About

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 90 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.

Since that time, Lightcap has worked with a wide array of material and musicians. He performed weekly with the Cecil Taylor Big Band in 1995 and was invited to perform in a trio with Archie Shepp and Sunny Murray in Paris the following year. For the next two years he worked regularly throughout New York City in a trio led by saxophonist George Garzone. In 2000 Chris joined the ensemble of MacArthur fellow Regina Carter, with whom he has performed and recorded extensively throughout five continents and has been featured alongside the rest of her group with the Boston, Atlanta and Minnesota Symphonies. Since 2013 he has toured extensively with Craig Taborn’s Daylight Ghosts which released its self-titled album on ECM in 2017. He has toured and played major festivals with such bandleaders as Julian Lage, Mark Turner, Henry Butler, Nels Cline, Tomasz Stanko, Ravi Coltrane, Joe Morris, Steven Bernstein, Ben Monder, Terrel Stafford, Ralph Alessi, and Rob Brown. He has also been a member of drummer Matt Wilson’s well-travelled quartet since 1998 and worked with singer-songwriters like Glen Hansard, Joan Wasser, Jesse Harris, Rebecca Martin and Ruper Orodorkia, country/rock artist Smokey Hormel and the Brazilian surf guitarist Joao Erbetta.

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.

In 2005 Lightcap expanded the band to include Craig Taborn on keyboards and named the group Bigmouth. He went on to produce and release two albums with this group on the Clean Feed Label: 2010′s “Deluxe and “Epicenter” in 2015. Both records were cited among the top releases of the year by The New York Times, NPR, Downbeat, Jazztimes the Village Voice and The Wall Street Journal. In addition to numerous US appearances, Bigmouth has performed at major festivals throughout Europe including Willisau, Saalfelden, North Sea, Porto, Geneva, Ljubljana, Maribor and Edinburgh.

In 2014 Lightcap assembled Superette, an all-electric band that explores the nexus of of harmolodics, surf, West African music, psychedelia and beyond, featuring Jonathan Goldberger and Curtis Hasselbring on guitars and Dan Rieser on drums. The group performed at the 2017 NYC Winter Jazz Fest and in 2018 released its debut recording on Royal Potato Family Records featuring guests Nels Cline and John Medeski. Co-produced by Lightcap and David Breskin, All Music Guide called the album “superb” and Goldmine Magazine named it the “best pure rock all instrumental CD in years.”

In 2019 Lightcap released SuperBigmouth on the Pyroclastic label. This album featured an octet that combines both the Bigmouth and Superette ensembles. The group was dubbed “Best New Artist” by Jazztimes and the album was named one of the best of the year by Rolling Stone and Downbeat. SuperBigmouth headlined at Portugal’s Guimarães Jazz Festival in November of 2021.

In 2011 and 2016 Lightcap was awarded Chamber Music America’s “New Jazz Works” commission grants. He has also received generous composing and production grants from The Shifting Foundation. In 2006 Lightcap was comissioned to write “Wiretap” for the contemporary chamber ensemble counter)induction and he has also contributed compositions and arrangements to albums released by Regina Carter, Matt Wilson, Chad Taylor, Mary Halvorson, Rob Brown and others.

Lightcap is currently a faculty member at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and the School for Improvisational Music.

Notable recordings featuring Lightcap include releases by Craig Taborn (“Light Made Lighter,” Daylight Ghosts”), Regina Carter (“Southern Comfort”, “Reverse Thread”, “Pagannini: After a Dream”,), the Swell Season (“Strict Joy”), Matt Wilson (“Gathering Call”, “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark”), Chad Taylor (“Circle Down”), Gerald Cleaver (“Detroit”), and Joe Morris (“Underthru”, “A Cloud of Blackbirds”(Aum Fidelity), and “At the Old Office”). He has also appeared on recordings with Tom Harrell, Dianne Reeves, Marc Ribot, Anthony Coleman, Steven Bernstein, Roy Campbell, Mat Maneri and Joshua Bell.