Most of this album is taken up by MDM, in which Charles Mingus layers Duke Ellington's Main Stem, Thelonious Monk's Straight, No Chaser and his own Fifty-First Street Blues over one another. Stormy Weather was recorded with the piano-less quartet of Eric Dolphy, Ted Curson and Dannie Richmond. Lock 'Em Up carries the subtitle Hellview of Bellevue, after the New York hospital where Mingus himself had spent a short time. The sessions took place in New York in October and November 1960 for Candid, Nat Hentoff's label, and the album itself originally came out in 1961.

This edition is an LP.