One of the bassist's greatest contributions to jazz was the extended composition, and to hear great and harmonically rich ballads such as "Duke Ellington's Sound of Love" dispensed with in a mere six minutes (the presentation of its theme alone takes up a quarter of the track's total running time) is somewhat unfortunate. The inclusion of Mingus classics such as "Fables of Faubus" and "So Long Eric" cannot help trigger nostalgia on the part of Mingus aficionados for those pieces' legendary readings in the early '60s.