Boxing dances closely with its various musical partners. Jazz and prizefighting made a pair for much of the twentieth century, and one fighter’s history intricately intertwines with that of multiple trumpet players. When Wynton Marsalis crafted music for a film about boxer Jack Johnson, he did something Miles Davis had previously done. Given the musicians’ contentious history, some saw an Oedipal drama with Marsalis essentially doing over a project by a man whose 1960s work clearly influenced his own but whose later work dismayed him. Others pointed to the irony of the younger musician casting himself as the protector of jazz heritage while the older one relentlessly experimented with new sounds. What often got overlooked in connection with the coincidental dual effort was what it reveals both about the music and the sport it celebrated. By producing very different soundtracks Davis and Marsalis highlight the special capacity for the simultaneous embrace of tradition and innovation, continuity and disruption, in both boxing and jazz.

Violence flamed around the United States after Johnson won a racially charged bout. On the Fourth of July, 1910, the first black heavyweight champion prevailed against Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope placed before him by men incensed at the idea of title belt surrounding a non-white waist. Afterwards, bloody incidents endangered the well-being of, among many others, a child who survived to become a jazz giant. “Johnson’s victory caused white rioting throughout the country, and New Orleans was no exception,” Thomas Brothers writes in Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans. “Armstrong remembered hiding in his house while gangs wandered through the neighborhood in search of random targets on whom to release their rage.” The intersection of boxing and jazz included the potential for profound tragedy. Although Armstrong escaped them, Jeffries supporters seeking blood did find not-entirely-random targets, as Geoffrey C. Ward recounts in Unforgivable Blackness. A black marching band celebrating Johnson’s achievement in Armstrong’s city had to run from a fusillade of thrown bricks. To the west, in Houston, a white streetcar passenger slit the throat of a black Johnson fan who dared to cheer for the fighter. A black motorist was stopped and hanged in Wheeling, West Virginia, and white shooters at a black construction camp in Georgia killed three workers and injured five more. “At least eleven and perhaps as may as twenty-six people would die before it was all over,” says Ward. “Hundreds more were hurt, almost all of them black.”

Often, fighters symbolize apparently irreconcilable qualities, and this certainly became Johnson’s situation. Long before Muhammad Ali pointed to his own appearance as evidence of the beauty of blackness or Joe Louis simultaneously knocked out Max Schmeling and fantasies of white supremacy associated with the German fighter, Johnson challenged entrenched racial myths. Like his successors, he became an icon with an unstable meaning. His disregard for prevailing notions of what a black man ought to do –whether winning a prestigious sporting prize or marrying a white woman (Johnson did the latter three times) – threatened certain people and encouraged others. Supporters and detractors did not fit into discrete skin-color-defined camps. Booker T. Washington, for instance, refrained from reveling in Johnson’s athletic success and despised his ostentatious lifestyle, with its flashy clothes, fast cars and parade of sexual partners. Washington denounced Johnson for “misrepresenting the colored people of this country.”

The staunchly individualistic Johnson preferred not to stand for anything or anyone other than himself. According to Ward, “nothing – no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female – could keep him for long from what he wanted.” Looked at from a certain perspective, he could be taken as a rebel against the racism he regularly confronted. In an era when white champions routinely refused to enter the ring with black boxers, he had to chase the previous heavyweight champion around the globe before convincing him to fight in Australia. The United States federal government, deliberately misapplying the White Slave Traffic Act (also known as the Mann Act) and depending on the dubious story of a prostitute, constructed a transparently unjust criminal case in an effort to destroy Johnson, which initially spurred him into exile but ultimately resulted in a year in prison.

Yet even as large portions of the U.S. population reviled him, Johnson also fit the national archetype. “He was in the great American tradition of self-invented men, too,” writes Ward, “and no one admired his handiwork more than he did. All his life, whites and blacks alike would ask him, ‘Just who do you think you are?’ The answer, of course, was always ‘Jack Johnson’…”

The diverse potential ways of interpreting the meaning of Johnson’s life story permit both Davis and Marsalis – despite their conflicting outlooks and opposed styles – to find something of themselves in Johnson’s image.

