Calling it "a major disappointment" and "[o]ne of the few complete duds of Sonny Rollins' career,"
AllMusic reviewer
Scott Yanow describes the album as a "rambling live session" that "sounds as if Rollins were merely warming up, playing whatever came into his mind without any thought of developing a coherent statement". Still, theirs was decidedly the minority view.
The New York Times critic
Jon Pareles, writing shortly after the album's release, described it as "one of Mr. Rollins's most illuminating albums," adding that it "may be as close as we can get to a great jazz musician's stream of consciousness." Others sounded a similar theme, including ''
Saturday Review's
John Swenson, who described the album as "nearly an hour [of] Rollins develop[ing] stunning solo ideas that rank with some of the best playing of his career," The Providence Journal's
Jim MacNie, who called it "an amazing tour de force," and The Boston Phoenix'', which named it one of the top 10 jazz albums of 1985. The reviewer for
The Saxophone Symposium, a periodical of the
North American Saxophone Alliance, described his "considerable time spent" with Rollins' album as "[p]robably one of my most intense recent listening experiences," while ''
Musician's'' Chip Stern called the album "a wondrous thing, like the peak of some inscrutable mountain parting through the clouds for the first time," noting its emphasis of "melodic rhythmic development over the harmonic," and ascribing to Rollins' improvisation "a stately thematic inevitability that would do
Mozart proud." ==Track listing==