The first is African-American and became famous through hip-hop. The second is Anglo-Caribbean and is a respected jazz musician. They don’t technically have much in common.

And yet. Both have just released albums centered on the bamboo flute and will perform – separately – during this 44th Montreal International Jazz Festival (FIJM).

Former member of the hip-hop tandem Outkast, André 3000 (in concert on June 30 at Wilfrid-Pelletier) caused a surprise by launching an ambient solo flute album last year entitled New Blue Sun. The rapper explained this bold gesture by the fact that he had “nothing more to say” and felt the need to renew himself. Despite its not at all commercial side, this production aroused disproportionate media interest, given the relative modesty of the project.

Another surprise is Shabaka Hutchings (two concerts, July 6 at the Gesù), whom jazz fans met in the British quartet Sons of Kemet. The saxophonist was known for his ripping solos, in a context that sometimes bordered on free. This spring, he baffled many with the release of a soaring flute album, on a bed of celestial harps, the very beautiful Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace.

We will not go so far as to speak of a movement, and even less of a groundswell. For the moment, these two projects do not seem to have made many disciples. But the fact that two musicians, respected in their respective niches, launch flute albums with an atmospheric-new-age tendency, with a certain spiritual veneer, at roughly the same time, can only pique curiosity, all the more so if this causes a break in their artistic journey.

In any case, we are not talking about a coincidence. For Maurin Auxéméry, chief programmer of the FIJM, these two albums would be neither more nor less a reaction to our crazy, crazy times, where we are constantly bombarded with stimuli and information.

The programmer thinks that these two projects “respond to a need for breathing”, linked on the one hand to the desire for reinvention of these two artists, and on the other, to the times we are going through. A stifling time, also exacerbated by the COVID crisis or the “I can’t breathe” of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, to which the two artists are perhaps referring, consciously or not.

Sign of the times? One of Shabaka’s pieces is titled Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become, which could be translated as: Manage my breathing, what fear had become…

That these two musicians have set their sights on folk flutes is not insignificant either.

They could have fallen back on the transverse flute, an instrument more common in jazz (and widely sampled by hip-hop) notably popularized by Herbie Mann, Eric Dolphy or Roland Kirk – who would also influence the flautist of the group Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson.

But Shabaka and André 3000 instinctively opted for wooden or bamboo instruments, closer to traditional so-called “ethnic” music than to acid jazz groove. For Jacques Denis, music expert at the newspaper Libération and contributor to the excellent Pan African Music site, this artistic choice can be explained by the need for ecology, a return to the earth, or even a quest for roots in a perspective of renewal.

“The question of the past to project oneself into the future is not new in music,” explains Jacques Denis. Roscoe Mitchell, from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, spoke of “ancient to the future”… There has always been this concern to inventory the great practices of the past in order to do something else with them. It’s cyclical. »

Understand that our two friends are not the first, far from it, to take this step.

“There are a lot of musicians in a lot of traditions who have been doing it for a very long time,” Denis adds. We must put into perspective this notion of a bamboo flute which is anything but rudimentary, which is played as much among the Fulani in sub-Saharan Africa as in Japan or India or in the West Indies or in the Brazilian Northeast. »

It remains to be seen what it will look like on stage, particularly in the case of André 3000, who will perform in the comfort of the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier.

A bold choice, which Maurin Auxéméry assumes perfectly. “I think it will attract the curious, Outkast fans, yes, but also a very eclectic audience. There are links between jazz and hip-hop. I think people are very aware of what they’re going to see…”