Boxing mattered a great deal to Davis, and his appreciation of it went beyond the idle interest of the spectator. He saw the characteristics of a boxer in himself, and he discerned parallels between the sport and jazz. In Miles: The Autobiography, he claims people said his aggressiveness showed that he had the mind of a boxer. He also writes that boxing resembles learning to play a musical instrument. Both require extensive practice, for one. He believed it was crucial to learn the fundamentals, after which an athlete or musician could develop his own individual approach. “After you’ve learned to play your instrument the right way, you can turn around and play it the way you want to, any way you hear the music and sound and want to play it,” he says. “But you’ve got to first learn how to be cool and let whatever happens – both in music and boxing – happen.” Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker taught Davis this lesson, as did Sugar Ray Robinson, who had special significance for him. Davis attributed his ability to overcome his heroin habit to boxing generally and to Robinson specifically, which stands as a palpable example of the impact made by a boxer on the development of jazz. The trumpeter admired the fighter’s self-discipline and became determined to exercise his own.

Style reigns supreme, both in music and in boxing, according to Davis. “Boxing’s got style like music’s got style,” and he aimed to incorporate something of the style of boxers he admired – Johnny Bratton, Louis, Robinson and others – into his own personal style. “Some styles are slick and creative and imaginative and innovative and others aren’t.” In Miles, he leaves little doubt about which sort of style he had.

Like Ali, whose style he also respected, Davis had a career characterized by monumental changes. The music he created for a boxing film represented another sharp shift in his artistic evolution. In liner notes for 2003’s The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, music writer Bill Milkowski calls the original 1971 album “the first record where Miles stepped over the line that separated the rock and jazz camps,” and calls attention to the influence of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone on Davis’s sound. He identifies a riff as Davis’s “answer to Sly’s ‘Sing a Simple Song’” and says some of the material sounds “like Miles jamming with the Jimi Hendrix Experience.” Davis had unrealized hope of working with Hendrix’s drummer Buddy Miles on the Jack Johnson record. Reissue producer Bob Belden called it “the album that is going to get Miles into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.” (The hall did induct Davis in 2006.) John McLaughlin, who contributed what Milkowski calls “ripping, proto-punk guitar work” to the “ferocious jam-oriented outing,” remembered that Davis “definitely wanted to go towards more funk.”

Johnson undoubtedly impressed Davis, and the Independence Day rioting sixty years earlier affected the style he sought in the sessions for the film Jack Johnson. Davis tried to transmute boxers’ movements into sound. He likens their shuffling movement to dance steps, which in turn remind him of the sound of a speeding train. “That train image was in my head when I thought about a great boxer like Joe Louis or Jack Johnson,” says Davis, who worked with a boxing trainer at the time he recorded the music for Bill Clayton’s documentary. “When you think of a big heavyweight coming at you it’s like a train.” Milkowski describes the track “Right Off” as a “boldly uncompromising statement … dripping with defiance,” which makes it appropriate for a soundtrack to a movie about Johnson, “a proud black man who lived large and played by his own rules during the early part of the 20^th century.”

Fitting as the attitude and feel might be, that song and the others Davis recorded from February 18 to June 4, 1970, do not sound anything like what would have been played during the boxer’s lifetime. Davis’s electrified soundscape, if Johnson could have experienced it, would probably have felt like disorienting, unfamiliar territory, as it did to some initial listeners a quarter century after Johnson’s death. Davis did not try to imitate music Johnson might have actually heard. Instead, Davis asked himself: “is the music black enough, does it have a black rhythm, can you make the rhythm of the train a black thing, would Jack Johnson dance to that?”

