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

Abstract

In a 1986 interview with Ben Sidran, Davis equated his sound and his sweat, explaining “Your sound is, [pause] your sound is like, uh, [brief pause] you know it’s, it’s like your sweat. You know, your sound.” How is sweat like sound, and why does Davis need to evoke the movement of sweat on skin to describe sound? What can Davis mean by describing his sound, unique to himself, as sweat? To answer these questions, I use theories of sweat proposed by Anthony Braxton and Roland Barthes, who each posit that sweat can be used by critics and audiences as either a sign of primitivism or a sign of intellect. The difference lies in who is sweating. While musician and philosopher Anthony Braxton sees jazz critics' perception of sweat as a sign of black musicians’ physical exertion, and therefore musical prowess, philosopher Roland Barthes, basing his argument on a study of white actors, asserts that sweat is a sign of mental exertion. Following this logic, Davis’s sweat would be considered by jazz critics as a sign of physical effort, or another way of linking him to primitivist rhetoric. However, I argue that Davis shifts sweat from a sign of physical effort to a sign of intellectual effort. Whereas Davis’s sweat would have indicated physicality to his critics, Davis articulated his own view of his sweat as disembodied, much like the sound he cultivated, reclaiming both as symbols of intellect, rather than physical labor.