Ayler plays tenor saxophone (and piano for several bars on one track) and is accompanied by Swedish musicians Torbjörn Hultcrantz (bass) and Sune Spångberg (drums).

[1] In the spring of 1962, Ayler, who had been living in Cleveland, traveled to New York City, and then to Stockholm, Sweden, in the hope of finding an environment receptive to his music.

He said, 'Come on, it won't hurt you,' and then I made that record..."[2] On October 25, 1962, Ayler brought bassist Torbjörn Hultcrantz and drummer Sune Spångberg, with whom he had been playing for months,[2] to the Main Hall of the Academy of Music in Stockholm, where, in front of an audience of twenty-five people, they recorded twelve tracks, mostly standards.

Val Wilmer wrote that they were "oblivious to his conception from start to finish,"[4] while bassist and writer Jeff Schwartz commented on the opposition of Ayler's "totally stream-of-consciousness playing to the conventional work of his sidemen," and wrote that "the bassist 'walks' the chord changes in 4/4 most of the time, and it is unintentionally hilarious to hear Ayler play phrases constructed from pure noise, only to be answered by heavy-handed bop-style 'bomb dropping' on the drumset".

According to Murray, after hearing Taylor's group perform, Ayler approached them in a state of excitement, saying "I've been waiting for you, man.

[13] Later that year, he moved to New York City, where he reunited with Cherry and Taylor, and found other musicians more receptive to his playing.

1, Scott Yanow wrote: "The problem with the trio recordings heard on this LP is that bassist Torbjörn Hultcrantz and drummer Sune Spångberg sound as if they are completely ignoring what tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler is playing.

"[17] The authors of the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings commented: "The first recordings are astonishly sparse... what is immediately distinctive about Ayler is the almost hypnotic depth of his concentration on a single motif, which he repeats, worries, splinters into constituent harmonics... Ayler's impatience with bop is evident throughout, and for all their unrelieved starkness, these rather solitary experiments are still remarkably refreshing.

His main improvisational strategy is to find the 'hook' of the song, the melodic phrase that is the catchiest, or most intriguing, and elaborate on it by free association."

Because he was moving such a large mass of air through his horn, Albert Ayler was able to shape the harmonic content of each note he played.

This second solo also contains phrases in which all the sounds are produced in unconventional ways, displaying a fluidity of technique that Coltrane would struggle for the last two years of his life to try to make his own.