Chris Lightcap

Burning Ambulance Podcast

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Chris Lightcap is is a guy I’ve been aware of since the start of his career in the late 90s, when he was playing with Whit Dickey’s trio on the album Transonic. He was also a member of guitarist Joe Morris’s quartet with Mat Maneri on viola and Jerome Deupree on drums at first, and Gerald Cleaver later on. That group made three records in the late 90s and early 2000s, and then reunited for another record four or five years ago. Lightcap has bounced around and done a ton of projects in the last 20 years or so, as you do, but he’s been leading the band Bigmouth, with Cheek and Malaby and Taborn and Cleaver, for about a decade now. They’ve made several records together that are a kind of avant-garde groove jazz – hard to describe, but a lot of fun to listen to. Superette, which just debuted last year with a self-titled album, is more of an instrumental rock outfit – they even cover a Link Wray tune called “Ace of Spades,” so we talk about that a little bit in this interview.

We also talk about writing and recording, about free jazz and the kind of porousness of boundaries when you’re an open-minded listener and player, and a bunch of other things. So there’s a lot here to listen to and think about, and it’s all pretty interesting, at least I hope so.

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Music heard in this episode:

Superbigmouth, "Through Birds, Through Fire" (Superbigmouth)

Superbigmouth, "Queenside" (Superbigmouth)