HIP-HOP

Cardi B featuring Ye and Lil Durk, "Hot __"

An event record that sounds like an off-the-cuff late-night studio session, this new single is lean verging on spare, measured verging on reticent. Individually, everyone's verse is frisky, but Cardi B's the most so — she plays with pattern, and tosses off some sharp barbs ("I don't know what's longer, man, my block list or my checklist/I don't know what's colder, man, my heart or my necklace"). This is Cardi at her most straightforwardly skillful, and it also nods back to one of the most appealing qualities of her 2018 debut album, "Invasion of Privacy": the way in which it, subtly and directly, aligned her with traditionalist New York-style hip-hop, a gesture aimed at naysayers. Are there any left, though?

JON CARAMANICA, New York Times

JAZZ

Moor Mother, "Jazz Codes"

Moor Mother's beats, if you'd call them that, tend to sound like stardust incinerating itself. She doesn't move in a way that you'd swiftly associate with jazz, but she is of the tradition: a history miner and an innovator, a serious intellectual and a commentator, speaking through coded confrontation. And after a few years on the international jazz festival circuit — both as a member of Irreversible Entanglements, an acoustic quintet, and as a solo artist — she has some notes. Her new album, "Jazz Codes," has an air of intervention, but also of mischievous play and mystery. It's heavy on features — poets (Rasheedah Phillips, Thomas Stanley), musicians (Mary Lattimore, Keir Neuringer) and vocalists (Melanie Charles, Orion Sun) sit in — and she pulls clips from interviews with elder musicians (Amina Claudine Myers, Joe McPhee). She released a 14-minute film suturing together tracks from across "Jazz Codes," and it captures the album's feeling of defiance and reinvention.

GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO, New York Times

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