MacDermot's music is popular with collectors of jazz and funk. Working with jazz musicians such as Bernard Purdie, Jimmy Lewis and Idris Muhammad, MacDermot created pieces that prefigured the funk material of James Brown. In recent decades, his work has become popular with hip-hop musicians including Busta Rhymes, who sampled "Space" from MacDermot's 1969 record "Woman Is Sweeter" for chart-topper "Woo hah!!", and Run DMC, who sampled the "Hair" song "Where Do I Go?" for their Grammy Award-winning "Down with the King". Handsome Boy Modelling School ("The Truth"), DJ Vadim, DJ Premier and Oh No have all sampled the same segment from "Coffee Cold", from "Shapes of Rhythm" (1966).