[1] Charles Tolliver, who had played as a side musician for both, was now leading both an experimental big band and a quartet (formed in May 1969 and billed as Music Inc.) to explore a creative middle ground between the avant-garde and the more traditional hard bop style.

[2] Helping raise his stature among hard bop peers, Tolliver's trumpet style employed a variety of techniques and musical ideas while based in a tradition of melodic, swing-rhythmed playing associated with predecessors such as Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, and Donald Byrd.

[7] With Strata-East, Tolliver and Cowell became the first two young African-American musicians to head a jazz label, while releasing recordings by leading avant-gardists like Clifford Jordan and Pharoah Sanders (Coltrane's former sideman).

The midtempo Cowell-composed ballad "Effi" began in a waltz time signature and proceeded to different sections, during which the musicians employed complex fills and gradual variations that allowed them to explore modes from the blues, Latin, and Eastern music.

He felt the trumpeter sounded uncertain and poorly recorded at times, while the rhythm section of Houston and Barbaro did not provide entirely reliable accompaniment, although he added that Tolliver and Cowell played well enough to not always need it.

[11][nb 3] Richard Brody, who had been a big fan of the original LP, reviewed the box set for The New Yorker and appraised the recordings collectively as "fervent, intimate classics of live jazz".

He added that "they convey the spirit of the cramped bandstand and the rapt crowd as keenly as Charles Mingus's Debut recordings from the Café Bohemia, Eric Dolphy's Five Spot dates, and John Coltrane's sets from the Village Vanguard".

[1] Thom Jurek from AllMusic was also very impressed by the Tokyo disc, highlighting Tolliver and Cowell's "symbiotic" musical interactions on tracks like "Drought" and "Stretch", while finding "'Round Midnight" to be a "radical" interpretation that "has to be heard to be believed".

From the Tokyo disc, he called "Truth" "forcefully melodic and endowed with just the right touch" by the quartet and enjoyed "'Round Midnight" for being "all about deeply gutted feeling", while noting the "brighter" recontextualization of Houston's "sinuously mysterious bass solo" on "Effi".

But he ultimately found the Tokyo recordings somewhat marred by inconsistent sound quality and expressed some disappointment in the rhythm section, specifically observing a lack of rhythmic poise in Barbaro on "Drought".