Chris Lightcap is an accomplished bassist and composer with a wide-ranging performing and recording career. He has worked with Marc Ribot, Regina Carter, Craig Taborn, Glen Hansard, Mark Turner, John Medeski, Jason Moran, The Kronos Quartet, Tomasz Stanko, Chris Potter, Paul Motian, John Scofield, Dave Liebman, Paquito D’Rivera, Anthony Braxton, Joe Morris, Sheila Jordan, James Carter, Butch Morris, Ben Monder, Mary Halvorson, and many other artists. His has played on over 100 albums and as a bandleader/composer he has produced six critically acclaimed albums of original music.
Born and raised in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Chris played violin and piano before taking up the electric bass at fourteen. As a senior in high school he started to study the upright bass and the following year he enrolled at Williams College. During this period he studied bass, composition, classical performance, and improvisation with Milt Hinton, Cameron Brown, Robert Suderburg, Alvin Lucier, Jeff Levine and Bill Dixon. He also had the privilege of studying and performing with master drummer Edward Blackwell shortly before his death in 1992. Upon graduating from Williams with the the school’s Hutchinson arts fellowship as well as the Robert G. Barrow Memorial Prize for Composition, he moved to his current home, New York City.
Throughout his performing career Lightcap has has also been a prolific composer. In 1998 he began to write for his own group, a quartet featuring Gerald Cleaver on drums and Tony Malaby and Bill McHenry on tenor saxophones. Lightcap produced two recordings with this group, “Lay-Up” (2000) and “Bigmouth” (2003), which were released on Fresh Sound Records. Both albums were on CMJ’s top 10 radio chart and received critical acclaim in the New York Times, Jazztimes, Cadence, the Village Voice, and All About Jazz. Lightcap is currently a faculty member at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and the School for Improvisational Music.