Jason Christopher Lindner was born in New York on February 1, 1973 and raised in Brooklyn. His father played piano and sang, in jazz, theater music and classical music, and kept a large jazz record collection; Jason was picking out melodies on the piano at two. "It was just a case of imitating him," he told All About Jazz in 2014. His first two-handed piece was the Star Wars theme. Formal lessons started at seven, and he tried guitar, trombone, saxophone and upright bass along the way. The turning point was the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, where for the first time he had peers: drummer Eric McPherson, drummer Daniel Freedman and saxophonist Myron Walden were classmates. "Before that I was never around other musicians who were peers," he said. "It was definitely a college level situation in high school."

He was working New York gigs at fifteen: an art gallery in Alphabet City, a Baptist church in Harlem, a social club in Harlem, a cabaret bar on the Upper West Side. Weekends went to jam sessions at the Village Gate and at Zanzibar. After high school he apprenticed under Barry Harris, Chris Anderson, Junior Mance, Tardo Hammer, Jaki Byard and Frank Hewitt, and spent his listening hours on the older local players, Tommy Turrentine, Junior Cook, "C" Sharpe, Jimmy Lovelace and Arnie Lawrence among them. A different education ran alongside it: a three-nights-a-week gig at a Cuban restaurant on 52nd Street, taken with the bassist William Ash, where he had to learn Afro-Cuban music from a standing start. He later described working out how salsa piano and ragtime share a root, and hearing the connection change how he heard everything else.

Smalls opened in Greenwich Village in 1994 and Lindner became its house pianist. About a year in, he asked the club's founder Mitch Borden about putting a big band on Mondays. "Mitch said, 'Great, when do you want to start?'" Within three months he had written the charts and assembled a band that included trumpeter Diego Urcola, percussionist Kahlil Kwame Bell and trombonist Avi Lebovich. The residency ran seven years and drew lines around the block on a weeknight, which almost nothing else at Smalls did. "That put my name in the paper every week," he said. "The band probably didn't sound all that great the first couple years, honestly. I was learning how to do it." Impulse! caught the band mid-apprenticeship on the 1998 compilation Jazz Underground: Live at Smalls, where two Lindner tracks sit alongside Omer Avital's group, the Charles Owens Quartet and the Frank Hewitt Sextet. Chick Corea's Stretch Records then signed the band and issued Premonition, recorded in 1998 and released in July 2000, with Walden on alto, Jimmy Greene and Owens on tenors, Avital and Avishai Cohen splitting the bass chair and Bob Belden co-producing. By the time it came out Lindner had already moved on to a quintet. "Everything in my career is very delayed as far as what the public at large catches," he told JazzTimes in 2004.

That lag became a pattern. Live/UK, a quartet set with Greene, Avital and drummer Marlon Browden taped by the BBC at London's Pizza Express, was recorded in 2001 and issued by Sunnyside in 2004. Two trio records with the Barcelona bassist Giulia Valle and drummer Marc Ayza bracket the decade, 1, 2, 3, Etc. from December 2001 sessions and Enchanted House from 2008. Ab Aeterno, cut over two December 2004 days with Avital on oud and bass and Luisito Quintero on percussion, is the most explicitly cross-cultural of his acoustic records. When the big band finally got a proper document, it was Live At Jazz Gallery, a double disc from two nights in November 2005 with Miguel Zenón, Anat Cohen, Avishai Cohen, Duane Eubanks, Avital and McPherson. Through the same years he served as music director for the Chilean singer Claudia Acuña, playing on her Verve debut and producing and largely writing her 2004 MAXJAZZ album Luna, and he produced four Anat Cohen albums for Anzic between 2008 and 2015.

The second half of his career belongs to a different instrument. He bought a Roland XP-80 workstation to make hip-hop beats before he owned a computer, and by 2004 was leading an electric band with Jacques Schwarz-Bart, Avishai Cohen, Reggie Washington and Gene Jackson. Now Vs Now started as a quintet in Brooklyn in 2006, with Panagiotis Andreou on electric bass, Mark Guiliana on drums, the beatboxer Baba Israel and Cohen, and settled into a trio. "I wasn't playing jazz quartet gigs anymore," Lindner said. "I wanted to appeal to ordinary people and not just a jazz audience. I was growing up. I didn't want to pretend I was in another era." Meshell Ndegeocello, whose band he played in for about four years, produced the trio's 2009 Anzic debut and named it. Earth Analog followed in 2013, most of it begun as Logic sketches on a laptop, and The Buffering Cocoon in 2018 with Justin Tyson replacing Guiliana. Down Beat's critics named his band Rising Star Big Band in 2009 and again in 2015, and Lindner himself Rising Star Keyboard in 2013.

The band that Donny McCaslin built around Lindner, Guiliana and bassist Tim Lefebvre on Casting for Gravity in 2012 is the one David Bowie hired whole. Over the first three months of 2015 Lindner played nine keyboards and a grand piano on Blackstar, released on January 8, 2016, two days before Bowie's death; the credits read piano, Wurlitzer organ and keyboards. He has said that watching Tony Visconti work those sessions changed his own approach to production. The same group carried on as McCaslin's, on Beyond Now (2016), Blow. (2018) and after. Alongside it he has kept working across genre lines that a jazz discography does not describe well: keyboards on one track of Ndegeocello's The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, Dafnis Prieto's Proverb Trio, Justin Brown's Nyeusi, the New York Gypsy All Stars, Basya Schechter's Pharaoh's Daughter, and from 2022 onward a run of house and dance 12-inches, including a 2026 EP co-billed with the New York producer JKriv.

Lindner's writing was described in 2004 as "buoyant, singable melodies enlivened by circular, interlocking rhythms," reconciling Afro-Cuban and modal jazz with R&B, hip-hop and house, and the description has held up across the electronic turn. Rhythm, not harmony, is the organizing idea: he has said phrases arrive in his head as rhythm and melody together and that he often writes them on paper without going to the piano. The Cuban restaurant gig, the seven-year Smalls residency where he had to accompany a rotating cast of horn players with incompatible needs, and four years in Meshell Ndegeocello's band each widened the palette in a different direction, and he frames the breadth as principle rather than eclecticism: "No one music is more important than any other. As knowing multiple verbal languages broadens your native tongue, so does knowing multiple musical dialects." His later influences are named plainly and are not jazz musicians: Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Nigel Godrich's band Ultraista. He rejects the framing that this puts him outside jazz, citing the drummer Jojo Mayer's insistence that a band improvising with electronics is playing jazz: "Earth Analog is not an electronic record. To a purist jazz musician, it might seem that way, but to an electronica person it's a jazz record." Chick Corea called him "a musical universe"; Time Out New York placed him "among the finest all-around pianist-composers of his generation." He plays Moog and Dave Smith instruments.