About

A TAV Essential Listening Album.

Angles Without Edges is the first album released by hip hop producer Madlib's Jazz project, Yesterdays New Quintet. Although a fictional quintet or virtual band, it is, in reality, Madlib playing the instruments while giving credit to fictional characters.

“Using jazz experimentation, education, and the unequivocal brilliance of his hip-hop creativity as a primary instrument, Madlib leads this record of paramount importance in the modern jazz and hip-hop worlds alike. Favoring swatches of lounge-heavy atmosphere and Fender Rhodes rivers to forever soulful infinity, big beats, and abstract soloing on everything from vibraphone to the turntable itself, Angles Without Edges is where music hoped to go by 2001. This is a hip-hop record made with jazz principles of improvisation, spacy cut-and-paste passages of drifting solos, and periods of vamping grooves that are layered handsomely with uncut breaks that build on top of themselves, eventually creating what may be the Bitches Brew of the new millennium.” – AllMusic

More about Yesterdays New Quintet:

In the summer of 2000, Madlib's name was beginning to be known to hip-hop fans as the creator and producer of Lootpack and Quasimoto, whose debut album The Unseen had just been released. Behind the scenes, the producer was beginning an extended break from hip-hop production, trading the SP1200 for the Fender Rhodes. 

That fall, Madlib put the jazz group Yesterdays New Quintet together - Joe McDuphrey, Malik Flavors, Ahmad Miller, Monk Hughes and Otis Jackson Jr. They set up shop in the West Los Angeles living room the home/headquarters of Stones Throw, living and worked there through the end of the year before Stones Throw relocated to another house elsewhere in Los Angeles. A few days later, Madlib and YNQ showed up there too, building a studio in the home's former cold war-era bomb shelter.

Yesterdays New Quintet's debut album Angles Without Edges was released September 11, 2001. Stevie, an album of Mr. Wonder covers recorded even before Angles, was released later in 2003.

And from there, the core of Yesterdays New Quintet was essentially over, and would expand into what Madlib called "Yesterday's Universe," a loose-knit collective replacing the original group, with Madlib as the constant producer & arranger. Each member of the original group released solo works, many of them performed with Madlib on Shades of Blue (2003), and several new groups within the universe would follow. Many of these were announced on the compilation album Yesterdays Universe (2007). Even more names had their debut on Madlib's High Jazz (2010).

Phase 1: Yesterdays New Quintet - 2000

Phase 2: Joe McDuphrey Experience - 2002

Phase 3: Ahmad Miller - 2003

Phase 4: Monk Hughes & the Outer Realm - 2004

Phase 5: Malik Flavors - 2005

Phase 6: Otis Jackson Jr. Trio - 2007

Towards the end of this cycle, several new YNQ spinoffs were announced on the compilation album Yesterdays Universe - Sound Directions, The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble, Young Jazz Rebels, and others. 

- Stones Throw Records

Read Stones Throw’s Guide to Madlib’s Yesterdays New Quintet and Yesterdays New Universe here.

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