It’s been 18 years since he passed away, but Miles Davis is still the biggest jazz artist on the planet. If anything, the mercurial trumpeter casts a greater shadow now than he did when he was alive. Tributes to his legacy are everywhere, from a huge exhibition of memorabilia in Paris to a 24-hour temporary satellite radio station on SIRIUS Canada, to a series of concerts and tours led by former sidemen and followers, to books, to a Don Cheadle-helmed biopic that’s in the works. On Tuesday, Sony will release a 71-disc box set of Davis’s work.

The question arises: At what point does the constant paying of tribute turn into fixation? And furthermore, is there a danger that in looking back at the career of someone who was always looking forward, the jazz world is ignoring the innovation of a younger generation?

Certainly, from a commercial standpoint, Miles Davis is an easy sell to crossover audiences at a time when jazz is hardly a commercial force. “John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, I don’t think, have sunk into popular culture,” says André Menard, artistic director of the Montreal Jazz Festival, “but Miles’s sounds have percolated in most of rock and pop music, from what I hear all the time. … He has this crushing presence in the world of music.”

Crucial to Miles’s appeal is his unique, enigmatic star quality. Miles the man appears to have been as complex as his music: no two people remember him the same way. Biographer Jack Chambers, who wrote the acclaimed two-volume set Milestones (1983-’85), calls the jazz legend “a miserable son of a bitch” and “a genuinely nasty man.” Menard, who presented Miles’s concerts on four occasions, suggests that the trumpeter had a “concrete aura that was very hard to get through,” but that he was nonetheless “a gentleman.”

What everyone does agree on is that he took orders from no one, and that — up until two retrospective concerts at the end of his life — he never looked back, either at his own legacy or at that of his fellow jazz musicians. Since his death, however, the jazz tribute project has become such a tradition that jazz itself has come to be seen as a “retrospective art form,” as Chambers puts it, where all “the commemorative extravaganza, concerts, CDs” come across as “a marketing ploy. There’s an emphasis on looking back because some of the creative impetus is stuck back there.”

Part of the problem, for Chambers, is the “academic crust on the jazz world that was not there until the 1990s. What’s missing for me is this raw kind of feeling that players could communicate in performance in days gone by.” Davis himself dropped out of Juilliard after studying for a brief period there in the mid-’40s: “He always said he learned more from Dizzy Gillespie at night than he did from his professors in the daytime.”

While Davis might have turned his back on the formal study of music, his work will occupy jazz musicologists for generations to come: because he was such a pioneer — from cool jazz to hard bop to modal jazz to fusion with rock and funk — it’s almost impossible to get around him in any study of the genre. Moreover, so great has his critical and commercial success been that it has tended to drown out the work of those around him — drummer Jimmy Cobb, for instance, the sole survivor of the Kind of Blue sessions, makes the news only when playing concerts of music from that one seminal album.

“The spirit of having to go backwards to be noticed saddens me,” says Toronto-based trumpeter Nick “Brownman” Ali. However, he suggests, there is a way out: the key is not to “photocopy” Davis’s sound or his playing but to concentrate on his spirit of “fearlessness and irreverence.” In his own recurring series of five-night tribute concerts, Brownman and a shifting cast of Canadian and American collaborators celebrate different phases of Davis’s music while attempting to use the frameworks “to be original and play like we live in 2009.”

There’s always the hope that a new Miles Davis may emerge to lead jazz forward, inspired by the spirit, rather than the letter, of the original. “It can be done,” Brownman asserts. “But you have to be just as fearless as Miles was.”

- We Want Miles runs at Paris’s Cité de la Musique until Jan. 17, and then moves to Montreal’s Musée des Beaux-Arts from April 30-Aug. 29, 2010. Miles Davis Radio runs on SIRIUS Channel 72 until Wednesday. The Brownman Electryc Trio’s album Juggernaut is available now on Browntasaurus Records.