One of Music’s Biggest Stars Just Returned With … a Flute Album. He Joins a Long Tradition.

For at least four years now, former OutKast rapper André 3000 has been spotted in airport terminals and coffee shops, from city to city and around the world, tootling on various flutes. So people shouldn’t have been entirely surprised when he announced last week that he was putting out his first album in 17 years, called New Blue Sun, and that it would have no rapping, just woodwinds. In fact, Key & Peele all but predicted it in 2015, with a sketch that spoofed André’s eccentricity by dressing him in a Pied Piper outfit and having him propose an experimental album that would feature only “one spoken word per track.” (The sketch ends with him whispering into Big Boi’s ear as flutes whistle in the background.)

Still, for those who hadn’t been paying attention, this flute album could seem like one of the more outrageous left-turn albums in music history, comparable to Lou Reed’s 1975 all-feedback opus Metal Machine Music, Neil Young’s 1983 synthesizer-heavy Trans, Lil Wayne’s 2010 rock LP Rebirth, or perhaps most nearly, Stevie Wonder’s mystical and mostly instrumental 1979 double album Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants.” While most reactions last week leaned toward intrigued bemusement, a few fans got genuinely angry over the idea of André’s forsaking lyrical flow for lilting flute. Their sharpest spokesperson had to be Leslie Jones on The Daily Show, who declared, “This is how you know the white people are winning. Y’all done turned André 3000 into Jethro Tull!” When her co-host Jordan Klepper offered that artists have to evolve, she shot back, “You don’t always have to stay in your lane. But try not to drive completely off the road into a damn flute store!”

It’s typical of the flute’s reputation that Jones’ joke inevitably name-checked Jethro Tull. The 1970s prog band of Aqualung fame still notionally exists today, but the last time it had any impact on the world at large was in 1989, when it scandalously beat Metallica’s … And Justice for All for a Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance. Under fire, the band joked that, after all, the flute is a “heavy, metal instrument,” and “we do sometimes play our mandolins very loudly.”

In the public imagination, though, the flute’s role in popular music has frozen there. Visions of Tull’s somewhat hobbity frontman blowing his brains out on songs like “Locomotive Breath” have melded with memories of Lord of the Rings soundtracks and Renaissance fairs to reduce flutes to a limp stereotype. Flutes tend to get pigeonholed as fey and girly, which of course shouldn’t be slurs but often are. Unless it is Jethro Tull, flute parts usually aren’t as flamboyant and assertive as, say, a horny saxophone solo, so even the finest tend to recede into the collective consciousness. Most people come up blank if you ask them to name great moments in pop flute between Tull in the 1970s and Lizzo’s infuriating Republicans by playing James Madison’s crystal flute last year. For her Daily Show punchlines to land, Jones had to suppress even that recent memory.

But as Klepper insisted to her, “a flute can slap,” and they have, from the soul-funk of the 1970s to the rap of the 2010s. New Blue Sun certainly stands at the far end of the continuum of “no songs, just vibes,” but that’s also an approach that can be grounded in multiple flute traditions, whether it’s Afrofuturist spiritual jazz or New Age atmospherics to accompany inner journeys. Flutes are the most ancient instruments we have, other than drums. Every global region has its own, from bamboo flutes to panpipes to the clay “vessel flute” the ocarina (heard, for instance, on the Troggs’ 1960s classic “Wild Thing”) to the Irish tin whistle (which can serve as the light that glows on the prow of Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” or the keening energy that drives the 1980s Celtic folk-punk of the Pogues).

Synthesizers have also proved to be particularly adept at imitating flutelike sounds—even going back to forerunners like the 1960s’ Mellotron, which the Beatles used on the opening of “Strawberry Fields Forever”—to the extent that it’s often difficult to guess whether you’re hearing a physical flute or a virtual concoction. Producer Metro Boomin took advantage of that confusion last week to claim, tongue in cheek, that it had been André 3000 who played on Future’s flute-tastic 2017 hit “Mask Off” (it really, really wasn’t)—probably the biggest of the improbably huge wave of flute-rap hits in the second half of the 2010s.

The flute’s fate in pop tends to fluctuate that way, through phases of ubiquity and then long fallow periods. In fact, despite being such an old instrument, it was a latecomer to 20^th-century pop music, both live and recorded, because its delicacy of sound worked against it. In an orchestra that includes a whole woodwind section, the massed power of many flute players can make itself heard, but in the smaller ensembles and soloist-emphasizing arrangements typical of most jazz, a flute just couldn’t cut through the louder instruments. The earliest known jazz flute solo on record was by Cuban musician Alberto Socarras, on 1927’s “Shootin’ the Pistol” by the Clarence Williams band, but you have to strain to hear it, demonstrating the problem. Through the 1930s, the best-known flute player in jazz was Wayman Carver, who played with the popular Benny Carter and Chick Webb bands, but like most jazz flutists for decades to come, he was mainly a sax player who added some flute now and then as a treat. The flute’s scarcity might have begun for practical reasons, but it was self-reinforcing, leaving it stigmatized as a classical instrument for squares.