In contrast, Marsalis made a soundtrack for a film about Johnson that sounds like something from the fighter’s historical moment. If Davis’s Jack Johnson fuses jazz with rock and funk, Marsalis’s music for Ken Burns’s Unforgivable Blackness “is built around the blues, “the musical embodiment of the triumph over adversity that Johnson exemplified throughout his life,” says Ward, who wrote the 2004 documentary as well as the biography that shares its name. Johnson certainly might have found the soundtrack, which includes Marsalis originals as well as pieces by Jelly Roll Morton, W.C. Handy and others, recognizable and more readily comprehensible than Davis’s. Where Davis aimed to make music of his own day, Marsalis manages to evoke an earlier one. “Even when he’s not explicitly appropriating early 1900s musical idioms,” critic Michael Holman observed, “his music often feels of a piece with the times being depicted in the black and white photographs and grainy newsreel footage.” Unforgivable Blackness does not mark the first time Marsalis crafted music for a boxing film. He scored Sugar Ray Robinson: Bright Lights and Dark Shadows of a Champion, a 1998 documentary about another of Miles Davis’s heroes.

Johnson regarded himself as quintessentially American, and this side of him relates to Marsalis. Even though at the time, as Ward writes, “most American Negroes were relegated to second-class citizenship,” Johnson determined to live his life as if there were no color line encircling it. Johnson “saw no reason ever to accept any limitations on himself to which other Americans were not also subject.” When performance space was being built specifically for Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York magazine described Marsalis, the institution’s artistic director and key fundraiser, as “someone to whom race and class barriers simply do not apply.” Furthermore, Marsalis stresses the specifically national character of jazz, calling it “the greatest music ever produced in this country” and America’s “greatest art form, a democratic triumph of order and beauty over chaos.” Where Davis relishes Johnson’s flaunting of his success and taunting of white supremacists, Marsalis advocates race neutrality in his field. Jazz “teaches us what can happen when we come together; the ultimate story is integration, and recognition of the humanity of people regardless of their race,” Marsalis told The Guardian.

While for publicity purposes fighters sometimes feign dislike for each other to make their upcoming bouts look like personal grudge matches rather than straightforward professional athletic contests, Davis and Marsalis really did not get along. The two clashed both personally and musically. Davis felt Marsalis had said disrespectful things about him in the press and, while conceding Marsalis’s talent, questioned the material he played. Davis wanted to do new things, not conserve certain work in a rigidly structured repertory. “They got Wynton playing some old dead European music,” Davis complains in Miles. “Why doesn’t he play some of the American black composers, give them some play?” He might have dismissed Johnson’s record collection as consisting of “old shit” that has “been done over and over again,” which is how he characterizes canonical classical music. Davis and Marsalis represent divergent ideas about music and the mutability of jazz. Davis recounts an incident from 1986 when Marsalis walked on stage during Davis’s set and tried to join in with the band. Davis furiously told him to leave. “He wouldn’t have fit in,” he explains in his autobiography. “Wynton can’t play the kind of shit we were playing. He’s not into that kind of style and so we would have had to make adjustment to the way he was going to be playing.”

Marsalis confirms the basic outline of his exchange with Davis at a festival in Vancouver, Canada, but provides an alternative interpretation. Marsalis claims his band members bet him he would not confront Davis because the older man intimidated him. He rose to the challenge because he was upset about things Davis had said about his family. Marsalis says that after Davis insisted he “get the fuck off the stage,” Davis raised his horn and played. “I guess he was trying to put me in my place, show me who was boss,” Marsalis told New York. He admitted to an inability to play what Davis was playing then, five years before his death, but not in the sense of Davis’s dismissal of his adaptability. According to Marsalis, Davis “played some sad shit. He had nothing left.” He found it pathetic to see “a great player challenged like that and be without a response.” Yet he also took some pleasure in it. “Miles knew what was up. He knew the Oedipal deal, he’d done enough of it himself when he was young. Besides, it was fun.”

