Denis Colin is a bass clarinettist and composer, born in Vanves, just outside Paris, on July 24, 1956. He began on piano as a child and then chose the bass clarinet, an instrument he has described as full of sound possibilities. He studied clarinet at the conservatoire in Versailles, although his own career summary says he left both conservatoire and university before finishing, in order to throw himself into the Paris jazz scene.

The turning point came in 1975, when he met the American bassist and composer Alan Silva, who founded the Institute for Artistic and Cultural Perception (IACP) in Paris in 1976. Colin played his first concerts with Silva's Celestrial Communication Orchestra in 1977 and ran the IACP from 1979 to 1982. He is credited as soloist on "The Shout - Portrait for a Small Woman" (Sun, 1979) and plays bass clarinet on the orchestra's Desert Mirage (IACP, 1982). In 1977 he also co-founded the group Texture with the saxophonist François Cotinaud, which recorded two albums for the IACP label, a sextet LP in 1982 and Polygamme in 1983, with the trumpeter Itaru Oki and the violinist Bruno Girard. From 1981 to 1990 he belonged to Luc Le Masne's group Bekummernis, and from 1984 he wrote a long series of scores for the theatre company Tuchenn.

In 1988 he gave his first concerts with the pianist François Tusques, a trio partnership that lasted until 2008 and produced Le Jardin des délices (1992), Blue Phèdre (1996), Blue Suite (2000) and Arc Voltaic (2003). His first record under his own name, the solo Clarinette basse seul (In Situ), appeared in 1990. In 1991 he formed the Denis Colin Trio with the cellist Didier Petit and the zarb player Pablo Cueco, a group that toured for seventeen years and made Trois (1992), In situ à Banlieues Bleues (1994), Fluide (1998), Something in Common (2002) and Songs for Swans (2006). In 1995 the trio grew into the quintet Denis Colin & Les Arpenteurs, with the guitarist Camel Zekri and the violinist Bruno Girard, and recorded Étude de terrain. A commission from Radio France later led to a twelve-piece band named Dans les cordes.

Something in Common grew out of meetings with musicians in Minneapolis in 2001 and brought gospel singers and rappers into the trio's sound; the singer Gwen Matthews, heard on that record, returned for Songs for Swans (2006), followed by a long tour in Europe and North America. From 2007 he was invited as a guest with the Archie Shepp Quartet, on and off until 2015. In 2008 he founded La Société des Arpenteurs, a younger band of variable size, which made Subject to Change (2009) and Subject to Live (2011) for Le Chant du Monde. In 2011 he created two film concerts with Vincent Peirani and Benoît Lugué, one on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and one on the short films of Charley Bowers, and he is credited on bass clarinet on George Lewis's Les Exercices spirituels (Tzadik, 2011), performed with Ensemble Erik Satie.

Since 1995 he has also written music for the animated films of Florence Miailhe. Her short Au premier dimanche d'août, which he scored, won the César for best short film in 2002, and Conte de quartier received a special mention at Cannes in 2006. In 2013 he began Univers Nino, a tribute to the songs of Nino Ferrer with the singer Ornette, issued on Cristal Records in 2014, and in 2014 he formed the quartet Quiet Men with Pablo Cueco, the guitarist Julien Omé and the arpeggione player Simon Drappier, whose album came out in 2019. From 2015 to 2018 he was composer in residence at Le Salmanazar in Épernay and, from 2015 to 2019, in residence at cultural venues in the Essonne. In his career summary of 2022 he notes that concerts resumed in 2021 and 2022, mainly with Quiet Men.

Colin came up in the free-jazz circles around Alan Silva, and AllMusic files him under avant-garde jazz. He says that the older Black American musicians then living in Paris told him not to play like them but to find his own sound, and that the years of radical research which followed produced a personal voice on an instrument that is prized but rarely used as a lead. In the trio with a cello and a zarb he combined chamber music, improvisation and rhythms from outside the jazz tradition; a reviewer at All About Jazz noted that on Something in Common, a program of Black American music, the instrumentation kept the band from imitating its sources. His later projects move toward songs and accessible forms, from the Nino Ferrer repertoire of Univers Nino to the ciné-concerts and theatre and film scores, while free improvisation stays at the center of his work. Wikipedia notes that he taught jazz at the Montreuil conservatoire, and his own summary adds a 2013 diploma in somato-psychopedagogy.