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. The eeriness, the mystery, and the sweetness lie always in the deceptive simplicity... The record started no revolution, probably because no other two performers had such chemistry or such a distinctive reaction. As jazz styling, though, it endures unsurprisingly. You hear the set in less than one hour... You spend decades wandering inside the sound, as you might inside a sonic Stonehenge, savoring each new vantage point discovered, and the impossibility of discovering them all." In an article for
The New York Review, Adam Shatz wrote that the album "in its mélange of youthful effervescence and noir fatalism, captured the sensibility of New York bohemia as much as John Cassavetes's
Shadows or James Baldwin's
Another Country." 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. His spiky, unresolved style found a perfect foil in the serenity and poise of Lee's singing and in her precise, sensuous diction." ==Track listing==