André 3000, “New Blue Sun.”

In a move almost no one had on their 2023 bingo card, OutKast rapper André 3000 released his first new record in 17 years—an album of instrumentals, with Benjamin playing flute.

André Benjamin seems pretty clear about his approach in the album’s first song title, “I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me.” The nearly 13-minute jam evolves from gauzy synth chords, tambourine and flute into a mellow simmering jazz jam. Like a river, the music has a current with eddies and ripples, occasional rocks it must flow around. In the animal-like scurrying of the melodies, the vibe resembles surreal classical music, like Igor Stravinsky falling into a K-hole.

Yeah, Benjamin can play the flute. He’s not a face-melting shredder like James Galway. But he’s got a great ear, and his playing meshes with the other musicians in the jams like a pro.

New Blue Sun began to take shape when Benjamin met California music producer Carlos Niño, who co-produced the album, which features the guitarist Nate Mercereau and  keyboardist Surya Botofasina.

The languid weirdness of “The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off the Tongue With Far Better Ease Than the Proper Word Vagina. Do You Agree?” sounds like what they play when you’re up to your neck relaxing in some kind of fancy mud in a pricey spa, or huffing nitrous oxide while drifting in space. On “That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into a Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones I Couldn’t Control. … Sh¥t Was Wild,” distant, reverberating drumming offers just the faintest hint of a groove, over which Benjamin delivers fluttering flurries of flute notes.

This is not The Beastie Boys’ “Flute Loop” or similar hip-hop appropriation of the flute. It’s also not your dad’s Kenny G or Spyro Gyra cassettes. Benjamin is working in a somewhat obscure but growing musical subgenre of contemporary jazz. Bands like Sons of Kemet and musicians like Kamasi Washington are part of this burgeoning jazz movement using synthesizers and sonic experimentation rather than upright basses and virtuosic soloing (or they use both). Benjamin lists his influences on the album as including Brian Eno, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Steve Reich.

The lush synthesizers that punctuate “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears a 3000™ Button Down Embroidered” deliver shades of Vangelis’ epic “Blade Runner” soundtrack. Elsewhere in the song, sinister synths and strange processed sounds evoke Karlheinz Stockhausen’s experimental “Musique Concrete” weirdness. The song grows almost silent at the end, becoming barely audible ambience and making it impossible to determine precisely where the music ends and your tinnitus begins.

The album’s closer, “Dreams Once Buried Beneath the Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens,” spans more than 17 minutes but maintains an almost comatose mellowness. This is the perfect album to throw on after a crazy night at the club, or to provide an unobtrusive background for strange and intimate conversations.

I think the reason social media got so excited this week about this album is that we want to live in a world where we can be surprised by art and artists, where not everything is focus-grouped and market-tested. Contemporary jazz may soon have a lot of new fans, which worries me a little bit, because a lot of those guys have been huddled in their basements crafting an outre personality based on their dedication to an under-appreciated art form. They may not take kindly to a large segment of the population imagining they’ve discovered an entirely new type of music after one of their favorite rappers “invented” it.