The flute’s fortunes began to turn with improved amplification and recording technology through the 1940s and ’50s. Shifts in style also helped, with “Latin jazz” trends opening up some space for piping sounds, as did the “exotica” fantasias of artists like Martin Denny and Les Baxter and the “cool” jazz of Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and others. Flutists Bud Shank (who would later improvise the pivotal flute solo on the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’ ”), Buddy Collette, Frank Weiss, and James Moody started to make their marks.

In 1956 jazz bible DownBeat magazine added flute for the first time to its annual polls of best instrumentalists. Voting was dominated by rivals Sam Most, who was a technical innovator, and Herbie Mann, a populist who was probably jazz flute’s most high-profile promoter for decades. Mann is the guy Will Ferrell and friends likely had in mind when they conceived the infamous Ron Burgundy jazz flute sequence in Anchorman. Mann would have been used to the razzing, as he got plenty of it from jazz purists. Sometimes he deserved it, as when he tried to sex up the flute’s image by striking a very ’70s-porn pose on the cover of 1971’s suggestively titled Push Push. But he is also the white guy who took the stage alongside avant-garde electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival and blew the place apart with their version of “Hold On, I’m Comin’ ” as displayed in Questlove’s documentary Summer of Soul.

In the 1960s and into the 1970s, the divisions between jazz and R&B remained thin, with musicians passing easily from one kind of gig to the other. That’s Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the radical blind Black musical experimentalist, on the hook of Quincy Jones’ 1962 “Soul Bossa Nova,” which is now known as the Austin Powers theme and a sports-stadium standard, but which I grew up hearing as the intro music to the Canadian game show Definition. (It was later sampled for one of the earliest Canadian rap successes, the Dream Warriors’ 1991 “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style.”) But the flute’s freshly cool aura took longer to be accepted in rock ’n’ roll. In the 1950s, the only exception I can find is on the 1958 Bobby Day hit “Rockin’ Robin,” where flute was pressed into service to provide novelty bird calls (as it would be again when Michael Jackson covered the song in the early 1970s).

As usual, the initial breakthrough came from the Beatles and producer George Martin, who tagged a wistful flute solo onto the end of John Lennon’s soulful 1965 confessional “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” But it was that Shank solo on the proto-hippie “California Dreamin’ ” later that year that seemed to precipitate the deluge. From 1966 through 1968, multiple orchestral instruments were ushered into the rock fold, in a movement often called “baroque rock,” with memorable flute (or flutelike) parts on the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” the Left Banke’s great “Walk Away Renee,” such 1967 Beatles singles as “The Fool on the Hill,” and much of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Baroque gave way to psychedelic, followed by progressive rock (hello, Jethro Tull), hard rock (we can’t overlook the recorder bits on “Stairway to Heaven”), heavy metal (the flute on Black Sabbath’s “Solitude” birthed arguably whole subgenres), and myriad hippieish styles alternately jammy (like the Canterbury scene U.K. bands Soft Machine and Gong), fussy (Peter Gabriel’s other role in Genesis, aside from lead singer, was flute player), or simply mellow (see Chicago’s “Colour My World”). In the mid-1970s you could even hear flute in the macho Southern rock of the Marshall Tucker Band—and on a non-macho note, Ann Wilson of Heart was not only an all-timer of a hard-rock singer but a kick-ass flutist herself.

As fertile as the late 1960s and early 1970s were for flute rock, they were even more wildly fecund with flute funk and fusion. Spiritual jazz and politicized soul were intermingling, with the soft urgency of woodwind vibrato a common element for artists from Leon Thomas and Yusef Lateef to Marvin Gaye on What’s Going On. Gil Scott-Heron’s poetic raps were often counterpointed by partner flutists, whether Hubert Laws at the time of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” or Brian Jackson on “The Bottle.” Blaxploitation film soundtracks like Shaft by Isaac Hayes and Superfly by Curtis Mayfield heightened the dramatic tension with shivery flutes. Flute provided the hook to the 1972 Main Ingredient soul hit “Everybody Plays the Fool,” leading scads of listeners to mishear it as “Everybody Plays the Flute.” Flutes were everywhere on jazz-fusion classics like Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” and Lonnie Liston Smith’s “Expansions.” This is also the era from which so much later hip-hop would sample its sounds: Deserving special notice is the great funky flutist Bobbi Humphrey, whose albums, such as the 1973 Blue Note masterwork Blacks and Blues, would go on to be sampled by Eric B. and Rakim, KMD, Madlib, Mobb Deep, and Digable Planets, among others. If you take nothing else away here, remember her name.

