Charlie Rosen (born July 20, 1990) is an American musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, musical director, and music producer. He is best known for his work on Broadway, where he has worked on Be More Chill, Prince of Broadway, American Psycho, and, along with Bryan Carter, won the 2023 Tony Award for Best Orchestrations for Some Like It Hot. He is also the leader of the 8-Bit Big Band, a jazz orchestra specializing in video game music.
Rosen was born in Los Angeles, California, as the son of a bassoonist and organist. He was taught piano by his mother, starting from the age of three. At the age of fifteen, he joined the onstage band for the Los Angeles production of 13. He moved to New York at the age of seventeen to make his Broadway debut in 13, where he was a swing. He later attended Berklee College of Music for four semesters.
Rosen began his professional career as a swing musician for the bass, guitar, and percussion tracks of 13. Starting in 2012, he was the bandleader of Charlie Rosen's Broadway Big Band, where he arranged classic musical theater numbers into music that could be performed by a jazz orchestra with Broadway performers as the vocalists. , he primarily features as a guitarist in the Broadway musical Be More Chill.
Rosen can play about 70 musical instruments including the "flugelbone", melodica, Fender Rhodes, and theremin. Of these he has described the flugelbone as his "orchestrating secret weapon" due to its ability to utilize variety of timbres. However, he considers himself primarily a bassist but uses the range of instruments in his repertoire to improve the quality of the music he is able to create.
In 2017, Rosen founded the 8-Bit Big Band, a jazz and pops orchestra, in which he serves as the director. The band won a Grammy Award for an arrangement for the song "Meta Knight's Revenge", from the game Kirby Super Star(1996), in 2022, and were nominated again in 2024.
Rosen is also the composer on 2021 comedy film Here Today.