Evan Christopher was born August 31, 1969, in Long Beach, California, and started clarinet at age eleven. He trained at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts (Idyllwild Arts Academy), where an early mentor, the bassist Marshall Hawkins, had played with Miles Davis; in high school he won the Louis Armstrong National Jazz Award. He went on to study saxophone at the University of Southern California and graduated with honors in clarinet from California State University, Long Beach, where he studied under Gary Bovyer. His early clarinet mentors included Kenny Davern, Tony Scott, and the soprano saxophonist George Probert; it was Scott who, autographing a photo for the young Christopher, wrote "Good luck on Clarinet Road...lots of curves!," a phrase Christopher later adopted as the name of his working band and publishing company.

Touring with the singer-songwriter A.J. Croce in the early 1990s first brought Christopher to New Orleans, and he relocated there permanently in 1994, working freelance with musicians including trumpeter Al Hirt, veterans of Preservation Hall, and brass bands such as the Nightcrawlers and Galactic. In 1996 he left the city to join the Jim Cullum Jazz Band in San Antonio, Texas, where he appeared nightly as featured clarinetist for nearly three years and recorded episodes of the syndicated public-radio program Riverwalk Jazz: Live From the Landing, working alongside guests including Benny Carter, Dick Hyman, and Joe Williams on the band's American Love Songs (Riverwalk, 1997). He returned to New Orleans in 2001 and, on the strength of his own published research into the city's Creole clarinet style, began pursuing a master's degree in musicology at Tulane University. As a leader he had already started recording in 1998 with This Side of Evan (Meridian Productions), and through the early 2000s he built the first volumes of his long-running "Clarinet Road" series on STR Digital Records: Clarinet Road, Vol. I: The Road to New Orleans (2002) and Vol. 2: The Road to Romance (2004), alongside duo and small-group dates including Danza (2002) with pianist Tom McDermott and The Ragpickers (2002) with veteran clarinetist Tony Parenti.

In August 2005, when the federal levees failed after Hurricane Katrina, Christopher was displaced from New Orleans again. He traveled and performed internationally before settling in Paris at the invitation of the French Embassy's cultural services division (Wikipedia's account gives the invitation as coming from the city of Paris itself), living there from roughly January 2006 through March 2007. During that residency he formed the Jazz Traditions Project and, more lastingly, Django à la Créole, a quartet with guitarists David Blenkhorn and Dave Kelbie and bassist Sebastien Girardot that fused Django Reinhardt's Gypsy swing with New Orleans grooves; The Sunday Times (UK) asked of the group, "Is there a more graceful band at work at the moment?" Django à la Créole made three records for the London-based Lejazzetal label in partnership with the Paris imprint Frémeaux & Associés: the self-titled debut (2007 per Christopher's own site and Wikipedia, though Discogs dates the same recording 2008), Finesse (2010), and Live! (2014). Alongside the group work, Christopher's own leader catalogue through this period included Introduction (Live at the Meridien) (2007) and two records built around senior collaborators: Delta Bound (Arbors Records, 2007), featuring pianist Dick Hyman, bassist Bill Huntington, and drummer Shannon Powell, and The Remembering Song (Arbors Records, 2010), featuring guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, guitarist James Chirillo, and bassist Greg Cohen. In July 2010, on the strength of that record's original material, he debuted "Treat It Gentle Suite," a concerto for clarinet and band with the Minnesota Orchestra, described by his own promotional materials as the first concerto written for clarinet and band in the New Orleans style.

