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Book: The Last Miles

Chapter: The verdict on the music of the 1980s

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.18878

Blurb:

History had long decided that Miles Davis was one of the giants of jazz, but how will the music of his nal decade be judged? To some, Miles had stopped innovating in this period and was following rather than creating trends. Writer Paul Tingen says: “While the process of rediscovering and re-evaluating Miles’s electric experiments of the ’60s and ’70s is ongoing, no similar interest is discernible regarding his music from 1981 to 1991. The simplest explanation is that the music of 1981 to 1991 did not announce a new musical paradigm and hence does not invite belated re-evaluation.” Tingen concludes that the music of Miles’s last decade was a translation rather than a transcendence.

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