structural:summarization
Views on his earlier work

Late in his life, from the "electric period" onwards, Davis repeatedly explained his reasons for not wishing to perform his earlier works, such as Birth of the Cool or Kind of Blue. In his view, remaining stylistically static was the wrong option. He commented: " ' So What' or Kind of Blue, they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It's over... What I used to play with Bill Evans, all those different modes, and substitute chords, we had the energy then and we liked it. But I have no feel for it anymore, it's more like warmed-over turkey." When Shirley Horn insisted in 1990 that Miles reconsider playing the ballads and modal tunes of his Kind of Blue period, he said: "Nah, it hurts my lip." Bill Evans, who played piano on Kind of Blue, said: "I would like to hear more of the consummate melodic master, but I feel that big business and his record company have had a corrupting influence on his material. The rock and pop thing certainly draws a wider audience." Throughout his later career, Davis declined offers to reinstate his 1960s quintet.

Many books and documentaries focus on his work before 1975. According to an article by The Independent, from 1975 onwards a decline in critical praise for Davis's output began to form, with many viewing the era as "worthless": "There is a surprisingly widespread view that, in terms of the merits of his musical output, Davis might as well have died in 1975." In a 1982 interview in DownBeat, Wynton Marsalis said: "They call Miles's stuff jazz. That stuff is not jazz, man. Just because somebody played jazz at one time, that doesn't mean they're still playing it." Despite his contempt for Davis' later work, Marsalis' work is "laden with ironic references to Davis' music of the '60s". Davis did not necessarily disagree; lambasting what he saw as Marsalis's stylistic conservatism, Davis said "Jazz is dead... it's finito! It's over and there's no point apeing the shit." Writer Stanley Crouch criticized Davis's work from In a Silent Way onwards.