Jazz music and professional boxing were both arguably reaching their cultural peaks in the 1950s. Unlike a lot of other forms of entertainment, the greatest stars in both fields were African American during a time when segregation was still a reality in much of the United States.

Miles Davis obviously found his success as a horn player rather than a fighter, but he was always an appreciator of the ‘sweet science’ of boxing, and did his fair share of training and sparring through much of his life.

“It gives you a lot of strength,” he told DownBeat in 1969. “It’s good for your wind. I mean, when I go to play something that I know is kind of impossible to play, I have that strength, that wind. And it blows the smoke out of your lungs from last night.”

A lot of what Davis had learned about strength had come from surviving the weakest moments of his life. Unlike a lot of African Americans growing up during the Great Depression, Miles was middle-class, the son of a music teacher and a dentist, and from East St Louis, Illinois, rather than the Jim Crow South.

Given the opportunity to excel, he was already a member of Charlie Parker’s band in New York by the age of 18, but entering that world was both a blessing and a curse. So many of the musicians he was playing with at the time, including Parker himself, were hooked on heroin; it was almost inevitable that a young, impressionable newcomer from the Midwest was going to fall under the same influence.

Davis wasn’t naive about it, though. Always a calculating, cerebral type of performer, he didn’t get into smack to fit in; he did it because he thought it would benefit his playing. “It enhances creativity,” Davis told a reporter with United Press International in 1986.

“They say it doesn’t, but it does. You see people in movies and they get ready to do something; they say, ‘Pour me a drink, I had a hard day,’ or, ‘I need to light up a cigarette.’ Now, that shit is worse than dope.”

Davis often argued that many of the eventual victims of heroin addiction, including Parker and Billie Holiday, died because they couldn’t legally manage their drug use, and instead suffered from run-ins with the law. Davis had been luckier. When he hit rock bottom in 1953, the cops didn’t bust him. Instead, his own friends and family rallied to try to pull him away from his self-destructive course. In the end, though, it took a harsh moment of self-realisation to turn the tide and get himself straight.

One night, after a series of benders in Hermosa Beach, California, with drummer Max Roach, Davis looked in the mirror and had a reckoning with himself. He was 27, and should have been entering his prime, but was instead adrift and completely creatively lost. He built up the courage to phone home to his father in Illinois and boarded a train back east the next day.

When he arrived back at his childhood home, his father, Doc Davis, was stern and direct. “You have to do this by yourself,” he said. “You know that, ’cause you have been around drugs all your life. You know what you have to do.”

What he had to do was go cold turkey, a potentially horrific ordeal that could take days if not weeks. Knowing he had no real alternative, Davis locked himself in his old bedroom, curled up in a foetal position, and gradually went into a cold sweat until “my pores opened up and I smelled like chicken soup,” as he later told Ebony magazine.

The 12 days Miles Davis spent getting clean were ultimately just as important to his life and career, and to the sound of jazz in the second half of the 20th century, as any time he spent actually writing or playing in a studio or on a stage. Sadly, he couldn’t look to the example of any of his fellow musicians on how to navigate this challenge either; the vast majority of users he knew in the jazz scene never kicked the habit. Instead, Davis found his inspiration in that other discipline that fascinated him.

“Sugar Ray Robinson, the boxing champion, inspired me to kick my habit,” he told Spin in 1985. “I said, ‘If that mother can win all those fights, I can break this motherfuckin’ habit.’ I laid down and stared at the ceiling for 12 days and cursed everybody I didn’t like. I was kicking it the hard way.”

Interestingly, Sugar Ray Robinson had temporarily retired from the sport at the time that Davis was holed up in recovery, but over the course of a 25-year career, Robinson ultimately fought in 201 bouts, winning 174 of them. By comparison, Tyson Fury has only fought 39 times in his celebrated professional career. There was something about Robinson’s tenacity and longevity that provided a guiding light for Davis in his moment of weakness, and it made him all the more committed to developing his own skills as a fighter in the years after, whether he needed to fend off the pull of addiction or just some jerk in a club.

“A man in the street is no contest against what I can drop on him,” Davis bragged to DownBeat, doing his best Muhammad Ali impression. “Even if he hits me three or four times, he’ll be tired. I don’t get tired. A guy who doesn’t know how to fight is the one who always wants to fight. They think it’s a big deal to fight, but it’s the easiest thing in the world to whip somebody like that.”