"[4] In late December 1963, Bernard Stollman, who had been toying with the idea of starting a record label, went, at the insistence of a friend, to hear Ayler at the Baby Grand Café on 125th Street in Harlem.

[5] Ayler had moved to New York City earlier in the year, and had recently been playing with a variety of musicians, including Ornette Coleman, with whom Ayler made an informal recording earlier that month,[6] and Cecil Taylor, with whom he would perform on New Years Eve on a concert at Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center that would also feature the John Coltrane quintet and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

[8] (Here he was referring to the February 24, 1964 session that yielded two albums, Spirits, later reissued as Witches & Devils, and Swing Low Sweet Spiritual.)

According to Val Wilmer, Ayler's decision to join Stollman's label, which would be called ESP-Disk, was made "against the advice of Cecil Taylor and other musicians who thought that artists should hold out for a price commensurate with their talent.

[13] Stollman recalled: Just before 1 PM, Sunny Murray arrived, a large, genial walrus, moving and speaking with an easy agility that belied his appearance.

)[13] Early releases of Spiritual Unity contained a booklet titled "Ayler - Peacock - Murray - You and the Night and the Music" with text by Paul Haines.

[17] The album liner notes state that the symbol "Y" that appears on the back cover "pre-dates recorded history and has always represented the rising spirit of man.

Ayler was pleased with the recording, and felt that it represented a very high level of musical interaction, stating: "Most people would have thought this impossible but it actually happened.

"[20] A week following the Spiritual Unity session, Ayler, Peacock, and Murray, along with Don Cherry, John Tchicai, and Roswell Rudd, recorded New York Eye and Ear Control, which would also be released by ESP-Disk.

Scott Deveaux and Gary Giddins observed that the album "was both cheered and ridiculed", and stated that "Ayler's huge sound evoked lusty hysteria".

He passed the moon and the stars", alongside a positive review by Bill Mathieu, who wrote: "Notes disappear into wide, irregular ribbons, fragmented, prismatic, wind-blown, undetermined, and filled with fury.

The authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz selected the album as part of their suggested "Core Collection," awarding it a "crown" in addition to a four-star rating, and commenting: "the 1964 Ayler trio was quintessentially a listening band, locked in a personal struggle which it is possible only to observe, awestruck, from the sidelines.

"[2] According to John Corbett, Spiritual Unity represents "one of the most radical moments" in an "alternative way of thinking" where instrumentalists ask: "What is my supposed role, and what if I don't want to live by it?

"[29] He wrote: "The saxophone and bass and drums are doing something quite different from what they normally do—the bassist... is melodic, skittish, and virtuosic; the drummer... gathers pools and eddies of sound, mounting and dissipating volume, his cymbals awash in nervous energy; the saxophonist... only plays a smidge of melodic material, concentrating on ecstatic shouts and cries, swooping across the others in big slurs and swipes, lightning flashing across a turbulent sea.

"[31] Ted Gioia called Spiritual Unity "a major statement, the most cohesive ensemble project the saxophonist had undertaken to date", in which "Ayler showed that his radical remaking of the jazz saxophone vocabulary was largely self-sufficient, needing no other horns to set it off or support its blistering attack.

"[32] The authors of The Penguin Jazz Guide described Ayler's trio as "quintessentially a listening band, locked in a personal struggle which it is possible only to observe, awestruck, from the side-lines", and, having noted that Ayler had recorded traditional material on Swing Low Sweet Spiritual earlier that year, wrote: "Heard in that context, it is impossible to consider Spiritual Unity as anything other than an extension of vernacular themes, played in an ecstatic manner typical of the African-American churches.

"[33] Saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, leader of the band Sons of Kemet, wrote that the first time he listened to Spiritual Unity, he "didn't understand anything!...

Murray has a light, rapid touch, keeping the cymbals and snares going pretty much constantly, never breaking the flow of the music with a heavy roll, and Peacock functions as an extension of his textures."

"[23] John Fordham, writing in The Guardian, commented: "Half a century since the trio unleashed this music in a tiny Times Square studio, it still blazes, uplifts and unnerves.

Ayler emerges from a Sonny Rollins-like jauntiness into slurred-pitch flurries and klaxon hoots over Peacock's prodding lines and Murray's shadings on the opening 'Ghosts'; barges ferociously through seamless runs on 'The Wizard'; and calls imploringly in a tone somewhere between an impassioned singer and a microtonal viola player on the meditative 'Spirits'.

He continued: "Bassist Gary Peacock... doesn't so much keep time as feed the fires of Ayler's free folk jazz playing.

His cymbal work sizzles throughout... Ayler's marches, his folk-jazz and New Orleans brass sound was (is) an audacious and indomitable approach to music making that was both revolutionary and an 'ah-ha' moment in the development of free jazz of the 1960s that still resonates loudly today".

[36] Ayler biographer Jeff Schwartz stated: "The music recorded at this session is simply incredible... All three members are constantly improvising freely.

In fact, while there is quite a bit of brilliant interaction between the players, it is much more helpful to view the pieces recorded by the Ayler trio as sets of simultaneous solos.

"[37] Music critic S. Victor Aaron wrote: "Jazz began as Buddy Bolden's ragtime inspired by former slaves performing in New Orleans' Congo Square during the latter years of the nineteenth century.

"[38] In a review, writer Jackson Brown stated: "Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity is a confluence of divergent paths stretching back as far as our species can trace, as far as man's first experiments with giving force a form in the manner of sound...

In its place, he sought the sound in between notes and the expression of his instrument as a primal force, an extension of himself in which to explore a unique timbre, improvising in both high and low registers with squeaks, honks, blasts: bursts of passion them all".

Regarding the trio, he wrote: "the amount of understanding this group has for each other's tendencies and creative pursuits is staggering, nigh telepathic... the entire album is three separate 'solos,' each one building off of the other.