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

Abstract

"Your Sound Is Like Your Sweat":Miles Davis's Disembodied Sound Discourse Kelsey A. K. Klotz (bio) In 1954, Miles Davis returned to New York after ridding himself of his heroin habit cold turkey at home in East St. Louis. 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 Robinson's "cold" and "arrogant attitude," and he even trained at Robinson's gym (Silverman's 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 Davis's 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 Davis's 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 Davis's 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 [End Page 33] 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. . . . The body was the cosmos, the root of all self-consciousness that mattered." Davis's embodiment of both Apollonian and Dionysian forms of masculinity is evident in a 1968 discussion with drummer and interviewer, Arthur Taylor. Taylor asked Davis, "Why do you go to the gymnasium so often, Miles?"7 Davis responded, "I go to the gym to keep my body in shape, so I can hold notes longer, so my stomach will be flat and so I'll look handsome." Davis's answer spans the spectrum between the musical and the physical, the professional and the sensuous, indicating his preference for a variety of modes of embodied self-presentation. However, even as Davis boxed to keep himself "together, [his] body and [his] mind," his efforts played out in complicated and contradictory ways on the lives, bodies, and careers of those women with whom he came into contact. Writers from W.E.B. Du Bois to Ta-Nehisi Coates have described the constant sense of embodiment black Americans live with. As Coates writes, "Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body."8 This particular form of embodiment—itself an imprint of slavery, colonialism, and violence—is part and parcel of what Frantz Fanon called "the black experience of living."9 Likewise, cultural theorist Stuart Hall has argued that black musicians' performances necessarily include the body "as if it was, and it often was, the only cultural capital we had. We have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation."10 Davis was well aware of the embodiment of black lived experiences; in interviews throughout his life, Davis frequently talked about race and racism, maintaining a distinction between black music and white music that frequently hinged on "authentic" performances. But no matter how much Davis's self-image was rooted in the body, Davis also promoted his music through discourses of disembodiment, complicating the notion that black masculinity may only include two dialectical categories. Though the language of jazz criticism often revolved around racial binaries that hierarchically associated the body with blackness and the mind with whiteness...