The AllMusic review by Thom Jurek states: "Other Folks' Music is perhaps his most dizzying and troubling recording. Meant to be both a tribute and a pointer for the next move in modern black music, Other Folks' Music is, when all is said and done, a very private altar adorned with much of Kirk's personal iconography... in all of Kirk's moods and segues, his usually indelible mark of inseparability — the trace that says that this is all one music and we are all one people — is missing here, and the listener can feel the separation between tracks, and sometimes inside the tracks themselves. The music is still topnotch, but that nagging ghost of isolation on Other Folks' Music can still haunt the listener".[1]