Ted Reichman was born in Aroostook County, Maine in 1973. He began studying jazz piano at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School in 1987 and went on to study experimental music and ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University with Alvin Lucier, Sumarsam, and his most important early mentor, Anthony Braxton. At Braxton’s urging, Reichman began playing accordion, the instrument that would become the basis of his work in music.

After beginning his professional career with Braxton while still a student, Reichman moved to New York City where he worked with a panoply of musical greats in styles ranging from improvised music and jazz to rock and roll and various forms of Jewish music. In addition to his work with Braxton, which includes the first recordings and performances of “Ghost Trance Music,” he is best known for his ten-year-plus tenure with John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet. He also founded the music series at alt.coffee which would evolve into Tonic, one of the world’s most crucial venues for avant-garde music, where Reichman was the original curator.

He has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory for over ten years, where he coaches ensembles in the Contemporary Musical Arts and Jazz departments and teaches a curriculum he developed on recording and creative audio production techniques. He also spent four years as an Assistant Professor of Film Scoring at Berklee.

Reichman currently lives outside Boston where he records, produces and mixes albums and composes music for films at his studio Subtext Sound System. His film scoring work includes the independent features Rick, The Memory Thief, and Year of the Fish, as well as many documentaries, including Ahead of Time, Dear Mandela, and the Peabody Award-winning Missing In Brooks County. He was a fellow at the Sundance Institute Documentary Composers Lab. His essays on music have appeared in The New York Review of Books and poetry in the The Brooklyn Rail and other publications.