For approximately 18 months (from the fall of 1961 to June 1963), Archie Shepp and Bill Dixon co-led a group that varied in size between a quartet, quintet and sextet, depending on the gig. They mostly played coffee houses and small theatres in Greenwich Village, and travelled to Scandinavia in July 1962 for a series of concerts at the first International Youth Festival in Helsinki. Already in his late 30s, Bill Dixon seems to have suddenly appeared in 1962, stretching jazz modernism in distinctively new ways with this pivotal album. However, the trumpeter had been on the margins of the New York jazz scene for over a decade, encountering the likes of Cecil Taylor, Tina Brooks, and Earl Griffiths, often in informal settings.

Back in the United States, they featured in a series of radio performances on New York's WBAI. However, unless any unknown radio broadcast or live European performances surface, their only recorded work together consist of the studio quartet album made for