"[1] Cherry had recently left Sonny Rollins' quartet, with which he had recorded Our Man in Jazz, while Moore had been playing with Shepp's and Dixon's group, and Moses had been working with Eric Dolphy.
Cherry, however, was several hours late to the session, so Shepp, Tchicai, Moore, and Moses ended up recording a number of tracks as a quartet.
[4] Several weeks after the recording session, the group left for Europe, where they toured for roughly three months thanks to Tchicai's advance bookings.
I think our more traditional sound made it easier for people to get into us, as opposed to the difficulty some had with listening to Cecil Taylor's trio during that same period.
In an interview, Tchicai recalled some of the unique aspects of the NYCF, stating "we didn't have a piano in the group; we just had the three horns, bass and drums — that was kind of unusual for the time.
"[1] In a similar vein, Ekkehard Jost wrote: "the NYCF takes the Ornette Coleman group of the late Fifties as the starting point for its own general musical conception.
In contrast to Shepp's extrovert and rhetorical style of improvising, a cooler (not colder), spun-out linearity prevails in Tchicai.
"[3] Concerning the original material written by Cherry, Shepp, and Tchicai, Jost wrote that it is "carefully planned, and it is not treated merely as a peg on which to hang solo improvisations.
"[9] Jost described one of Tchicai's compositions as having "a balanced, calmly flowing linear quality, which makes it sound like a cool-jazz theme projected into free jazz.
"[9] Jost summarized the legacy of the group as follows: "The real importance of the NYCF lay without question in the fact that as early as 1963 it assimilated various trends of new jazz and at the same time did not hesitate to reach back to older models.
With a combination of these elements - and without sacrificing its own stylistic identity - it thereby laid the corner-stone of what might be called the mainstream of free jazz.