Billboard : 11/18/1957

Inventive interplay, rare cohesion make this trio date highly recommendable. Mingus, considered by some to be “far out,” reveals his feeling for the grass roots of jazz. His bass work is excellent in context, and he contributes some startlingly pointed, musically interesting solos. Pianist Hawes surges and probes as the occasion demands, and is more fulfilling than on many previous recorded outings. Try Dizzy Moods as demo-band.

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Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, TX)
Jack Butler : 11/10/1957

Mingus is a virtuosic bass man who at times actually seems to have the piano playing a sort of atonal rhythm for him, rather than the customary reversed role. Hawes, at piano, displays a nice feeling for the blues in Back Home Blues and Hamp’s New Blues. It’s somewhat on the progressive side, and Mingus has such a driving style that he keeps it swinging, sometimes far out. The producer tastefully gave them room to work, putting just seven tracks in the album.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : February 1958

Bassist Mingus’ tendency to seemingly uncontrolled innovation is held in check through most of these selections in order to pin pianist Hampton Hawes down to some of the soundest, warmest playing he has yet recorded. Occasionally Hawes goes off on his glib, slippery tangent but in most cases Mingus keeps a sensitive rein on him. Mingus’ main concession to himself is a setting for Summertime involving a Night in Tunisia obbligato, strummed piano wires, Chinese cymbals, and strange, wailing cries from his bass. Altogether this is an extremely clear, uncluttered presentation of the marked talents of both Hawes and Mingus.

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Indianapolis Star (Indianapolis, IN)
Polly Cochran : 01/12/1958

Jubilee has a fine coupling to offer jazzophiles in bass player Charles Mingus and pianist Hampton Hawes. Actually, they are heard as a trio — with Danny Richmond on drums — in the LP Mingus Three.

Their interpretations of familiar favorites like Summertime, Yesterdays and Laura are terrifically effective, Hawes out-Brubecking Brubeck at times and Mingus making his bass come alive in notes that speak as emotionally as a classical love ode. There’s three original compositions well expressed in the course of the album, too.

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Metronome
Jack Maher : February 1958

Charlie Mingus has become something of a legend in his short lifetime. His blunt honesty, strength and non-conformative intensity in musical writing have made him a talking point. Seldom do you find any one that has no opinion of his work. They either like it violently or dislike it violently. For those who have grown accustomed to hearing him, his personality, through his group, this album will be somewhat of a revelation.

As a bass player, Charles exhibits similar characteristics as does his group. There’s that same conviction, explosive humor and non-conformative intensity. Within the limits of a rhythm section, there’s only so much to be done, Mingus does most of it.

Hamp Hawes plays a bit off the usual track for him. He’s not quite so percussive.

CODA: Except for Mingus, this would ordinarily be just another trio album.

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San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA)
Ralph J. Gleason : 11/05/1957

Trio (Jubilee 1054) offers Charles Mingus, one of the great bass men of all time, in an extraordinarily good representation of his work. He is accompanied by pianist Hampton Hawes and drummer Danny Richmond. Mingus plays with incredible technical proficiency; in fact this sometimes gets in the way of the listener, but not on this album. Mingus has been recorded at his best, which is about as good as you can get. His improvisations on Laura and Yesterdays, are exceptional in every respect. To be sure, he has here the best pianist on the coast for this sort of thing. Hawes is a fine, blues based, mainstream youngster and he contributes a great deal to this album.

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Toronto Star (Toronto, ON)
Roger Feather : 05/17/1958
Five stars

Mingus is a turbulent, probing musician who, because of his striking originality, has yet to achieve the high position he deserves. As a bassist he has few peers; as a composer and leader he is a pathfinder who speaks with great strength. A few of his works in the latter field seem frustrated and incoherent but even they are presented with such honest conviction that they cannot be dismissed.

