In a contemporary review of the album, Bob Palmer of Rolling Stone magazine believed Carlos Garnett's saxophone playing sounded marginalized, but wrote that the music is "bracing, popping, at least one step ahead of the many Davis imitators. There are few real surprises, but there's a continuing skein of rhythms, themes and developments that makes fine extended listening."[14]Robert Christgau wrote in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981) that although "it takes a while to get into gear" and is "pretty narrow in function", the album's "urban voodoo" has "more going for it rhythmically than On the Corner."[3] In an article for The Village Voice, Christgau wrote of the album upon its reissue in 1997:
"By In Concert ... [Michael] Henderson is the sole survivor from the more talented prior band—although, crucially, Al Foster pushes like [Jack] DeJohnette with less excess motion. The result is the purest jazz-funk record ever—not as quick or tricky as James Brown, but more richly layered, riffs and drones and wah-wahs and tunelets and weird noises and shifting key centers snaking along on a sexually solicitous, subtly indomitable pulse."[1]
According to AllMusic editor Steve Huey, "melody isn't the point of this music; it's about power, rhythm, and the sum energy of the collective, and of Davis' electric jazz-rock albums, In Concert does one of the most mind-bending jobs of living up to those ideals".[2]Erik Davis, writing in Spin magazine, praised its "rhythmic wall of sound" and said that its music is "of such propulsive psychedelic density that it makes the heaviest P-Funk sound like the Archies."[15]JazzTimes writer Tom Terrell called Davis "a spiritual Hendrix with his own cosmic band of gypsies", and commented that the album's "visionary performance ... predicts hip hop ('Rated X''s bassline = 'White Lines'), Ornette's Prime Time ('Black Satin') and Talking Heads ('Ife')".[16]
In a mixed review, Don Heckman of the Los Angeles Times criticized Davis' use of the wah-wah effects controller and said that he was "not in particularly exceptional form" because he had "moved more deeply into pounding funk rhythms and fairly static sound textures."[7] In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), J. D. Considine felt that, although it was "occasionally fascinating, the busily churning rhythms often seem oddly static, as if the band were laboriously treading water."[17]