The flute-friendliness of Black 1970s music in particular carried on later into the decade, whether it was on Smokey Robinson’s A Quiet Storm, which lent its name to a whole emerging genre and radio format, or in the unforgettable piping hook of “The Hustle.” But around the turn of the 1980s, something strange happens. The flutes mostly fall silent.

Obviously, part of the story on the rock side is punk, with its back-to-basics and anti-prog ethos. And even in Black music, the wall-to-wall flutes of the 1970s probably left a lot of listeners weary by 1980. But as with the rise of the pop flute in the 1950s and ’60s, part of the story must be technology, as synthesizers started taking over more and more from acoustic instruments. The R&B of the ’80s was definitely infatuated with synths and drum machines, while the likes of Gabriel and Kate Bush, who otherwise might have employed flutes on a song like “Don’t Give Up,” were too obsessed at the time with their precious Linn and Fairlight synths and samplers. Aside from in the music of the Pogues or, say, Paul Simon’s Graceland, which drew on particular cultural traditions, flutes spent much of the 1980s relegated to novelties such as Men at Work’s “Down Under” and that one track on Duran Duran’s Rio. But one standout foretold a brighter flute future—Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” which sampled the flute from a 1974 track by go-go godfather-to-be Chuck Brown’s group the Soul Searchers. However, that flute was low in the mix and a few years ahead of its time.

You might ask why the flute fell out of fashion so quickly when, for instance, it took the saxophone till the 1990s to do the same. Partly the sax just had a more deeply established role in popular music. But there was also an external force, and his name was Gheorghe Zamfir, the Romanian “Master of the Pan Flute” whose lachrymose pips and puffs took over easy-listening radio and late-night infomercials around the turn of the 1980s. And then, often lumped in with Zamfir though not really related, there was New Age. In the late 1960s, jazz musician Paul Horn became a convert to transcendental meditation (he went to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India with the Beatles), and in 1969 he released an album of extended flute tones called Inside the Taj Mahal, because that’s where it was recorded. It became New Age music’s founding document, and such sonic seeking continued under the radar through the ’70s—for example, on an album extremely relevant to André 3000’s current explorations, 1978’s Song of the Golden Lotus by Edward Christmas (aka Swami Kriya Ramananda), or the Native American flute traditions that were revisited by figures such as the Navajo and Ute flutist R. Carlos Nakai (as well as some white interlopers).

The best of it was not unlike the “ambient” experiments made around the same time by the likes of Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, and ambient is how all of it is grouped together today. But by the 1980s, because it was distributed on cassette in the same shops that sold healing crystals and mass-produced dream catchers, it was linked with hippies turned yuppies trying to make spiritual enlightenment a consumer good and a luxury lifestyle. In other words: Get away from me with your stupid crystals and your dippy flutes.

In the late 1980s, though, one subculture that perhaps became less averse to the idea of healing vibes was the gay community in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Some of the sounds of New Age began to be repurposed for the chill-out phase in the club as “ambient house,” alternatively known as “flute house,” by DJs and producers such as Bobby Konders, Roger Sanchez, and Frankie Knuckles. This presaged the more mainstream New Ageish invasion in 1990 by the monk-chanting and flute-tootling Enigma, with its Top 5 hit “Sadeness.”

And then it started to seem everyone had recovered from their 1970s flute hangovers and was getting ready for a revival. A few tentative flute samples appeared on tracks by the likes of A Tribe Called Quest, but surprisingly, it was West Coast gangsta rap that truly embraced the sound of high-pitched piping, with Dr. Dre sprinkling it all over The Chronic and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. This also appeared the beginning of a long-standing pattern in which grossly sexual or violent, arguably misogynist rap tracks were paired with the feminine-coded strains of the flute. (Other major examples from the 1990s and early 2000s include 2Pac’s darkest beef track “Hit ’Em Up” and Jay-Z and UGK’s “Big Pimpin’.”) Is this irony, an instinct for balance, or putting lipstick on a (chauvinist) pig?

Flute wouldn’t return to rock music until the grunge era had passed and elements of prog would start to be reclaimed by a few left fielders such as Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips, and as part of the kitchen-sink approach of the reinvented-hippie bands of the Elephant 6 collective. In the 2000s, it became more common as indie groups seemed to attract more and more affluent kids who’d had lots of music lessons and could bring their strings or woodwinds training to bear, for instance in Bright Eyes, Arcade Fire, Go! Team, or Vampire Weekend. But the ultimate return of the repressed 1970s lush woodwinds and horns in that realm waited until 2011’s Kaputt by Destroyer, which could travel under cover of leader Dan Bejar’s sardonic elusiveness, allowing listeners to think perhaps it was all a joke, until they found they’d been thoroughly seduced and would go on playing it in their hipster cafés daily for the following decade. After that, any “yacht rock” signifiers that rock bands wanted to dally with were fair game, whether in Natalie Mering’s always flute-philic Weyes Blood or the (sometimes) neo-psychedelia of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.

