[1][2] Lee and Blake met while students at Bard College, and, as a duo, won the Wednesday night Apollo Theater amateur contest, leading to a record deal with RCA.

[5] In a review for AllMusic, Andrew Hamlin wrote: "'Third stream' may have been the bandied term, but this unjustly ignored 1962 duet set... plays blissfully free of the lumbering lugubriousness and Big Mac-thick philosophizing that mar so much of that music.

Lee was never excessively theatrical, though her articulation derives more from speech rhythms than from bel canto or traditional jazz singing; Blake swings even when he sounds most abstract.

He continued: "On that album... Lee and Blake approached each other not as singer and accompanist but as highly interactive improvisers, taking apart standards... and rearranging them like a pair of musical Cubists.

Full of whimsical, often violent contrasts in color and dynamics, Blake's playing was an eccentric, fractured collage of twentieth-century modernism, Thelonious Monk, gospel, and film music.