Jean-Francois Charles

Over the years, I've been blessed to make music with incredible artists. Today, I am thrilled to annouce the release of the Tenebrae album , created in collaboration with eleven unique musicians and poets. Tenebrae by Jean-François Charles The album is a 21st century reverberation of Carlo Gesualdo's Tenebrae responsories . Like the ship on the album’s cover, the music is suspended between the physical and the spiritual world. Two poetic bonus tracks, La bête and The sea , invite to meditate further on the place of life on planet Earth. First nocturne On the Mount of Olives , with Ramin Roshandel, setar Ramin Roshandel and I created the Jamshid Jam duet in December 2019. We released Jamshid Jam as an album and performed it across the United States. Together, we have also played soccer, enjoyed Persian food, and listened to a lot of music while traveling. Sorrowful is my soul , with Nicolas Sidoroff, trumpet & objects As students, ">Nicolas Sidoroff an...

Here is for great holiday music: Baby Bossa Nova, written by Mike Simpson for Dick Schory and the Percussion Pops Orchestra in 1963. Percussionist Dan Moore invited me to play clarinets on his album The Long Way Home . I play the small Eb clarinet, the Bb, the basset-horn, and the contra-alto clarinet. He wrote the arrangement and performed all of the percussion parts. He also shot and edited the video! Check out the album , it features great tunes and great musicians. Happy Holidays!

Here is a video that I shared in 2021 with composer Davide Ianni while he was composing Dedalo Nero, a solo for contralto clarinet . The instrument is a Leblanc paperclip contra-alto clarinet in Eb, known as model 350. The instrument I have used might have been made in 1967. Davide was looking for pale multiphonic sounds. All of these sounds are preferably played pianississimo to piano. Some can be played forte. The basic technique to look for multiphonic sounds on a clarinet consists in playing different partials/pitches on a given fingering - using throat shape and air pressure variations. Then try to play these different partials at the same time. I learnt all of these techniques from working with clarinetist Armand Angster .