"Chasin' the Trane" is in part successful because of the tension between what Gary Giddins called Coltrane's "desire to pare down harmony and escape any form — chords, choruses, the tempered scale — that keeps him from an elusive grail of total expressiveness" with the fact that "Garrison and Jones follow him... but whenever he threatens to push beyond the blues, they bring him home." Giddins wrote: "In pushing jazz orthodoxies to but not through the wall, Coltrane employs everything he has learned in order to challenge the validity of what he had already mastered... No matter how far afield he goes, he upholds the playful quality of the theme, recurrent and childlike, for the duration of the performance." Ratliff stated that "Chasin' the Trane" "is a unifier. This recording, precisely, is what free jazz and straight-ahead jazz... have in common."