Regardless of whether what Ben Ratliff calls Davis’s “fascinating, maddening, posturing autobiography” tells the whole story of the trumpeters’ tumultuous interactions or Marsalis’s account contains the vital truth, the two trumpeters definitely exemplify conflicting approaches to their work. Much like certain boxers, willingly or not, have come to be regarded as emblematic of certain attributes, Davis and Marsalis can be seen as representative of distinct schools of thought. Marsalis co-leads the camp associated with critic Stanley Crouch and writer Albert Murray, author of 1976’s Stomping the Blues. Crouch takes credit for helping Marsalis develop an appreciation for his precursor and fellow son of New Orleans, Armstrong. The Crouch-Marsalis-Murray take on the music stresses heritage and swing rhythm. More specifically, according to Holman, “Marsalis is the leading figure in a movement among jazz musicians that has turned firmly away from just the sort of electronic and rock-or pop-inflected experiments that Davis championed in albums like Jack Johnson.” Further, according to The Guardian, “Marsalis also led a move away from Miles Davis’s rock star image and the informality of T-shirts back to jazzmen in suits. ‘Our music has a tradition, and we’ve chosen to affirm who we are,’ he says.”

The rival camp believes the adamant emphasis on earlier times stifles the innovation that should serve as the throbbing heart of the music. Critic Nat Hentoff derided Marsalis as the “pope of jazz.” Responding to the idea of jazz as black classical music, trumpeter Lester Bowie asked, “What about the innovation? If you retread what’s gone before, even if it sounds like jazz, it could be anathema to the spirit of jazz.” Paradoxically, change defines the history of jazz, complicating a curatorial approach and raising fundamental questions. Does its heritage get diluted when mixed with other music, as Marsalis claimed happened with Davis’s jazz-rock fusion, or does the anything-goes, ceaseless search for a new sound, regardless of generic definitions, better embody jazz’s true spirit?

While it is possible to align both Davis and Marsalis with Johnsonian characteristics, a contrast between that champion and a later one offers another way of looking at the musicians’ feud. Just as Marsalis did something Davis did earlier, but did so in an older, more traditional style, Joe Louis attempted to redo what Johnson had done when he became the second black heavyweight champion, and he did so by consciously adopting a less divisive, controversial persona. As a boxer, Johnson was ahead of his times. He was inventive, developing a fighting style closer to that of contemporary fighters than that of his peers. Indeed, he can be compared with Ali, who during his rise to the championship frequently weathered criticism for rejecting a conventional approach and insisting on boxing (and living) his own way. Again like Ali, Johnson demeaned his opponents and appeared to enjoy humiliating them. In sharp contrast to Johnson (and Ali), Joe Louis purposely behaved much differently. Early on, his handlers “spread a kind of ‘official’ image of Louis’s character that strongly influenced public perceptions of Louis for the rest of his career,” writes his biographer Chris Mead. “They wanted to dissociate Louis from the memory of Jack Johnson.” He was directed not to gloat after knocking down an opponent. Outside the ring, he did not brag; he complimented opponents instead. He avoided being photographed with white women. He was presented as a “model of middle-class virtue” as far removed from “Johnson’s negative image as possible.” The careful construction of his image had the desired effect. Prior to World War II, white sports writers “had emphasized the differences between Louis and themselves by stereotyping him, referring to his color, calling him a ‘credit to his race’ and ‘an African,’” says Mead. Subsequently, they followed the example of sportswriter Jimmy Cannon by repeating the line that Louis was “a credit to his race – meaning not the colored race, but the human race,” and by explicitly identifying Louis as an American.

Just as Marsalis and Davis distanced themselves from each other, Johnson and Louis could acknowledge each others talent but ultimately opt for mutual rejection as well. Recognizing the younger fighter’s skills, Johnson offered to work with Louis, whose trainer adamantly refused, disallowing any association between the boxers. In response, Johnson loudly announced that he’d bet against Louis in his first fight against Schmeling, the one Louis lost, and then publicly boasted of his windfall. Continuing a tradition of sorts, Louis criticized the politics and public behavior of Ali when he attained controversial prominence.

