Jazz Articles about Collin Sherman

About Collin Sherman

Album Review

The first sentence in multi-instrumentalist Collin Sherman's liner notes for his 2026 CD Ouroborosuite says: “The United States is eating itself." Ouroboros, the image of a snake eating its tail, is historically seen as a symbol of eternal, cyclical renewal. Sherman is using it as a symbol of self-destruction, specifically to the United States in 2026, as the country sinks into a stinking quagmire of political venom. For Sherman, this is an often strident exploration undertaken in a ...

Album Review

Collin Sherman: Life Eats Life

Read "Life Eats Life" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
September 14, 2025

Collin Sherman, a multiple reedman, has a day job in Manhattan. But on nights and weekends, he sheds the work clothes and switches into his idiosyncratic original voice in the creation of music. Life Eats Life is a solo effort. He plays and records all the instruments in his living room for his albums. Then he overdubs it all together--an audio cut-and-paste affair. He is responsible for the crafting of the spooky, 1940-ish Noir and the exotic saxophone-over-drones outing String ...

Catching Up With

Collin Sherman: A Solitary Visionary in Jazz

by Robert Middleton
December 2, 2024

Collin Sherman is an outlier in the jazz world. He creates all his own music, plays every instrument, records everything himself, and rarely performs live. His approach is unconventional but deeply compelling, allowing him to produce music that defies easy categorization. In a conversation via Zoom, Sherman opened up about his journey, his creative process and the unique challenges of being a one-man jazz ensemble. I began by asking Sherman how he got started in music. “I started playing jazz ...

Album Review

Collin Sherman: Noir

by Dan McClenaghan
November 11, 2024

Making music is most often a collaborative affair. Big bands, duos, trios, quartets and quintets--take your pick. Miles Davis (or any other of your favorites) calls his guys into the studio or to the stage where they bump elbows and trade riffs, drawing their individual personalities out to form a collection of sound waves to craft a finished work of art. On the other hand, we have the solo outing. Alone at the piano, or with the guitar--or ...

Extended Analysis

String Planes

by Dan McClenaghan
April 18, 2024

Collin Sherman takes the 'A' train to his day job in Manhattan. Billy Strayhorn, the writer of the tune “Take the 'A' Train" that was made famous by the Duke Ellington Orchestra, must be smiling. Do the seeds of Sherman's compositions germinate during these forty-five-minute rides? Possibly, though his music has no resemblance to Ellington's or Strayhorn's. Day job and train rides aside, Sherman creates his music in a home studio in a one-person endeavor via the overdubbing ...

Album Review

Collin Sherman: Organism Made Luminous

Read "Organism Made Luminous" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
November 9, 2022

The Covid pandemic slowed artistic progress for many musicians. Opportunities to collaborate became scarce; live music in front of an audience blinked out. However, the enterprising players out there found a way. File sharing and solo projects blossomed, and these—along with the relative affordability of home studio set ups—had an invigorating effect on musical creativity. If you cannot go out and play to an audience, you might as well stay home and create. But for multiple instrumentalist (primarily ...

Album Review

Collin Sherman: Suitable Benchmarks of Reform

Read "Suitable Benchmarks of Reform" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
December 27, 2021

Multi-reedist Colin Sherman's thirteenth album, Suitable Benchmarks Of Reform, was made from the same template from which his previous twelve releases came into being—recording alone in his New York City apartment, recording the individual parts then layering each onto the next to make an ensemble sound. This, in the time of the arrival of the Covid virus, has become a more common practice; it is just that Sherman got a head start on the go-it-alone process. Call it ...