Catherine Delaunay is a French clarinetist and composer, born in Bordeaux on October 31, 1969, who grew up in Brittany. She started the clarinet at six in a local music school, studied the piano from 1978 to 1985 and later took drum lessons with Jean-Louis Méchali (1991 to 1994). After the conservatoire in Rennes she entered the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in Lyon in 1989 and stayed until 1995. There she took the clarinet diploma in the class of Jacques Di Donato (1993), a chamber-music certificate with Jacques Aboulker (1993), a certificate in twentieth-century instrumental music (1993) and a final one in early clarinets and chalumeau with Jean-Claude Veilhan (1995). While still a student she played with the accordionist Marc Perrone, the clarinetist Laurent Dehors and the guitarist Alain Blesing, and French Wikipedia dates her turn to jazz and improvised music from that period.

In the 1990s she became a member of Dehors's big band Tous Dehors, on which she is credited on Dans la rue (1996) and Dentiste (1998), the second one on clarinets and bagpipes. From 1996, according to her own biography, she has led and composed for projects under her own name. Since 2000 she has led the small street and indoor fanfare Y'en a qui manquent pas d'air with the saxophonist Lionel Martin, the trombonist Daniel Casimir, the sousaphone player Didier Havet and the drummer Tatiana Lejude, and the same year she recorded Tocade(s) (Agapes) as a duo with the drummer Bruno Tocanne, playing soprano saxophone and clarinet. The fanfare's Cœur de Lune followed in 2002, and she played bass clarinet on the Alain Blesing Octet's Yörük (Buda Musique, 2002).

The middle of the 2000s brought trio, sextet and duo records: Plumes (Mélisse, 2006) with the pianist Édouard Ferlet and the bassist Benoït Dunoyer de Segonzac, the clarinet chair on the violinist Régis Huby's sextet album Simple Sound (Le Chant du Monde, 2006), alongside the bassist Bruno Chevillon, and Le chien déguisé en vache (2008) with the saxophonist Pascal Van den Heuvel. In 2011 she recorded Sois patient car le loup, settings of poems by the English writer Malcolm Lowry, in a translation by Jean-François Goyet, for the singer John Greaves, the harpist Isabelle Olivier, the trombonist Thierry Lhiver, the bassist Guillaume Séguron and herself on clarinets and accordion. Citizen Jazz made it a "disque élu" and noted that her grandfather, a Newfoundland fisherman lost at sea, hovers behind the sea poems.

From the middle of the 2010s she worked more and more with Jean Rochard's independent label nato. With Séguron and the drummer Davu Seru she made La double vie de Pétrichor (2015), and she plays clarinet in a duo with the pianist Tony Hymas on three pieces of the drummer Jacques Thollot's three-disc Thollot In Extenso (nato, 2017). In 2017 she was the clarinetist of a French edition of the saxophonist Steve Coleman's Natal Eclipse during his residency at La Villette in Paris, according to a review dated October 27, 2017. Her trio La Guinguette à PépéE, with Van den Heuvel and the guitarist and banjoist Sébastien Gariniaux, released Apaches (2018), a record of jazz standards, songs and musette that Citizen Jazz also named a "disque élu". In October 2018 she recorded Marc Ducret's Lady M, issued by Illusions in 2019, and she is on the guitarist Pierrick Hardy's quartet album L'Ogre intact (2019). In the same years she was a regular partner of the double bassist Claude Tchamitchian (Need Eden, 2016, and later Naïri and Vortice).

When Frédéric Maurin took over the Orchestre national de jazz in 2019 she was one of its musicians. She plays clarinet and basset horn on Rituels (ONJ Records, 2020), recorded in September 2019, and on Ex Machina (Pi Recordings, 2023) with the American saxophonist Steve Lehman. Her own trio with the double bassist Sarah Murcia and the pianist Bruno Ruder, whom she met in the orchestra, grew out of that period. With Hymas she recorded the duo album No Borders (nato, 2023) at La Fraternelle in Saint-Claude, and she plays in the One Another Orchestra (nato, 2024). L'Homme des Damps, a double CD released by nato on January 9, 2026, is a suite of her own for large and small groups on the novelist and anarchist Octave Mirbeau, who lived in Les Damps, the Normandy village where she now lives, from 1889 to 1893, and on the painters and writers who visited him there.

Delaunay's music runs between jazz, free improvisation and written chamber music, and a good deal of it is built around a text, a place or a story. She sets poems (Lowry in Sois patient car le loup, Mirbeau's writing in L'Homme des Damps), plays for dancers, actors and silent films, and leads two bands that deal in popular repertoire, the street fanfare Y'en a qui manquent pas d'air and La Guinguette à PépéE. English Wikipedia and her own biography describe her as a jazz and improvised-music clarinetist and composer, AllMusic files her under jazz, and Discogs tags La double vie de Pétrichor as free jazz. Besides the clarinet she plays the bass clarinet, the basset horn and the accordion, and has been credited on musical saw and, early on, on soprano saxophone. Citizen Jazz has called her a wonderful storyteller, and the label that publishes much of her recent work, nato, describes her as an "impressionist composer". Her partners have included the folk accordionist Marc Perrone and the violinist Jacky Molard, with whom she plays in a quartet co-led by the baritone saxophonist François Corneloup, but the body of her work is jazz and improvised music.