Toward a Theory of Cinematic Detachment; or, The Beauty of John Coltrane

This study offers a sustained engagement with Amiri Baraka's liner notes for the album Live at Birdland (1964) by John Coltrane. In doing so, it aims to demonstrate how Baraka's encounter with the track “Alabama” enacts a uniquely cinematic form of detachment that refuses the regulatory given of racial violence as a precondition for the beauty of black music. Of key interest throughout is how montage organizes thought; or, more precisely, how cinematic perception may very well precede thought in a manner that makes thinking without cinema impossible. Thus, what this article is after, and what its author senses in Baraka's liner notes, is an illicit invocation of montage beyond cinematic jurisdiction; something like a movement of thought that foregrounds the cut as a site of insurgent detachment that the cinematic does not permit, but no less makes possible.