Around halfway through a set during his Blue Note residency last Thursday, André 3000 took some time to survey his tools. The musician crouched over a rug arrayed with around a dozen varieties of the flute — the instrument that's come to symbolize the dramatic creative pivot that culminated in his 2023 instrumental opus New Blue Sun — plus assorted digital woodwinds. There was something devout in his posture, as though he was waiting for the moment to tell him what it wanted. The mostly seated audience at the intimate New York club watched with rapt attention as he settled on a Chinese gourd flute featuring a bulbous eye-catching sphere near the mouthpiece. Standing up, he blew a march-like pattern, soft yet insistent. Surya Botofasina, one of his core collaborators both on the album and an ongoing tour in support of it, added gentle washes of synth, and the piece — an improvised soundscape unique to that moment — gradually bloomed.

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