"Your Sound Is Like Your Sweat": Miles Davis's Disembodied Sound Discourse

With an image tarnished in the jazz press through association with the drug, a sound that had been described by Barry Ulanov as feeble, and a career that Leonard Feather characterized as slipping away from him, Davis sought to rebuild himself.1 Boxer Sugar Ray Robinson (1921-1989) became the hero-image after whom Davis fashioned his new stance.2 An amateur boxer in his own right, Davis idolized Robinson as both a fighter and a public figure: he actively began to embody Robinsons cold and arrogant attitude, and he even trained at Robinsons gym (Silvermans Gym) and ate in his restaurant and bar.3 Furthermore, in interviews throughout his life, Davis frequently mapped boxing techniques onto his discussions of musical performance, comparing the importance of style, practice, and rhythm between each.4 In doing so, Davis implied a relationship between music and embodiment in which playing a musical instrument required physical engagement-and further, physical domination-like that of boxers.5 Daviss discussions of the moves and techniques of his favorite boxers went beyond those of a casual hobbyist, and his emulation of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson exceeded simple fandom. Gerald Early argues that Robinson was not simply a boxing hero to Davis, but rather played a formative role in Daviss construction of a mythology of black masculinity that relied on the physical embodiment of both discipline and pleasure.6 The body played an important role in Daviss form of cool in the 1950s and 1960s, which Early describes as a kind of black male existentialism that forged a moral code from the imperatives of the male body as it alternately functioned as a symbol of engagement and detachment, of punishing discipline and plush pleasure that operated cooperatively, not in conflict, if rightly understood. . [...]I can imagine fruitful investigations of Ella Fitzgerald's sweat and handkerchief, particularly in conversation with Louis Armstrong, or James Brown's performance of "Cold Sweat" (1969), or, even further afield, Evgeny Kissin's 1997 performance of "La Campanella" at the Royal Albert Hall, in which sweat flies from his forehead and hair as he plays the étude by Franz Liszt. For Davis to align blackness with intellect was a subversive move that counteracted the narratives critics wrote for Davis that described him primarily in terms of his bodily engagement with music, privileging and reifying a separation between body and mind.13 As I argue elsewhere, midcentury jazz critics f