Charlie Kirchen is a music-maker and theorist based in Inwood, NYC. He composes, improvise, plays bass, and lead bands. Roughly situated in the realm of “jazz/experimental music,” his music reflects an aesthetic and technique gained from study of the broad sweep of both jazz and western classical music, as well as immersion in American pop music of the past 50 years.

His compositions are made of a handful of notated themes which are related by subtle motivic and structural correspondences and linked together by passages of free improvision.

As a theorist, he is working on a dissertation at Columbia University which studies cases to theorize the nature of musical “influence,” drawing on ideas surrounding notions of creativity, embodied cognition, hybridity, craft, and aesthetics in the process. Find more of his music on bandcamp and follow @charliekirchen