Episode #174: Charlie Rosen
Rosen has been hailed by The New York Times as “insanely ambitious,” “a sort of bridge between genres and generations, embracing Broadway standards, pop songs and the music of Tetris.” Broadway World hailed his orchestrations for “Some Like it Hot” — co-written with Bryan Carter — as “explosive… another first-rate team.” Opined JazzTimes of the 8-Bit Big Band: “[These are] innovative spins on a hidden musical canon that’s arguably just booting up.” In 2021, Grammy.com proclaimed him to be one of “6 Big Band Composers Pushing The Format Forward.”
Rosen was born in 1990 in Los Angeles, to a bassoonist and music teacher mother and pianist, banjoist, and silent movie theater organist father. When Rosen was three, his father ascertained that he had perfect pitch, when he successfully distinguished piano keys by color without seeing them. “That’s a black key, that’s a white key,” Rosen remembers intuiting.
Rosen played flute in an elementary school orchestra, but that didn’t really take. “I played cello for a year. That didn’t really take,” Rosen says. But as his single digits flowed into his doubles, he accordingly took guitar lessons, and proceeded to perform in bands. “That was my first exposure to what it means to collaborate with your musical peers,” Rosen says, “as opposed to receiving rote classical music from a teacher.”
Large ensemble jazz grew to captivate him most; his father frequently took him to see big bands and jazz orchestras, and his mother brought him to her orchestra rehearsals and chamber music performances. Rosen became fascinated by the sheer numbers of the musicians, the volume, and the force of the moving air. Saxophones, flutes, trumpets, banjos, guitars, and mandolins were around the house. “That influenced my love of arranging and discovering new instruments,” Rosen says — and he learned one after the other. Despite his parents’ love of musicals, Rosen initially gravitated far more to classic rock and jazz. Yet in his sophomore year of high school, he nabbed a role in the coming-of-age Broadway musical “13” — which not only featured an entire cast of teenagers, but an all-teen orchestra. This led him to the comedic historical rock musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” — conversely, a full-on professional production with adults. Both shows transferred to Broadway one year apart, before Rosen was old enough to drink.
Rosen studied at Berklee College of Music for a few semesters; around 2010, he decided to focus on Broadway for good. At first, he was a multi-instrumentalist in a variety of pits, and it became clear he was capable of much more. “I started being like, ‘I’ll do anything. I can transcribe your piano parts. I’ll write sheet music. I’ll write horn parts for you,’” Rosen recalls. “Just to get my name out there as somebody who could be part of music teams.” In 2012, he started his first New York large ensemble, dubbed Charlie Rosen’s Broadway Big Band. He went on to work on a plethora of Broadway shows, as an orchestrator, music director, music supervisor, and more — from “Moulin Rouge” to “Be Home Chill” to “Some Like it Hot.”
Already, Rosen was reimagining what a big band could do. “I would take songs from Broadway shows, like I do with the 8-Bit Big Band, and totally flip them on their head — rearrange them,” he says, “and I would ask singers from the Broadway community to front it.” He began a long-running residency at Midtown Manhattan’s 54 Below, and “invited as many music directors, supervisors and composers — anybody I could possibly think of — to come to this thing.”
The 54 Below residency demonstrated Rosen’s swelling chops for old-school, Broadway-style arranging. Fast forward through years of shows and connections, and in 2018, Rosen launched the 8-Bit Big Band, and the lifelong gamer picked up the torch of the “Great Video Game Songbook.” To date, they have released four albums: 2018’s “Press Start!,” 2019’s “Choose Your Character,” 2021’s “Backwards Compatible,” and 2023’s “Game Changer.”
In 2021, Rosen won a Grammy for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Capella. He won one Tony in 2020, for his work on “Moulin Rouge!, and another in 2023, for “Some Like It Hot.” Another Grammy followed in 2023, for his contributions to the latter production’s cast recording. He was also nominated for both a Tony and Grammy award for his work on the groundbreaking 2022 Broadway show “A Strange Loop.”Other productions Rosen has worked on as a musician, composer, music supervisor, and/or orchestrator include “One Man, Two Guvnors”; “Cyrano de Bergerac”; “Honeymoon in Vegas”; “American Psycho”; “Prince of Broadway”; “Be More Chill”; “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”; and “A Strange Loop”. He was the musical director for the 2016 TV series “Maya & Marty,” and 2020’s “Arthur Miller Foundation Honors,” and arranged, orchestrated, conducted, and/or composed for 2017’s “The President Snow,” the 2021 documentary “Listening to Kenny G,” and that year’s Billy Crystal comedy-drama “Here Today,” as well as the music producer for the 2023 film “Wonka.”
What binds it all together is Rosen’s unshakeable faith in the unrealized potential of a piece of music, especially as it relates to its function for dramatic storytelling. How the music functions to deliver a story, or deliver a feeling — “whether someones up there singing or not,” Rosen says. “Or whether it’s creating an arrangement to support a singer singing in a specific way, or an instrumentalist to solo in a way they do best. “Whether it’s your movie, song, orchestra, TV show, or Broadway show,” Rosen concludes, “it’s all essentially the same instinct, but through instruments.”
Marc Shaiman, a Tony-winning theater and Oscar-nominated film composer, described Mr. Rosen as a big talent, but without the eccentricities that sometimes come along for the ride. ‘It’s the kind of talent where I almost want to hate him,’ Mr. Shaiman said. ‘But I can’t.’ You don’t get to be Charlie without being insanely ambitious, but I think it’s really an ambition to have as much music in his life and in his head and in his mouth as he possibly can. He just loves making music.”
Italia