Five-Star Collection... Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus Trio

Mingus Three

Charles Mingus is the volcanic, inflammably honest virtuoso, composer and Jazz Workshop leader whose strength of musical personality has made his playing and writing instantly identifiable, however intermittently controversial. Hampton Hawes, Los Angeles-born and almost thirty, has been welcomed by several critics and a number of musicians as an unusually earthy and deeply swinging representative of mainstream modernism that flows directly from Charlie Parker, whom Hawes acknowledges as his primary influence. The drummer is Danny Richmond, a regular member of Mingus' Jazz Workshop unit.

(...)

This trio session is considerably different from most trio dates. Two strong personalities are present in Mingus and Hawes, and although there is an overall feeling of fusion, of tempered rapport, this as much a dialogue between Mingus and Hawes with punctuation from Richmond as it is a group expression.

Mingus and Hawes are contrasting spirits, musically and off the stand. Hawes is rather diffident and disinclined to verbalize about music. Mingus, on the other hand, is a celebrated writer of open letters to the music magazines, and is the Tom Paine of modern jazz in his polemical zeal to make his positions clear.

(...)

The meeting of the two in this album is provocative, all the more so because both — health and wars willing — have the major section of their futures ahead of them. Hawes continues to move in the main road; Mingus, having absorbed the map, backwards and to the present, of the main route, is striking out on his own path. In ten years, they might well meet: or the main road may have been widened, in part by Mingus' impact, so that he has become conventional; or he may have, as I believe, been found to have been in the mainstream all along — except that he was swimming deeper than most. *Nat Hentoff (from the liner notes)*

There really isn't much else to say after rating this a full five stars. These are superb performances by all hands.

Hamp plays with more warmth and brilliance than he has displayed on records in a long time. Mingus is sensitive, powerful, lyrical, and several other adjectives which make up the feel of the much-abused word soul.

If there is an essence of jazz, a marrow which sustains the bones of jazz, then it is to be found here. I found few, very few moments on this LP when the incredibly high standard set in the moving Yesterdays was not sustained. And you will have to travel far to find a deeper probing of the blues by a trio than that in Back Home Blues.

Richmond, the regular Mingus' Jazz Workshop drummer, shows on Hamp's New Blues and Summertime the awareness and musicianship that come with membership in that remarkable quintet.

This is a set that should never grow stale. *Dom Cerulli (Down Beat, March 20, 1958 [5 stars])*

1 - Yesterdays

(Otto Harbach, Jerome Kern)

2 - Back Home Blues

(Charles Mingus)

3 - I Can't Get Started

(Vernon Duke, Ira Gershwin)

4 - Hamp's New Blues

(Hampton Hawes)

5 - Summertime

(George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward)

6 - Dizzy Moods

(Charles Mingus)

7 - Laura

(Johnny Mercer, David Raksin)

Hampton Hawes (piano), Charles Mingus (bass), Dannie Richmond (drums, tambourine [#5])

Recorded in New York City, July 9, 1957