Featured

In these sextet tracks, Mingus takes apart his compositions with the same audacious, self-critical freedom with which Bob Dylan unmade and remade his own songs—or, rather, Mingus even more uninhibitedly lets his band take over his compositions. It’s as if Dylan had remained fairly consistent in his own approach but replaced the Band with the likes of James (Blood) Ulmer, Sonny Sharrock, and Glenn Branca. This band of Mingus’s stands as his most coherent, consistent group since the late fifties. Far from merely recapitulating or revisiting the classical forms of jazz that he revered and embodied, Mingus extended it—even as jazz moved in directions that he found inimical. In working with younger musicians, whose spirit and imagination invigorated his music along with the new idiom that they helped to develop, Mingus tells a musical story of the expansive and comprehensive power of Black art. In demonstrating the infinite fecundity of jazz tradition, and advancing it as a creator, he opens its future vistas as a teacher. The newly restored version of “Mingus at Carnegie Hall” is in that sense one of his prime works, illuminating his vision of the living history of jazz and suggesting the mentorships, the dimensions, the grand embraces that were tragically foreclosed by his untimely death, in 1979, just five years after the concert. – The New Yorker

After her darker sophomore effort 2012's Master of My Make-Believe, Santigold returns with a sunshine-bright pop album, shaded with biting commentary on consumerism and the price of art. It comes across as a pointed reaction to her own success over the past decade: If Master of My Make-Believe was a trip down the rabbit hole post-Santogold, 99¢ tries to be the yin to its yang: a hyper-positive, yet self-aware, happy-pill remedy. - Pitchfork