot. So we never know what it’s going to sound like.”

Reciprocity and uncertainty are taken for granted at, say, The Stone in New York, where 20 dollars will let you watch a musician do their thing, then leave. This flutist made those sacred rules overt, maybe because of his fame. André Benjamin is of course André 3000 of Outkast, the horny and sophisticated hip-hop duo from Atlanta. Because of his reputation, his crowds for the flute shows are visibly diverse in taste, subculture, and age, and they include people who might never find themselves at The Stone. This seems to lead André into a dramatization of the choice-making required of an improviser, and into certain pronounced contrasts—namely channeling rather than performing—that are otherwise a given.

After a bout of soft beeping from his electronic MIDI flute, André delivered a chant in a foreign language—a move from the playbook of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Milford Graves—then explained, “I just completely made that shit up.” Big laughs from the crowd. “I always wanted to learn new languages growing up, but I never had the patience,” he continued. “I just put ’em all together and what they sound like to me, that’s what it is.” Later, over a meditative tom beat in three, a voice (maybe the percussionist Deantoni Parks, I couldn’t tell through the smoke machine) whispered, “Breathe with us, stretch with us,” while André chirped bird tones through a wood flute. If it’s easy to be cynical about that kind of sincerity and the money asked for it, you need only recall the cost of ceramics class or therapy.

These teachable moments, as a therapist might call them, were a reminder that this quintet is more New Age than jazz. They marry their synthesized atmospheres to earthbound flavors in a style perhaps most indebted to the spiritualist flute legend Iasos. A symbolic piece of stagecraft did the explaining: a glass of water sat balanced on the mouth of a traffic cone, while a white laser beam from the stage lights pierced the water, setting the underlying pedestal aglow in orange. The organic through the plastic. In that divining cone I thought I saw the kind of active listening that allows earth music to speak in an economy of pop. And maybe, too, a symbol for the career receptivity of a frontman who at age twenty-one, at the 1995 Source Awards, delivered Southern rap to national consciousness when he asserted to a booing crowd that “the South got something to say,” who at twenty-eight wrote the pop anthem of the millennial era by transcribing the first four chords he learned on guitar in sequence, who with age stopped rapping because colonoscopies, he told Rolling Stone, weren’t a suitable subject for the genre, and who now selects his flutes for purchase, he told CBS, according to the ads fed to him by the internet. That this windsock of a creative mind has spun toward the origins of human music rather than an Outkast reunion in our age of nostalgia tours is no cause for cynicism.