The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow states "The still-startling music, which uses space, dynamics, and a wide range of emotions expertly, is not for everyone's taste (the high-energy tenors of the mid-1960s are actually easier to get into), but worth the struggle".[3]The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide said "their masterpiece, People in Sorrow, a forty-minute example of how the group's menagerie of instruments and spontaneous approach to structure can create clearly delineated precisely shaded and starkly emotional music".[4]