Colin Fleming

Colin’s Contributions

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05/11/12    Albums

Twin Bill: Two Piano Music of Bill Evans
Alan Pasqua

An album intended as an homage to Bill Evans can be a bit of tricky business, given how dissociative Evans’ playing could be. There is not a single player that one might mistake for him, and few that can be recognized faster. This provides an opportunity...

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01/29/12    Albums

The Bowie Variations
Mike Garson

Having immersed yourself in an album that purports to be an extension on assorted musical themes by rock composer David Bowie, you might be surprised to find yourself not thinking about Bowie at all. Albums of this nature sometimes function as glorified...

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01/25/12    Albums

Post Scriptum
Wolfert Brederode Quartet

When a jazz band is able to strike a balance with music that is brooding and personal yet outward and approachable, listeners who otherwise wouldn’t agree on much are in for a shared treat. This second album from Dutch pianist Wolfert Brederode’s international...

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12/28/11    Albums

The Windmills of Your Mind
Paul Motian

On one of his last releases, Motian teams with Bill Frisell, Petra Haden and Thomas Morgan

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12/27/11    Albums

Unmistakable
Oscar Peterson

Zenph's incredible technology reanimates the artistry of another deceased master

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12/06/11    Albums

The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of the Modern Jazz Quartet 1956-64
The Modern Jazz Quartet

The Modern Jazz Quartet has typically been slotted a notch below the top jazz ensembles: a worthy enough unit, but also a source of consternation for fans of the genre, given how readily the band transcended it. They are certainly the most Bach-ian of jazz...

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07/10/11    Albums

The Complete 1932-1940 Brunswick, Columbia and Master Recordings of Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra
Duke Ellington

Mosaic isn’t exactly mucking around on this gargantuan 11-disc set that essentially distills the first grand age of Ellingtonia into the contents of one box set. There would, of course, be other ages of comparable majesty, but this set represents the first...

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March 2011    Albums

Mosaic Select 36
John Carter and Bobby Bradford

If you’re an admirer of saxophonist-clarinetist John Carter and trumpeter Bobby Bradford’s musical union, you’ll surely appreciate the invaluable service provided by Mosaic with this three-disc set. Previously, if you wanted to hear these two West Coast...

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October 2010    Albums

Natural Causes
Steve Tibbetts

As music to get lost in, this Steve Tibbetts album is state of the art. Featuring only Tibbetts on guitar, piano, kalimba and bouzouki and Marc Anderson on percussion—including a range of gongs—this is a decidedly Eastern disc, as though it were sourced...

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08/04/09    Albums

The Trouble With Love
Richard Burgin

An enlightening hybrid, Richard Burgin’s The Trouble With Love is the rare album that ably sets one mood inside of another. With vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Chris Cefalu performing Burgin’s songs—and venturing from fuzzed-up Little Walter-style harp solos...

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January/February 2009    DVDs

Jazz Icons Releases a Thrid Volume of Vintage Live Performances

With their dramatically drooped heads and shoulders, the members of Bill Evans’ 1964 trio look like an early, pre-electric shoegazer band in a Swedish broadcast that’s practically jazz-noir, a typical stylistic touch in the ongoing Jazz Icons series. This...

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August 2008    Albums

Beyond Standard
Hiromi’s Sonicbloom

Pair up some old-time-radio sound effects with some Jeff Beck Wired-era whammy effects, toss in a satirical approach to the great American songsmiths, and rekindle the Japanese infatuation with the supergroup, and you too can make standards sound less standard—alien...

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August 2008    Albums

Crossing the Field
Jenny Scheinman

If you prefer an album with a clear-cut identity, you might stumble a bit with this fifth instrumental outing from violinist/singer Jenny Scheinman. There’s a lot of shape-shifting going on here: string playing that resembles Mellotron effects, violin passages...

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November 2007    Albums

Evolution of the Groove
Miles Davis

What a jumble. Nearly a decade and a half of groove morphology compressed into an EP, and overlaid with new components to show, at once, how rhythmically pioneering Davis was—as if this needed reiteration—in a Sly Stone/James Brown sense, and how much influence...

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November 2007    Albums

The Harlem Experiment
The Harlem Experiment

A sideline project for the likes of clarinetist Don Byron, drummer Steve Berrios, keyboardist Eddie Martinez and guitarist Carlos Alomar, the ensemble billed as the Harlem House Band on this anthropologic study-cum-old-time-party-record produces a grand...

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June 2007    Albums

Unmistakable Evidence
Coyote Poets

“It’s the bipolar part of town,” Unmistakable Evidence’s urbanely voiced, decidedly trippy narrator/shaman informs us on “Purgatory Avenue,” atop a rolling soundscape of token Sun Ra vamps, as though a queue of beat poets were waiting to come out and do...

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About Colin Fleming

Colin Fleming has been writing for Jazz Times since 2006. His work can also be found in a number of other publications: Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, Tin House, ARTnews, ESPN The Magazine, The Smart Set, The Village Voice, The American Scholar, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The Times Literary Supplement, MOJO, Salmagundi, Gramophone, Spin, The LA Times, The Wilson Quarterly, The San Francisco Chronicle, The American Interest, Film Comment, Metropolis, Sight and Sound, The Washington Post, The New Statesman, Time Out New York, Smithsonian, and many others. His fiction has recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, TriQuarterly, Pen America, The Hopkins Review, The Republic of Letters, The Ampersand Review, The Iowa Review, Slice Magazine, The Texas Review, and The Massachusetts Review. He recently completed a story collection called Between Cloud and Horizon: A Relationship Casebook in Stories, and is at work on The Freeze Tag Sessions, a novel about a gifted pianist. His website is http://colinfleminglit.com/.