Colin Fleming is a prolific cultural critic and essayist whose work spans music, literature, film, and the arts. He contributed essays and reviews to The Weekly Standard between 2007 and 2018, covering a wide range of cultural subjects with a particular focus on music and literary figures. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker.
The tenor saxophone has always been seen as jazz's muscle instrument. It so often provides the brawn of any ensemble's attack. Were we to contextualize this particular make of horn in sports terms, it would be the home run, the slam dunk, the slap shot.
Most of us think of jazz as a genre predicated on extemporization—the horn man breaking into an inspired chorus set apart from the rhythmic structure of the song, the pianist using an established chord progression for extended flights of improvisatory fancy.
There was a time when I was surprised that many Americans—even fans of Turner Classic Movies—seemed to think that Alfred Hitchcock was a roly-poly Englishman who somehow ended up in Hollywood and got his start making movies there. The way the story goes, Hitchcock crossed the pond and made Rebecca…
To set the scene of the man who was on the stage: It's early April 1966, and for three days, Otis Redding is in residence at Los Angeles's Whisky A Go Go. He is far from his Chitlin' Circuit base back in the South, playing a club that would be at the epicenter of rock's psychedelic movement, where…
To set the scene of the man who was on the stage: It’s early April 1966, and for three days, Otis Redding is in residence at Los Angeles's Whisky A Go Go. He is far from his Chitlin' Circuit base back in the South, playing a club that would be at the epicenter of rock's psychedelic movement, where…
As might be expected from someone who makes his living from writing, I was an English major in college. But what always seems to baffle people is when they learn that I only became that person with that job because I stopped going to class. My grades were never good, and I recall recoiling from…
If you’re a connoisseur of ghost stories you are probably aware that the best reading experiences take the form of individual, pithy narratives rather than book-length efforts. This is true for almost all of the masters, from M. R. James to Henry James, Charles Dickens to Saki, Nathaniel Hawthorne…
I’ve long held a fascination with what I term death works—bursts of art born of some thanatos-based concern, be it an artist fronted with his own mortality or, in the case of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, the demise of a friend.
What does it mean to create a work deemed so deleterious to anyone who might encounter it that one’s friends, collaborators, and even a trusted spouse attempt to keep it secret from the world at large?
Slim biographies of the most famous people tend to have a more philosophical slant than the big life-of-so-and-so books. That 200-page volume on Napoleon, say, isn’t going to be some soup-to-nuts treatment, jammed with quotidian minutiae and copious excerpts from letters, but rather a study in how…
Of all of the giants of American popular music, there is perhaps no artist who had as brief a recording presence as Hank Williams, a prime mover in several genres who did all of his prime moving between 1946 and 1952.
Art Tatum had more outward flash, and Jelly Roll Morton certainly possessed more carny flair. But Earl Hines stood alone as the absolute champion of rhythm in jazz’s triumvirate of most important pianists. Never within the idiom has the instrument sounded quite as percussive as when Fatha was…
Lenin's Private War
The Collected Poems 1956-1998