Mingus’ work on this record is both sensitive and explosive. Yesterdays is extremely moving, Summertime is strangely fascinating, Laura is elegant and Dizzy Moods has a brilliant sense of correctness. The dynamic atmosphere which surrounds all of Mingus’ work dominates these tunes.

Hawes created much excitement and a large reputation about two years ago and then, until this record, almost dropped from sight. He sounds better than ever here and shows a stronger Bud Powell influence. His work on Hamp’s New Blues and Down Home Blues is about as “funky” as you can get. Richmond is an expressive, colorful drummer who speaks his piece emphatically on Summertime and Hamp’s New Blues. The trio as a whole fuses together with amazing cohesiveness.

Mingus’ music, and this album in particular, requires considerable listening effort to be fully appreciated but this effort is very worthwhile. This music is articulate, communicative and has a powerful emotional impact. The album deserves a wide audience.

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Down Beat : 03/20/1958
Dom Cerulli : 5 stars

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.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

Charles Mingus is the volcanic, inflammably honest bass 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.

Yesterday’s is a head arrangement in which the memories are collected at a brisker tempo than is usual in approaching the standard. Back Home Blues is Mingus, and it was his evident goal to create a down home feeling and particularly, as he explains it, “to make Hamp play even more basic blues than he has been accustomed to.”

I Can’t Get Started, a song that Mingus has been attracted to for some time is played within the framework of Mingus’ alteration of the changes. Hamp’s New Blues, described by Mingus as “bebop blues” illustrates a comment by English critic, Alun Morgan, about Hawes and the blues to the effect that “Hawes continues to extract freshness and beauty from this timeless material.”

Mingus’ intense plunge into Summertime is based, he acknowledges, “on a pedal point suggested by Lee Kraft,” who was supervisor of the date. Dizzy Moods came into existence because Mingus admired Dizzy Gillespie’s Woodyn’ You. He altered the original chord pattern, wrote an original melody on that altered sequence, called Dizzy on the phone, played him the song, and obtained Dizzy’s benediction. Laura exemplifies that no matter how often a listener may have heard a song (and Laura has been one of the most ubiquitous wraiths in music in many years) jazzmen of intractable individuality like Mingus can transmute the most familiar music into quite an unexpected, self-startling experience.

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 is as much 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. When three Down Beat critics once reviewed his trio and invited him to answer their reviews, one of which was fiercely negative, he never replied to any of the several requests for a statement made to him. 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. Had the same three critics reviewed Mingus, it might have taken most of an issue to print his answers.

In music, Hawes, as indicated previously, is in the direct Parker line with a partial indebtedness to Bud Powell, among others. His source of most impressive strength is his beat and his propelling assurance in the blues. Whether he will ever develop a commandingly individual voice that will in turn influence others irremediably is difficult to predict as of this writing, because there are personal as well as musical factors involved in the working out of Hawes’ future. He is, in any case, already an accepted professional by other jazzmen, and is an emotionally stimulating, fiercely candid player who is easily assimilable and who intends to keep the basic jazz language and direction, as he conceives them, alive and meaningful.

Mingus’ self-expressive needs are more impatient of convention than Hawes and yet even more plungingly appreciative of tradition. Mingus’ roots go far back into blues and old church music (as do Hawes whose father was a preacher and whose earliest musical memories are spirituals) but also into the cries and musical earth of other cultures as well. As a composer, he is a blazing believer in form following function, and he never composes except from an urgent desire to communicate a feeling, a lifeview, an anger or a joy. As articulate as Mingus is verbally, he feels—and rightly—that his most viable and self-revealing form of communication is through music. There are his intimately explosive bass solos in which the instrument becomes so annealed to him that, to paraphrase Yeats, a mesmerized listener may not know instantly where the bass begins and Mingus ends; and there is composed music, much of it transmitted orally and aurally to his sidemen, a body of music that is as searingly personal and yet universally aware of and defiant of mortality as any body of composed work in written jazz.

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.