André 3000 Brings His Solo Album ‘New Blue Sun’ to the Stage

Toward the end of his late set Wednesday night at the Blue Note in Manhattan, André 3000 said he and members of his band had gone to an instrument shop earlier in the day and picked up some new toys. He showed off his haul: something he’d thought was a flute, but turned out to be part of a bagpipe.

Nevertheless, he persisted. He blew through it, and what came out was sonorous and weird. A kind of sexy skronk. He looked at the long, thin tube with a nod of admiration. “This got something serious in it,” he remarked, before chuckling just a bit, and blowing even harder.

This is how André 3000 — one of the most gifted rappers of all time, and one of the true pop pathbreakers of the 2000s — communicates now. In November, he released “New Blue Sun,” an improvised album of experimental music on which he plays a variety of flutes. It reached No. 34 on the Billboard album chart, demonstrating what happens when decades of pent-up curiosity about a reluctant star meets art that demands curiosity, close attention and perhaps the benefit of the doubt. For fans, it reinforced the idea of André as a mystic beyond the pull of ego.

“I think I’m blessed with being oblivious,” he said Monday night at Crown Hill Theater in Brooklyn, performing his first show under his name alone. “It kind of keeps you pure.”

“New Blue Sun” is sometimes entrancing, sometimes frustrating. It is perhaps less a purely musical project than a philosophical or emotional proposition expressed through music. In many sections, you hardly hear André or his flute at all. Its arrival was greeted with awe and relief, and also conversations about the virtues of amateurism, and the right of a celebrity to recalibrate the terms of his fame.