Borges was, of course, sending up a certain sort of literary criticism. And MOPDTK is sending up a certain mindset in the jazz world. The genre’s boosters often refer to it as “America’s classical music,” a term meant to argue for the serious musicianship of the style, to argue for the serious cultural contributions of Ellington and Coleman next to Bach and Beethoven—and perhaps help to attract precious cultural programming dollars. That’s more dangerous than it seems. Few would call classical music a commercially vital form, and Alex Ross recently lamented in The New Yorker how Beethoven and his peers in the canon dominate to the point of crowding out innovation. Equating jazz with classical music threatens to turn a genre born in brothels and boozy nightclubs into a museum piece. (I am hardly the first to make this point.) Blue is the reductio ad absurdum: If jazz is classical music, why not perform it like classical music? How, then, is Kind of Blue different from “Eroica”? Just play all the notes from the score, reproduce it exactly the same, the band smirks.

The joke is that no one has ever tried to recreate a record quite like this, but for the last six decades, musicians have performing music that sounds a lot like Kind of Blue and the other milestone records of its era. What was once modern jazz has become more and more dated, but that hasn’t dissuaded many people from recreating it over and over. And there’s no theoretical cover for self-satisfied or lazy music that sounds pretty much like (rather than facetiously identical to) late 1950s post-bop. Unlike Blue, that’s a bona fide affront to the jazz tradition, and real grounds for anger.

What Blue does not and cannot do is replace its namesake, though the new record has been criticized as plagiarism or as forgery—including by Davis’s nephew Vince Wilburn, who serves as a family spokesman. In addition to a statement from Davis’s estate saying it did not support the project, Wilburn blasted the record on Facebook, even while noting that legally, Blue breaks no rules. The accusation misses the mark, since there has to be some sort of deception to constitute plagiarism or forgery, whereas MOPDTK make no claims to be creating an original work. I’m fairly confident that everyone who will buy Blue already owns Kind of Blue. (The original has sold millions of copies; MOPDTK’s top-selling record has moved 1,200 units.) Many people who do will probably listen to it once or twice, maybe comparing it to the original, and then file it away to collect dust.

The single most entertaining knock on Blue is that Miles would object. The trumpeter was famously insistent on innovation, refusing to fall back on old styles or crutches (“You know why I quit playing ballads? ‘Cause I love playing ballads."). But to borrow the name of the first track on Kind of Blue (and Blue), So what? Exalting Davis to the status of a god, whose imputed opinions are incontrovertible, is an even worse form of idolatry than the one Blue’s critics have alleged; they have stepped into MOPDTK’s trap.

Are there valid complaints to be lodged against Blue? Sure. Some of the mimicry doesn’t hold up. It doesn’t always swing. It doesn’t add much to a music collection, if anyone still has those. Perhaps the biggest problem is that it’s a diversion from MOPDTK making their own, important music. But the provocation to the jazz world, the demand to make something that really is fresh and different and not just another halfhearted impression, just might be worth the sacrifice.