A note on the Wind:

I don’t get the sense that we, humans, understand it yet, but we should be deeply cautious of the Wind. The Wind blows harder and harder. News reports talk of more hurricanes, more tornadoes, and more forest fires, all of which have a magnitude that feels beyond our ability to tame. The increase in massive scale weather events is a result of climate change, a result of our doing. There’s also more wind, the type that will blow away your hat or invert your umbrella or down a tree onto your parked car. I first took note of the Wind in Sacramento, a scorching valley in the summer, that is only alleviated by a zephyr known as the Delta Breeze. The Wind was our friend. It looked out for us. Then, the Wind turned on us. The Wind tore entire neighborhoods apart with downed tree branches that caused electrical blackouts. In the forests it downed power lines that caused forest fires, triggering mass evacuations and death, and even though those fires were hundreds of miles from Sacramento, the Wind carried poisonous smoke and left it there to haze over the city and keep us sheltered in homes that lacked the proper insulation to truly keep the toxins and the smell out. I was wearing masks in public before the coronavirus because of the Wind. When I moved to New York City, I thought I might have escaped the Wind’s ability to shepherd unbreathable air, but I was wrong. This year it carried forest fire smoke from Canada and it rested squarely over Manhattan like it was proving a point to anyone who felt that smoke was not a metropolitan issue. The Wind doesn’t have to be at its maximal power to be dangerous. More windy days are a chore to endure. Windy days disrupt our peace. Windy days act as harbingers of storms that will potentially upend our lives. The Wind is a mother fucker, don’t you know?

A note on “Play the Wind”:

Outdoor hoopers know the term. A windy day invokes it. The most attuned players, the ones who play as though there are no obstacles, only new interactions, are adept at playing the Wind. They truly play it. The Wind becomes part of their game. As you defend them, you have the temporary feeling that you’ve forced a bad shot, you celebrate a momentary victory as the ball is guided to the right of the rim, and then the Wind, like a ghost catching an alley-oop, sends the ball toward its intended place through the net. Play the Wind. I learned to play the Wind at Angel’s Gate Park, the magnificent court on a cliff in San Pedro that looks out to the Pacific Ocean. Angel’s Gate Park is the Wind’s home court. Here, a simple free throw will get carried wide left, or wide right, depending on the way the Wind blows, as though the Wind reached a long arm to goaltend the shot. The Wind loves to block shots. But, as I was shooting at Angel’s Gate Park, I remembered… Play the Wind… and gave the Wind a role in my shots. Soon, I was teammates with the Wind and we were in harmony and the Wind was not a defender but a role player in my efforts to get a bucket. Commune with Nature. Play the Wind.

Among the many things I love about basketball is the emphasis of breathing. We all carry within us a personal wind. Lance Stephenson once used his personal wind to blow in the ear of Lebron James as a distraction in a 2014 playoff game. We become aware of our wind playing basketball. When we’re out of shape, our wind depletes quickly, and it burns in our lungs. We tell our friends we are winded, without ever really thinking about the peculiarity of that term. Even stranger, there exists no term for the opposite of winded. (Perhaps worse, “having wind” implies bodily trumpet music and a stanky odor.*) Only electricity is wind-powered, not humans. And yet, humans especially athletes, deep sea divers, and jazz musicians must have intense command of their wind. What’s the first thing many great free throw shooters do when they step to the line? They take a deep breath and let it out, commanding their wind, in order to focus and make the shot. When we’ve strengthened our wind and we’re in the best of shape, it’s like a piston that propels us. Your wind, and your command of your wind, is integral to your game.

(*Throughout the entirety of this paragraph it took tremendous restraint to only make one fart joke. You will, however, see plenty of opportunities that I passed on.)

A note on André 3000 playing the Wind:

“…this album is about wind and breathing.” - André 3000

“It's just being excited about wind and flutes, and every culture has a flute. The flute is the first instrument where we actually heard a musical tone or note. And one thing I like about flutes, and wooden flutes in particular, is it's the closest to the human voice out of all the instruments. I think that's why I kind of gravitated towards it. When you're hearing a flute player or saxophonist, you're actually hearing the wind of that human.” - André 3000

André 3000’s new album New Blue Sun, his first album in seventeen years, surprised his fans when he announced it would be an ambient jazz album, no vocals, only him playing his collection of flutes and woodwinds accompanied by jazz musicians from Los Angeles. No rap. The first song on the album addresses that very issue in its title, “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.” The Wind moves us, like migration in birds, like migration in people who built wind-powered ships to sail oceans. The Wind was calling him. Not many people will or want to listen to the Wind. There are warnings and there are welcomings in the Wind.

I will not critique the album here. I’m far more interested in André 3000’s practice and his intuition. Earlier this year I interviewed the Sons of Kemet saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who announced that he was ending his band, as well as the band The Comet Is Coming, in part because he was giving up the tenor saxophone for the flute. He spoke with conviction that while he was being paid handsomely to play the horn, those gigs seemed to interfere with time he’d much rather spend learning the flute. He could feel a conflict within himself and it was one that shackled his spirit. He chose the path of freedom and uncertainty. He was going to give up the horn, for now, so that he could see where new projects, ones that excited him and seemed to enliven his spirit, might take him.