Touring engagements with trumpeter Irvin Mayfield's New Orleans Jazz Orchestra made it possible for Christopher to return to the city permanently by 2008; he is heard on the orchestra's Book One (World Village, 2009), which won the Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 2010. From 2008 to 2009 he taught part-time at the University of New Orleans, leading a student ensemble that performed alongside guest mentors trombonist Lucien Barbarin and pianist Marcus Roberts (the same Marcus Roberts who anchors Wycliffe Gordon's earliest sideman credit on Deep in the Shed, 1989). He continued recording steadily through the 2010s: Almost Native (Music From New Orleans & Beyond) (Threadhead Records, 2011), a co-leader date with Tom McDermott; Louie's Dream for Our Jazz Heroes (2013), with pianist and educator Eli Yamin; Clarinet Road, Vol. III: In Sidney's Footsteps (STR Digital, dated 2012 by Discogs but 2016 on Wikipedia and his own site, a discrepancy this profile could not resolve); and Bayou Chant & Other Textures (STR Digital, released November 4, 2016), a set of originals recorded in April 2015 at Marigny Recording Studios in New Orleans with guitarist Brian Seeger, bassist Roland Guerin, and pianists Joe Ashlar and David Torkanowsky, which does not appear in Discogs's catalog of his work at all. The same year, 2016, produced Gems by the Piano Giants (self-released, "Evan Christopher - Ehud Asherie Duo"), a duo record with the pianist Ehud Asherie built around repertoire by Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Mary Lou Williams, Eubie Blake, and Teddy Wilson, with vocalist Hilary Gardner guesting on three tracks. That Discogs-documented duo billing, "Evan Christopher - Ehud Asherie Duo," is the fact connecting this profile to Asherie's own. Christopher's Discogs artist page also lists him as a group member of the Bob Wilber Quintet (heard on the various-artists Atlanta Blues, 2016) and of Wycliffe Gordon and the SBS All-Star Band, documented on A Tribute to Storyville: Live at Flushing Town Hall (2016), on which he plays clarinet and vocals alongside Gordon, pianist Eric Reed, trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso, drummer Winard Harper, and bandleader Vince Giordano on bass, tuba, and bass saxophone.

More recently, Christopher recorded A Summit in Paris (Camille Productions, 2020, recorded July 2019) with the Belgian Gypsy-jazz guitarist Fapy Lafertin, Girardot, and Kelbie, and Blues in Air: The Music of Sidney Bechet (Camille Productions, 2022) with the French trio Three Blind Mice and drummer Guillaume Nouaux, a program devoted entirely to the Creole clarinet and soprano saxophone pioneer whose vocabulary Christopher has spent his career extending. He has continued to appear as a guest and sideman well into the 2020s, including on Aaron Diehl and the Knights' Zodiac Suite (2023) and vocalist Kathy Ingraham's Jazz Dreams (2026), and remains based in New Orleans, where he is a charter member of the composer guild NOLA ArtHouse Music, writes occasional columns on the city's music culture for NolaVie.com, and continues to teach through workshops, clinics, and residencies, including a recurring "Swing University" series at Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 2018 his ensemble Clarinet Road received a New Jazz Works composition grant from Chamber Music America, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which supported "The Faubourg Variations," a piece for the group premiered in subsequent years.

Christopher describes his own music as "contemporary, early jazz": a New Orleans clarinet vocabulary drawn directly from the Creole tradition of Sidney Bechet, Barney Bigard, Omer Simeon, Lorenzo Tio Jr., Edmond Hall, Johnny Dodds, and Albert Nicholas, played with contemporary technique and repertoire choices rather than as museum-piece revivalism. Critics have coined the phrase "close-encounter music" for the immediacy of his playing, and one reviewer's description of his work as "a triumph, joining the present seamlessly to a glorious past" is widely quoted in his own promotional materials. London Jazz News has called him among the finest living exponents of the New Orleans Creole clarinet style. He is outspoken about craft over taste in early jazz performance practice, summarizing his pedagogical philosophy as "craft is not subjective": specific, namable expressive gestures rather than a vague sense of authenticity. That philosophy runs through both his New Orleans-repertoire records and his Gypsy-jazz-facing work with Django à la Créole and, later, Fapy Lafertin, and through his original compositions, which increasingly draw on New Orleans's own bounce, funk, and second-line rhythms rather than only its 1920s recorded past.