[3] In addition to booking the hall and writing all the music, Stone also put up posters advertising the concert, rehearsed the musicians, and hired a recording engineer.

before landing with Blue Note, who intended to release the full concert over two volumes as BLP 4210 and 4211, omitting only a trio selection and a rhythm-and-blues number.

After test pressings had been made, legal complications caused the release to be renegotiated; BLP 4211 was turned over to Bernard Stollman, and was released—minus "Taurus", a solo bass performance by Izenson—as Town Hall, 1962 on ESP-Disk.

Stollman took the tape to engineer Dave Sarser, who was able to compress the bass track, removing the distortion and laying the groundwork for the ESP-Disk release.

"[11] The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings called "Sadness" one of Coleman's "most plangent and affecting themes... deeply marked by the blues," while "Doughnut" "catches Ornette in his most demonstrative form, punching out notes like a bar-walking R&B man."

"[12] Lyn Horton, writing for All About Jazz, awarded the album 5 stars, commenting, "In the stream of its apparent freedom, this trio acts with constraints, imposed not by restriction, but by genius.