Chris Anderson was born February 26, 1926, in Chicago, with osteogenesis imperfecta, a brittle-bone disorder, and limited vision that progressed to complete blindness by cataracts by the time he was twenty. He never took a piano lesson in his life; he taught himself by ear as a child, picking out melodies and harmonies at the family piano after a boyhood fascination with movie scores. He left high school early to play blues gigs in South Side Chicago bars, and a job at a record store introduced him to Nat "King" Cole, Art Tatum, and Duke Ellington, cementing his direction toward jazz.

Through the 1940s and 1950s Anderson worked as a house pianist in Chicago's jazz clubs, most notably the Pershing Ballroom, accompanying a remarkable list of touring and local musicians: Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, Gene Ammons, Stan Getz, Max Roach, and Roland Kirk, among others. He later recalled working with Parker on three occasions, including one arranged by tenor saxophonist Claude McLin, who called Anderson to come sit in with Bird; both men appear together, along with guitarist George Freeman and drummer Buzz Freeman, on the privately recorded An Evening at Home with the Bird (Savoy, 1961). Fellow Chicago pianist Von Freeman called Anderson's ear for harmony the best he had ever heard. By October 1959, financial hardship compounded by two broken legs in a single year, a recurring cost of his brittle bones, led fellow musicians and promoter Joe Segal to organize a benefit concert for him at Chicago's Preview Lounge.

Anderson's harmonic conception left its clearest mark on a young pianist newly arrived in Chicago. In 1960, Herbie Hancock heard Anderson play once and, in his own oft-repeated account, "begged him to let me study with him," later calling Anderson "a master of harmony and sensitivity" whose "music has affected the core of my music very deeply." The claim was not a later embellishment: Mapleshade Records' own 1990 reissue of Anderson's Love Locked Out billed him on its front cover as "the legendary teacher of Herbie Hancock," meaning the relationship was already common knowledge in the jazz press decades before it resurfaced in Herbie Hancock's later interviews and his 2014 memoir Possibilities. Writers have traced Anderson's reharmonizing influence directly into Hancock's own early recorded playing, on records such as My Point of View (1963) and Fat Albert Rotunda (1969); secondary sources also credit Anderson more broadly with shaping other pianists who passed through the Chicago scene in the same years, including Ahmad Jamal and Denny Zeitlin.

In 1961 Anderson toured for six weeks as pianist with Dinah Washington's band, playing dates including Pep's in Philadelphia, the Howard Theatre in Washington, and the Apollo, and decided to settle permanently in New York City afterward. He recorded as a leader for the first time around this period: My Romance, cut with bassist Bill Lee and drummer Art Taylor on February 10, 1960, and Inverted Image, recorded with Bill Lee and drummers "Philly" Joe Jones and Walter Perkins and released in March 1962 on Riverside's Jazzland subsidiary, produced by Orrin Keepnews. My Romance did not appear on record until a 1983 Vee Jay reissue; no earlier commercial edition is documented. Anderson then went unrecorded as a leader for more than two decades, a gap widely attributed to the professional discrimination his blindness caused him despite the consistent admiration of his peers.

His recording career resumed in 1990 with the solo Love Locked Out (Mapleshade) and continued through the 1990s and into the 2000s: Blues One (1991, DIW, a trio with bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Billy Higgins), Solo Ballads (1996, Alsut), None but the Lonely Heart (1997, Naim, a duo with bassist Charlie Haden, who also produced the session, recorded at New York's Cami Hall), You Don't Know What Love Is (1998, Naim, with vocalist Sabina Sciubba, bassist David Williams, and Higgins on percussion), Live at Bradley's (2000, Alsut), Solo Ballads Two (2001, Alsut), and From the Heart (2002, Naim), his final studio recording. Through these years he was a regular presence at pianist Barry Harris's annual New York concerts and at clubs including Bradley's, the Jazz Gallery, and the Village Vanguard, continuing to perform despite ongoing hip fractures. His last well-documented studio sideman date was as pianist on Roni Ben-Hur and Amy London's co-billed Two for the Road (1994, Fivecat). Chris Anderson passed away in Manhattan on February 4, 2008, at age 81, from the effects of a stroke; a memorial was held March 31, 2008, at Saint Peter's Church in New York.

Anderson was, first and foremost, a harmonic innovator: a self-taught ear that generated dense, deeply personal reharmonizations and chord voicings unlike anything he could have learned from a teacher, since he never had one. His reputation rested less on technical display than on that harmonic imagination, most audible in his solo ballad playing and in intimate trio and duo settings, where he could reshape a standard's changes from the inside without disturbing its melody. That reputation circulated for decades almost entirely by word of mouth among musicians, since his own recorded discography stayed thin, interrupted for more than twenty years between his early-1960s trio dates and his return to the studio in 1990; peers including Von Freeman and, most famously, Herbie Hancock credited him as a singular harmonic source rather than merely an influence among many.