I sort of look at this album the same way I look at Gertrude Stein's "book for children" (THE WORLD IS ROUND). I mean, Wooley's "game" here appeals to me as very syntactical, with all that terms implies and entails. Like, OK, let's REALLY go back to first principles -- something the Young Lions advocated, a "return" to the essentials of the music -- and see what happens when we start to experiment at that level. A) Like impulses can produce very unlike results; B) Let's entertain the possibility that, latent in these compositions is a musical direction that WM and the YL et al. could have taken but did not. But the seeds of their aesthetic's own undoing (or full flowering, take your pick) are lying dormant in the aesthetic particulars themselves.
Counterfactual history, perhaps. And, given where Wooley is positioned generationally, it makes perfect sense to me. Isn't there a bit of counterfactual history at work in the music of Albert Ayler, Gil Evans, Mingus?