Charlie Jefferson is a composer and musician based in the UK. His emotive music often combines his finger picked and bowed folk instruments with minimal electronica.
His most recent film and TV highlights include Oscars 2024 contender Holy Cowboys (short film dir. Varun Chopra) as well as a double win at the Tribeca Film Festival for feature documentary Scheme Birds (dir. E. Hallin & E. Fiske) which was described by filmmaker and producer Lena Dunham as being “one of the most profoundly skilful, empathetic and moving films of the year”, whilst his score for feature doc Killing Escobar helped earn the production a BAFTA Scotland win for Best Factual Director.
Other credits include the BAFTA-winning Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing, Yellowstone, HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Leonardo DiCaprio produced docudrama Theodore Roosevelt, and HBO comedy Miracle Workers starring Steve Buscemi and Daniel Radcliffe.
With a background as a multi-instrumentalist and music producer, he has also collaborated with international musicians on live scores for silent movie classics, such as The Goddess (1934) performed live at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and described by filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins as “one of the most moving times I have spent in a cinema.”
Starting off his career composing for television, some highlights include meeting and working with legendary journalist Jon Snow on special reports for Dispatches covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and scoring a series for the late George Alagaih called Future of Food which was awarded Best Factual by the Royal Television Society.
His solo releases include Memories of America (2016) which was described by the Guardian journalist and author Chitra Ramaswamy as “beautiful music…sparse, wide-screen Americana evoking the shimmer and heat of flat lands bisected by long straight roads vibe…” and Jumping Off Point – a new EP with influences of soul, folk and vintage electronica, released in April 2023.
In 2024, Charlie collaborated with the award-winning Rogan Productions (Uprising, Putin: A Spy Story) on a profile of Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the ruler of Saudi Arabia. The two-part documentary, titled The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince, is now out on the BBC.