Brian Charette was born November 24, 1972 in Meriden, Connecticut, and learned piano first from his mother, Catherine, a pianist, and then from a local teacher, George McKinstry. He carried on with piano, guitar and trumpet at Orville H. Platt High School and began working the clubs around Meriden and New Haven while he was still in them. From seventeen he was the house pianist on calls with Connecticut players including Jimmy Greene, Paul Brown and Jeff Pitchell, and he accompanied touring jazz elders who came through the state without a rhythm section of their own: Lou Donaldson, Houston Person, Charles McPherson and the blues guitarist Matt "Guitar" Murphy. A three-week summer course at Berklee put him in front of John LaPorta and Rick Peckham. He then went to the University of Connecticut, graduating in 1994, and studied piano there and privately with Ellen Rowe, Kenny Werner, Mark DeCozio, Mark Templeton, Charlie Banacos and Neal Larrabee.

Two things pulled him out of Connecticut in the same stretch. The first was Europe: the Czech trumpeter Laco Deczi took him on the road, and Charette became a fixture in Deczi's long-running band Cellula New York, appearing on Horse Manure (1998), Tibet (1999), Horse Power and Gadula Island (both 2000), and returning to the group as late as Eggenberg (2011) and Kudla (2022). That connection made Prague a second working city for him and it has stayed one for thirty years. The second was New York, where he moved in 1994. His first decade there was catholic and unglamorous: blues sessions for the British label JSP behind Willie Edwards, Lonnie Shields, Percy Strother and Johnnie Marshall; the Vivino brothers' orbit, which meant television house-band work and backing dates for singers well outside jazz; and, in 1999, a Hammond B-3 chair in the "Joni's Jazz" concert in Central Park alongside Joni Mitchell, Chaka Khan and Joe Jackson.

The recorded leader career effectively starts in 2008, when the Danish label SteepleChase signed him. Upside (SCCD 31678, recorded December 2008, released September 29, 2009) is an organ-guitar-drums trio with Ben Monder and Jochen Rueckert. Learning to Count (SCCD 31710, recorded October 2009, released February 10, 2011) added Mike DiRubbo's alto. Then came the record that changed how people described him. Music for Organ Sextette (SCCD 31731, 2012) threw out the guitar entirely and put a four-horn front line in its place: DiRubbo on alto and soprano, Joel Frahm on tenor, John Ellis on bass clarinet and Jay Collins on flute and baritone, with Rueckert on drums and Charette writing all ten pieces. He revisited the format on The Question That Drives Us (SCCD 31784, recorded January 2013), and split off a parallel thread of unaccompanied organ records that now runs to three: Borderline (recorded February 2011, issued 2013), Beyond Borderline (recorded October 2018, issued 2019) and Borderless (recorded April 2024, issued April 11, 2025).

Posi-Tone brought him a second, more compact discography. He arrived there in 2011 as a sideman on DiRubbo's Chronos and became a leader in 2014 with two albums in one year. Square One (PR8120), cut in Brooklyn on December 3, 2013, is a straight organ trio with Yotam Silberstein on guitar and Mark Ferber on drums across all eleven tracks, nine of them Charette originals plus Joe Henderson's "If" and The Meters' "Ease Back." Good Tipper (PR8128) is built differently: two alternating trios share the record, Silberstein and Ferber on four tracks and Avi Rothbard and Jordan Young on the other eight, with Charette the only constant. Alphabet City (PR8140, recorded September 23, 2014) named its tunes after the East Village blocks he lives on and paired him with Will Bernard and Rudy Royston. Once & Future (PR8153, recorded October 7, 2015) is an explicit history lesson, running fourteen tracks through Larry Young's "Tyrone," Freddie Roach's "Da Bug," Jack McDuff's "Hot Barbeque," Leon Spencer's "The Scorpion" and Jimmy Smith's "Mellow Mood" alongside Fats Waller, Bud Powell, Wes Montgomery and James Brown. The label also used him on two collective dates that carry his name in the billing, Bright Side (PR8155, 2016) and Allied Forces (PR8157, 2016). He took the 2014 DownBeat Critics Poll award for Rising Star on organ and the 2015 Hot House "Fan's Decision Jazz Award for Best Organist," and has placed near the top of DownBeat's organ category most years since. Hammond USA made him an endorsing artist in 2012, and Hal Leonard published his 101 Hammond B-3 Tips: Stuff All the Pros Know and Use in 2014.

The last decade has run on three tracks at once. The first is a working partnership with tenor saxophonist George Coleman, documented on two SteepleChase quartets: Groovin' with Big G (SCCD 31857, recorded December 2017, with Vic Juris on guitar and George Coleman Jr. on drums) and Working Out with Big G (SCCD 31973, recorded April 2024, with Paul Bollenback). Alongside it he holds the keyboard chair in Jaimoe's Jasssz Band, the group the Allman Brothers Band co-founder started in 2006. The second is electronic: Kürrent (Dim Mak, 2017) is a duo with Ben Monder built on circuit-bent and processed organ, and Like the Sun (Dim Mak, 2020) continued it. The third is a return to organ-trio and organ-quartet records for Cory Weeds's Cellar Music, beginning with Jackpot (CM110422, 2022) with Bill Stewart and Ed Cherry and continuing with You Don't Know Jack! (CM041424, recorded at Aero Studios on April 14, 2024), a Jack McDuff tribute built around two McDuff tunes and four Charette originals. His Czech work has kept pace throughout, from the co-led SoulMates (New Port Line, recorded November 19, 2012) with guitarist Libor Smoldas to the Otto Hejnic Organism albums Beringia (2022) and Sunday at the Studio (2023) and Forms of Happiness (Attra, 2024), a trio with drummer Otto Hejnic and guitarist Peter Bernstein. He teaches at The New School and the 92nd Street Y in New York and on the faculty of the Czech Summer Jazz Workshop at the Jezek Conservatory in Prague, and writes for Keyboard, DownBeat, JazzTimes and The New York City Jazz Record.

Charette plays a soul-jazz instrument without playing soul jazz in the received sense. The left-hand bass lines, the drawbar shouts and the Jack McDuff and Jimmy Smith repertoire are all there, and Once & Future is a whole record devoted to them, but the writing that surrounds them comes from somewhere else: odd meters, Eastern European modes (the Alphabet City tune "Hungarian Major" is what it says), fugal counterpoint, and enough dissonance in the voicings that critics have reached for Larry Young rather than for the Blue Note organ trios when placing him. Music for Organ Sextette is the clearest statement of that split. By replacing the guitar with alto, tenor, bass clarinet and flute, he gave himself an ensemble that could actually play the harmony he was writing, and produced a record that does not sound like an organ album at all. The unaccompanied Borderline, Beyond Borderline and Borderless push in the opposite direction, using the B-3's registration and swell pedal as compositional material with no rhythm section to hide behind, and Kürrent runs the instrument through circuit-bent electronics. A New York Times notice caught the tension in one line, describing him as weighing soul jazz's ageless objective against a trace of restless modernity. He is also a working teacher and writer on the instrument, and 101 Hammond B-3 Tips has become a standard text for players coming to the B-3 from piano, which is the route he took himself.