I got the opportunity to tell Shabaka that what he was doing was vital to people who listen to his music. That his decision, to serve only his spirit, was needed as a living example. We need to see people make courageous and risky shifts in their lives, so that those of us who are afraid of taking risks might find strength in seeing others be brave. There is a plague on humanity, an old one that has only gotten more rampant with growing inequality, in which we feel resigned, if not required, to serve masters, and not spirit. The main problem being, how will I feed myself or my family by serving my spirit? It is, by design, exceedingly more difficult than accepting a master’s wage.

This part I kept to myself, but I secretly wished that those with far larger platforms than Shabaka lived as representations of such bravery. And here we are, at this moment, with André 3000. He has been regarded as one of the greatest living rappers since he was a teenager. Outkast became one of the biggest groups on the planet, something Prince felt needed a personal call to remind them of, and their fans have longed for more Outkast music since Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in 2003 (I remember my friends on the college radio station played both sides in full the night before the release and I sat in my dorm with my roommate listening to the whole thing in awe). But, André has always been someone who lived as an island, and expectations were like a wind to be ignored. Some winds should be.

“So I just felt like I'd really like to play but it was really for me. I would just walk for hours and I'm a walker. I love to walk. So I would just walk and play for hours. I did that for years and it got to a point where, okay, I want to share.” - André 3000 to NPR

Disclaimer: I’m well aware of how ridiculous I’m about to sound.

I know what André went through in making this change in his life. I think many of us can relate, especially those who really loved playing basketball, only to have that path come to a conclusion. Maybe you played in college. Maybe you got to play overseas. Maybe someone who reads this made it to the league. But, at some point basketball ended and you felt unmoored. What’s next?

For me, I stopped playing during college tryouts at a D3 and subsequently spent fifteen years unmoored from basketball. The above quote reminds me of the feeling and practice I had right before I creating this project, Sacred. At first, I just really liked going to basketball courts by myself or with my dog and shooting free throws. I’m a shooter. I love to shoot. I went to different courts around Sacramento and got buckets in solitude. At first, I didn’t necessarily want to play with others. I was just there to do this one thing I was skilled at doing, to practice that skill and see if I could improve at it—perhaps even push myself to a level I’ve never known prior. At the time, the goal was to make fifty free throws in a row. I would get close. Thirty-eight. Forty-two. Forty-six. (Sometimes I blamed the misses that kept me from my goal on the Wind, but deep down I knew it was a lapse in concentration.)

I did that for years until I got to the point of “okay, I want to share.” I wanted to play pickup with others, as much as possible. I wanted to write about basketball. I saw infinitudes in how I could write about basketball that made me want to stop writing about music and local politics and the arts, etc. I had rediscovered a love that spoke to my spirit. For me, this was the most radical thing I could do. As Big Rube once said, “foolin’ ourselves / clownin’ ourselves / playin’ ourselves / by not being ourselves.” And in making this decision to listen to my spirit, I found a voice and I found people who speak the same language as me. Just like they say, “the ball finds energy,” perhaps the same applies to the flute and the musicians like Carlos Niño who entered Andre’s orbit to help him in his journey. See that’s the thing about listening to your spirit: it’s an invitation for others to come play. You won’t be alone when you serve your spirit. It’s not a selfish act or a solitary one. In my experience, it opens portals. I imagine Shabaka and André would say the same.

And so when I see other artists like Shabaka and André, doing the most radical thing they could do, despite much larger consequences, I feel a sense of conviction in my own spirited work. It’s a feeling I want for others. In writing and art, there’s an old saying that goes “do the thing that scares you” and it’s a half-truth. Your fear is not the motivator. Fear is not a goal. It’s the resistance, as Steven Pressfield would say. Your spirit is in the thing that scares you, and why fear your spirit? Our spirit is a wind that guides us toward destinations. You get places much slower when you fight the Wind.

“As an artist, you got to have really strong antennas. And that's really what it's about. So where I am now is where I'm supposed to be. I couldn't plan it. And here's the cool thing. Yes, we can plan it, our limited human brains can plan it. But it's always greater and more magical when you're surprised by these things... I've seen artists transcend themselves and I get emotional about it.

When I see rappers go to a certain level, I'm sure they didn't know. Because I didn't know. So I know they ain't know. But that's the magic. So y'all just looking at the magic show, and it's nothing special. I'm not special. Everybody has a certain kind of magic show.” - André 3000

Many of the quotes in this essay are taken from Rodney Carmichael’s interview with André 3000 for NPR, which can be read or heard in full here. I strongly encourage listening to André 3000 speak about his views on life, making art, and listening to his spirit.

A Collection of flute music that slaps:

In addition to the songs below, this is also a Spotify playlist called “F— Yeah, Flute!” where I would like to encourage ya’ll to contribute your favorite flute jams.

Jurassic 5, “Jayou”