Chris Jennings was born August 12, 1978, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He started on piano and classical guitar before moving to electric and then double bass, and in 1996 attended the Banff Centre for the Arts' jazz workshop under trumpeter Kenny Wheeler's direction — an early credential for a Canadian jazz musician of his generation. He went on to earn a Bachelor's degree in Jazz Performance from the University of Toronto in 2000, then a Master's degree in Music from the Royal Conservatory of the Hague in 2004, a route that took him from the Canadian jazz-education pipeline straight into the European scene.

Jennings relocated to Paris in 2002 and has been based there ever since, building a career as one of the more in-demand foreign-born bassists on the French and wider European circuit. That standing was formalized in 2023 and again in 2024, when France's JazzMagazine/JazzNews named him "best foreign double bassist" in its annual "Best of the Year" poll — back-to-back recognition from the country's leading jazz press.

Much of his profile rests on high-visibility sideman work. He has toured and recorded with the Dhafer Youssef Quartet alongside Tigran Hamasyan and Mark Guiliana, and he is a longtime member of two Nguyên Lê-led groups: the "Fire & Water Trio," with percussionist Stephan Edouard, and the "Streams" Quartet. He has also worked extensively with Turkish nay master Kudsi Erguner and Kurdish singer Aynur Dogan, performed with the Algerian chaabi ensemble El Gusto, and appears on record with Lee Konitz, Rick Margitza, Enrico Rava, and Marilyn Mazur — a sideman resume that runs from American postbop through Maghrebi and Anatolian folk traditions. Since 2015 he has held the bass chair in pianist Joachim Kühn's "New Trio" alongside drummer Eric Schaefer, a partnership that has produced two studio albums for the German label ACT Music, Beauty & Truth (2016) and Love & Peace (2018), plus a 2023 live document recorded with the Atom String Quartet at the Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic series, released as Komeda in tribute to the Polish film composer Krzysztof Komeda.

As a leader, Jennings released a self-titled quartet album — recorded in August 2006 and issued in 2010 on the French label Promise Land, with guitarists Pierre Perchaud and Manu Codjia and drummer Patrick Goraguer — before following it in 2013 with Drum'n Koto, a trio record built around koto player Mieko Miyazaki and Goraguer's drums, with guest spots from Nguyên Lê and Kudsi Erguner; the album was named a "disc of the day" on France's TSF Jazz radio. In 2021 he co-led the piano trio date Three Colors with Israeli pianist Yakir Arbib and drummer Roberto Giaquinto. His most recent project, Chris Jennings' 5 Ways Home, gathers an intentionally international band — New Zealand saxophonist Hayden Chisholm, French pianist Patrick Goraguer, Finnish guitarist Kalle Kalima, German drummer Eric Schaefer, and American vocalist Rachel Eckroth — around a sound Jennings has described as splitting the difference between Canadian country music transplanted to Paris and music from the Middle East and North Africa; the group's debut, Boy, She's The Dandy, appeared on Eden River Records in 2024. His own site credits him with eight albums under his name in total, including smaller-circulation projects such as a duo with Perchaud (running since 2006) and a Leon Parker-featuring "Country Jazz Trio" that have not surfaced in commercial discography databases.

Alongside performing, Jennings has taught at the Didier Lockwood Music School since 2005 and spent seven years on the faculty of the Conservatoire de Chelles, in addition to giving international master classes. He plays a custom left-handed double bass built by Thomas Martin and endorses D'Addario's bowed-string line and the David Gage Realist pickup.

Jennings's playing sits at the intersection of three formative environments: the structured jazz pedagogy of Banff and the University of Toronto, the freewheeling improvised-music culture of Paris he entered in 2002, and the Middle Eastern, North African, and Turkish musical vocabularies he absorbed through more than two decades of sideman work with Dhafer Youssef, Kudsi Erguner, Aynur Dogan, and the chaabi orchestra El Gusto. His long tenure in Joachim Kühn's New Trio — a harmonically demanding, largely free-improvising format — has sharpened the more abstract, reactive side of his playing, while his own bandleading projects lean the other way, toward song-forward, genre-blurring writing: Drum'n Koto built a trio around a Japanese koto rather than a horn, and 5 Ways Home folds Canadian country phrasing into music shaped by North African and Middle Eastern modes. The through-line across both modes is a bassist equally comfortable holding down free-jazz interplay and writing tunes meant to travel between traditions.