Larry Mizell was born February 17, 1944, in New York City. He and his younger brother Alphonso "Fonce" Mizell were both given trumpets as teenagers and joined their school band, but their formal paths diverged at Howard University, where Larry earned a degree in engineering while Fonce studied music under trumpet legend Donald Byrd, a connection that would define both brothers' careers. In the early 1970s, Larry and Fonce moved to California together 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. Their five-album run with Donald Byrd between 1973 and 1976 began with Black Byrd (1973), which became Blue Note's best-selling album to that point and helped establish the blueprint for jazz-funk and, later, acid jazz and neo-soul; Donald Byrd's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. They went on to produce Bobbi Humphrey's Blacks and Blues and Fancy Dancer, Johnny Hammond's Gears, and Gary Bartz's Music Is My Sanctuary, among many others, defining the sound of an entire label era largely from the production chair.

Larry Mizell's engineering background gave the brothers' productions a distinctively layered, electronically sophisticated sound within an otherwise soul- and funk-rooted aesthetic, a combination that helped define jazz-funk as a genre and later became a foundational reference point for acid jazz and neo-soul producers.