André 3000 Goes Electric at The Blue Room

It’s surreal seeing one of the best rappers to ever bless a microphone hit the stage without unleashing a single bar — especially when it’s your first time seeing the artist live. I never thought my first time watching André 3000, one-half of the legendary Atlanta act Outkast, would be for a live rendition of New Blue Sun, an ambient jazz album that grew out of his love for the flute. At the same time, the first 20 minutes of his intimate set at The Blue Room at Third Man Records made for some of the most transcendent, hard-to-describe live music I’ve ever heard.

I guess calling the show a “live rendition” isn’t quite right, given the performance was almost entirely improvised. As Dré himself said near the show’s conclusion, the band was “pulling stuff out of the sky.”

The difference was clear from the start of the show when Three Stacks, wearing a green-and-yellow beanie, walked through the standing-room crowd of a couple hundred people with his band. The Atlanta artist played a small woodwind instrument, and people parted to make way and glimpse the rap star. There was something ritualistic about it, which fits the New Age sounds of his flute era. When the band hit the stage, they kicked off with a more forceful opening than that of New Blue Sun’s “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” André’s flute didn’t chime in until past the two-minute mark of the album’s intro track, but it was at the center onstage. I always found the way he put “rap” in quotes funny in that title — if anyone in hip-hop pushed the musicality of rapping to its limits, it’s him.

An arsenal of wind instruments lay at André’s feet, from electric flutes to Indigenous pipes to bird whistles. He also tapped wind chimes and played the xylophone. He huffed and grunted, and the band looped primal exhalations. Carlos Niño, one of his main jazz collaborators, sat behind an unusual drum kit and also took out reeds, shakers and more offbeat noisemakers over the course of the show. Keyboardist Surya Botofasina crewed a station of Roland instruments, Deantoni Parks was the one-man rhythm section, and Nate Mercereau held it down on guitar.

The quintet showed flashes of Miles Davis' organized chaos and glimpses of Yusef Lateef’s global-minded soundscapes. Sometimes the interplay between flutes and grunts reminded me of how the Head Hunters version of Herbie Hancock's “Watermelon Man” builds on the sound of whistling into beer bottles. Dramatic changes to the light, including a persistent beam focused on a glass of water, added to the otherworldly vibe. It was easy to be transported elsewhere by the performance when sounds swirled together, but soon the band hit something that shook you back to reality — a crunchy chord, a primal howl, an electric flute note held seconds longer than the last time André found it.

Throughout the show there were familiar sounds and riffs from the album, including the double flute from standout piece “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.” But they didn’t lean on those motifs, instead making it up as they went along. The most infectious element was how much fun André was having, apparent in moments like when he cheekily tapped a mic stand with a chime.

The band was recording the performance to vinyl but never paused when the acetate was changed twice (per the live video of the recording process). They filled two sides of a record and ended up with room on a third — so Niño suggested they “blast off” into a thunderous encore.

It felt like the band was excited to make up for lost time. The performance was originally scheduled back in March but was postponed due to illness. But Dré didn’t just make up the one show — they added four to the schedule. Last night’s 6 p.m. show was the first of the bunch. Two more performances are scheduled for tonight at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.

New Blue Sun was a pleasant surprise from a middle-aged rapper who, in past interviews, has admitted he doesn’t have much to rap about these days. He told the crowd that no one has any idea what they’re going to do until it happens — he didn’t know he’d become a rapper till he met Big Boi in high school. Fans can’t wait to see where the wind blows André 3000 next, whether it’s to another jazz project or back to rapping or something else entirely. But the performance, and the album, is a good reminder that we’ll all be carried somewhere new and strange, too.