This album... is an extension of the Blue Notes but with greater absorption of modernist touches and the flowerings of each musician's unique voice.

"[10] Writing for The Jazz Mann, Tim Owen called the music "exciting stuff," and remarked: "McGregor's style somehow parallels both Cecil Taylor's fleet, explosive attack and Monk's probing angularity, and the group sound is rooted in these foundations.

"[7] Ethnomusicologist Carol Ann Muller noted that "the energy of the music conveys an urgent drive," and wrote: "one has the clear sense that these musicians are completely in tune with each other; they listen, respond to, and put the sounds together in the moment and without inhibition.

"[12] In an article for Point of Departure, Bill Shoemaker described the album as "sprawling and edgy," and "something of a retrospective of McGregor's London years, a both/and approach to mingling African and American materials."

He stated that "McGregor had something of Ellington's knack of knowing when to lay out and when to make a lightning-quick interjection to jolt horn solos, albeit using a vocabulary closer to that which [Cecil] Taylor introduced in the mid-1950s.