Preface for a solo by Miles Davis

Abstract

Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape seeks to establish and explain the following assertions: that there is an irreducible relationship between blackness, criminality and the aesthetic; that escape-in-confinement is a fundamental audio-visual motif for black expressive culture; that this motif is essential to modernity and to modernism in their broadest conceptions insofar as it instantiates a relationship between the history of race and the history of cinema. This complex of assertions revolves around the stilled, fugitive performance of a little girl.