Black Sun

Black sun is a progressive instrumental album, composed by Claude Léveillée and Michel Lefrançois, two french canadians from the province of Québec. Michel Lefrançois made the orchestrations, the arrangements and the musical direction. A very interesting and hard to find album.

Claude Léveillée, singer-songwriter, actor (b at Montréal 16 Oct 1932). Claude Léveillée's works, interpreted notably by Édith Piaf and André GAGNON, are marked by their depth and sincerity, melancholy, and a strong jazz influence. Léveillée was co-founder of the group Les Bozos (1959) and was the first Québécois chansonnier to present a one-man show at Montréal's PLACE DES ARTS (1964). He has toured Canada, France, the USSR, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, central Asia and Japan. His songs have been recorded by Gagnon, Monique LEYRAC and Pauline JULIEN. His musical drama Concerto pour Hélène was performed by the ORCHESTRE SYMPHONIQUE DE QUÉBEC in 1978. Léveillée also composed scene music for three plays by Marcel DUBÉ: Zone, Au retour des oies blanches and Un simple soldat.

Léveillée gave up performing in the late 1970s to concentrate on composition and acting. He returned to performance in 1985 with Gagnon in a revival of their 1964 show entitled Tu t'rappelles, Frédéric. In 1991 he released his first album in a decade, Un homme, un piano, followed by Mes années soixante (1994), Enfin revivre (1995), Mes années 70 (1995), Mes années 80 (1996), Claude Léveillée (1997), Rêves inachevés (1998), Au temps des boites à chansons - Les années de la Butte à Mathieu (1999), Rêves inachevés vol. 2 (1999), Non-stop le rebel (2000), and Mes immortelles, je vous les confie (2003). In 2004, Claude Léveillée was part of the cast of Don Juan, a musical that was recorded and nominated for a JUNO award. He was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006.

-HÉLÈNE PLOUFFE and RACHELLE TAYLOR