Alphonso "Fonce" Mizell was born January 15, 1943, in New York City. He and his younger brother Larry were both given trumpets as teenagers and played in their school band together, and Fonce went on to study music at Howard University, where he trained under trumpet legend Donald Byrd, then a professor there. In the early 1970s he and Larry moved to California to launch their own production company, Sky High Productions.

From 1972 to 1981, the Mizell Brothers produced some of the most recognizable recordings in jazz-funk history, beginning with a five-album run for Fonce's former teacher, Donald Byrd, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile: Black Byrd (1973), which became Blue Note's best-selling album at the time, Street Lady (1973), and Places and Spaces (1975) among them. Their production work extended well past Byrd's own catalog to Bobbi Humphrey's Blacks and Blues and Fancy Dancer, Johnny Hammond's Gears, and Gary Bartz's Music Is My Sanctuary.

Fonce Mizell died July 5, 2011, in Los Angeles, California.

The Mizell Brothers' productions, anchored by Fonce's own trumpet training under Donald Byrd, brought a genuine jazz musician's ear to what became a defining jazz-funk sound of the 1970s, work that laid a foundation later generations of acid jazz and neo-soul producers would draw on directly.