Meanwhile, R&B and hip-hop and pop in the 2000s had been through the Timbaland revolution, and that’s a man who enjoys a flute, often as an “exotic” sound in his rhythmic jigsaw puzzles. Variations are heard on tracks such as Missy Elliott’s “Step Off,” Lloyd Banks’ “I’m So Fly,” and Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous.” The title and video imagery of Timbaland’s own “Indian Flute” with Magoo is deceptive, as the flute sample involved is not actually Indian but a Colombian recording that features the kuisi, an Indigenous instrument made from a hollow cactus stem. Flute-rap tracks by others continued to turn up regularly too, for instance by Jadakiss, Lil Wayne, Goodie Mob, Ghostface, and T.I., and by the early 2010s, it had undeniably become a permanent staple.

Nothing I’ve heard, however, fully explains what catalyzed the exponential rise of flute rap in the middle of that decade. My best guess is that it traces to Atlanta producer Zaytoven, who provided flutey beats to Migos and others, and claimed the sound as one of his signatures. Regardless, it spread not only to Future’s aforementioned “Mask Off” but to “Tunnel Vision” by Kodak Black, “Broccoli” by D.R.A.M. with Lil Yachty, and tracks by Gucci Mane, Drake, Travis Scott, 21 Savage, Young Thug, Gunna, Lil Baby, Roddy Ricch, Russ, and Roc Marciano, among others. (K-pop groups like BTS and Blackpink also began to pick up on the craze.) As in the gangsta age, these tunes of the trap and mumble-rap eras mix explicit imagery with little loops of dainty flute, as if to dare the listener to laugh and see what happens.

The trend became so conspicuous that even Saturday Night Live was moved to make fun of it, with a 2021 video short called “Weird Little Flute,” which earns the honor of being the finest piece of flute-based satire since Anchorman. Featuring Kid Cudi, Chris Redd, Pete Davidson, and a cameo by Timothée Chalamet, it begins with a checklist of the essentials of late-teens rap (“We got the fits, we got the flow/ We got the 808s, we got the Xanned-out tempo/ We got that drip-drip-drip, we got that brut”) before concluding with the most essential item of all (“The only thing that’s missin’ is that weird little flute”). The clip’s appeal is in watching the cast prance about as self-seriously as possible with their magical musical wands, but the jokes also point to the way the mere presence of the flutes (so phallic but so unimposing) threatens to expose the absurdity of rap machismo—a sexually destabilizing current Herbie Mann might recognize.

As is the way of such things, this parody came out just in time to be eclipsed by events, as rap flute seemed to start to fade. Instead, in the past few years, as if preparing the way for New Blue Sun, the flutes I’ve been noticing most are from artists and collectives such as Sault, Moor Mother, Irreversible Entanglements, Makaya McCraven, Nicole Mitchell, and even rapper Tyler, the Creator. They have been reaching back much more earnestly to the spiritual and political heritage of the 1970s Afro-flute boom, mixing sounds from both the jazz and ambient lineages with variations made possible by contemporary digital tools. Listen to other recent work by New Blue Sun co-producer Carlos Niño or another contributor, Leaving Records’ Matthewdavid, for a sense of all the sounds converging here at André’s embouchure.

Whether they have done them proud is another question. Over the course of its 87 minutes, New Blue Sun soothes but also meanders, sometimes in ways that seem less to focus meditative concentration than to prompt the listener to wander out of the room. It might have been stronger if André were mostly playing the flutes he’s been toting about for years, rather than deciding to record most of the album with, as he told the Guardian on Friday, a “digital” flute he’d never seen before. “What you’re hearing is me playing 20 minutes after opening it up out of the box,” he said. One can kind of tell.

I’m still happy to listen to it, and to whatever he does next, but for a more finely crafted and fully satisfying version of vibe-centric contemporary Black flute meditations, I might recommend last year’s Afrikan Culture by Shabaka instead. Like André’s flute record, this one also represents its creator, London’s Shabaka Hutchings, walking away from what his fans desire most—in his case, the roiling boil of his generation-leading cosmic-jazz ensembles Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming. Like André, he says a mellower instrument now seems more suited to his age and beneficial to his health. Perhaps, with the ancient breezes gusting through their bones, flutes especially befit those occasions when we’re moved to contemplate our frailty and mortality—everyone must eventually pay the piper. But as we’ve seen, flutes can also metamorphosize to serve all kinds of pop purposes, and what comes next depends which way the wind blows.