As these antagonisms illustrate, what went before sustains an enduring presence in both boxing and jazz. “No sport is more mindful of its iconic past than boxing,” Joyce Carol Oates observed in a review of Ward’s biography, and a similar statement could be made of jazz. Indeed, history can serve as the basis for ongoing fascination with both. Mindfulness of boxing’s past manifests itself in speculation about the outcome of fights between boxers of different eras. Who is superior: Johnson or Louis? (Oates leans towards the latter.) A similar phenomenon occurs in jazz. (“Marsalis may be a fine trumpeter, but he is no Miles Davis,” Adam Shatz gratuitously remarked in a Nation article about JazzTimes firing columnist Crouch.) However, the contest between the competing views of jazz and the role of the past – the preservationist or the innovative – may ultimately end in a draw. Perhaps it really amounts to an exhibition rather than an actual fight. “Jazz is about both change and tradition,” Marsalis declares: both, not one or the other.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Johnson loved music and played it himself. He traveled with records and a record player as well as bass viol, according to Ward. Johnson “prized a 7 ft. bass fiddle on which he’d proudly thump jazz,” as Davis puts it in liner notes he wrote for his music inspired by the fighter. After boxing, Johnson sometimes played with a jazz band, whose songs almost certainly would have been closer in style to Marsalis than Davis. Ward thinks the music Marsalis wrote or rearranged for Unforgivable Blackness captures Johnson’s life and echoes his time, and he suspects the boxer would have found it “irresistible.” Then again, if Johnson possessed the qualities Davis admired in other boxers – and he definitely respected the fighter’s flamboyant self-assertion – then perhaps Davis’s unrestrained, raucous 1970s music comes closer to expressing Johnson’s personality. “Johnson portrayed Freedom,” Davis says. “It rang just as loud as the bell proclaiming him Champion.” When not in public, however, Johnson preferred to listen to opera. He played a recording of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore on his beloved gramophone everyday, according to Ward. In an irony worth savoring, Johnson himself, rather than recognizing himself in either Davis’s or Marsalis’s records, might actually have preferred to hear some other type of music. He might have wanted to dance to something else altogether. Then again, given the tradition of boxers possessing remarkably versatile symbolic powers as well as the capacity of jazz to accommodate simultaneously the styles and approaches of Marsalis and Davis, it is equally possible that Johnson would have appreciated both tributes to him.

Works Cited in “Jack Johnson’s Dance”

Brothers, Thomas. 2006. Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (New York: W.W. Norton & Company).

Davis, Miles and Quincy Troupe. 2005 [1989]. Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster).

Holman, Michael. 2005. “Miles Davis v. Wynton Marsalis: Jack Johnson in Jazz,” All About Jazz, 8 March. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=16763.

Jacobson, Mark. 2001. “Wynton center,” New York, 17 December.

Jaggi, Maya. 2003. “Blowing up a storm,” The Guardian, 25 January. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4590185-110428,00.html.

Mead, Chris. 1986. Champion: Joe Louis: Black Hero in White America (London: Robson Books).

Oates, Joyce Carol. 2004. “The man with the golden smile,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 51, No. 18, 18 November.

Ratliff, Ben. 2007. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Shatz, Adam. 2003. “Fight Club,” The Nation, 9 June.

Ward, Geoffrey C. 2004. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).

Wiley, Ralph. 2000. Serenity: A Boxing Memoir (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press).

John G. Rodwan, Jr.’s work has appeared in publications such as The Mailer Review, Open Letters, Spot Literary Magazine, The Oregonian, California Literary Review, Slow Trains, The Brooklyn Rail, American Writer, Free Inquiry, the Humanist and the International Labor Office’s Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety. A former correspondent for Fight News, he also contributed to the Ringside and Training Principles website.