Jazz
Intakt Records · 15 May 2026
“Minwi” is Haitian Creole for midnight, the hour when, in the island’s folklore, the boundaries stop holding. The trio whose name is pronounced “Night Beauty” is Candice Hoyes on voice, Mimi Jones on bass and Val Jeanty on electronics and turntables. Hoyes never sings the same thing twice: the words aren’t written beforehand, they’re called up while the music is running.
Nine tracks, 50:32. The first is “Ode to Octavia” (3:55), the shortest thing here, and the reference is Octavia Butler, specifically the line from “Parable of the Sower” about everything you touch being changed, and everything you change changing you. That is literally the method: Jeanty picks up Jones’s bass and Hoyes’s voice, works them over and sends them back into the room altered. The long tracks are the ones that give her room to do it — “Roots Legacy” (7:11), “Hijas” (6:58) and “Burf Myself” (6:27).
The record ends on “Wombfire” (6:00) with Nicole Mitchell’s flute, and Mitchell shares the trio’s Afrofuturist reading of Butler. The album stops just as that quartet starts to exist.
The digital edition titles it “minwi (Live)” and it is not overstating things: this was cut live on 6 May 2023 at NUBLU in New York, and it was not mixed and mastered until February 2026, by Tyler McDiarmid. Three years between the night and the release, on a record sold on the idea that a particular night can never be heard twice. Both guests are named in their own track titles: Milena Casado’s trumpet on “Blaxk Mermaids” (6:21) and Mitchell’s flute on “Wombfire”.
The trio debuted on 14 April 2023 with a self-titled eleven-track album on Whirlwind Recordings. This is their second, and their first for Intakt.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents