Anthony Charles Mottola was born in Kearny, New Jersey, on April 18, 1918. He began on banjo and wanted to play saxophone, but he was too young to ride the bus to a teacher's house in Newark on his own, so his father taught him guitar at home instead. In high school he and the guitarist Al Caiola formed a group modeled on the Hot Club Quintet of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, and as a teenager he played on Jersey City radio station WAAT alongside Al Viola, who would later be Frank Sinatra's guitarist. At WAAT he first met the young Sinatra, a friendship that would frame the end of his career.

He turned professional in 1936, touring with the George Hall orchestra, and his first recorded appearance was behind the singer Dolly Dawn on the band's "Shine." In 1941 he joined the CBS radio staff in New York, where Carl Kress and Dick McDonough, the busiest studio guitarists of the era, were his mentors. He played in Raymond Scott's CBS orchestra, backed Sinatra on the network and then Perry Como, and became the kind of studio guitarist producers called first because he could read anything, improvise when asked and never miss a downbeat. By the late 1940s he was leading a trio on the CBS programs Face the Music and Make Mine Music.

His jazz-side recordings from those years are specific and documented. His first records were guitar duets with Kress, and in 1947 the two cut quartet sides, among them "Blonde on the Loose," "Sarong Number" and "The Goose from Gander," later issued by Capitol on the EP Guitar Stylist, with Paul Ricci on clarinet, Bob Haggart on bass and Terry Snyder on drums. The Tony Mottola Four, with Johnny Guarnieri on piano, Trigger Alpert on bass and Morey Feld on drums, recorded "Tony's Touch," "Coquette," "Guilty" and "Trigger Fantasy" for Majestic in 1947; Royale later put the four sides on one half of a split LP whose other half is a Lennie Tristano Trio set, though the two groups did not play together. In 1947 he was also the guitarist on the H.R.S. single "Flight of the Be Bop" by bassist Billy Taylor Sr.'s Big Four. In 1948 he played guitar, uncredited on the label, on a Musicraft record by Sarah Vaughan that included "The One I Love," and in October 1949 he was the guitarist on Decca's New York session for Billie Holiday with the Gordon Jenkins orchestra and trumpeter Bobby Hackett, which produced "You're My Thrill" and "Somebody's on My Mind."

Television made him famous to people who never read a jazz magazine. Beginning in 1950 he scored the live CBS thriller Danger, writing and playing the whole soundtrack on guitar from a booth next to the control room, after Yul Brynner, then directing the series, asked him for an original score; Brynner's successor Sidney Lumet wanted a fresh score for every episode. The opening figure became known among musicians as the Danger chord, and MGM issued a 10-inch LP of the music, Danger. He was a regular on The Perry Como Show and the Sid Caesar programs, and from 1958 to 1972 he was in the Tonight Show band, first under Skitch Henderson and then under Doc Severinsen. He won an Emmy for his score to a television documentary about the boyhoods of Hubert Humphrey and James Baldwin, and in 1988 he scored Lumet's film Running on Empty.

Through the 1950s he kept a foot in the jazz studios. He played on Lou Stein's Six for Kicks (Jubilee, 1954), a small-group date with clarinetist Peanuts Hucko and trumpeter Billy Butterfield; on Ruth Price's Kapp album My Name Is Ruth Price... I Sing! (1955), with trumpeter Joe Newman, saxophonist Frank Wess and bassist Milt Hinton; on a 1957 Philips EP by Toots Thielemans with bassist Oscar Pettiford; and on Neal Hefti's Concert Miniatures (Vik, 1957), with trombonist Urbie Green. In 1958 he is credited on Cootie Williams in Hi-Fi (RCA Victor), recorded at Webster Hall, with pianist Hank Jones on "Just in Time" and "Air Mail Special," and on the title track of Benny Goodman's Swing Into Spring, recorded February 25, 1958 with Jones and trumpeter Doc Severinsen. He and Al Caiola were the two guitarists on Johnny Mathis's Open Fire, Two Guitars (Columbia, 1959), with Milt Hinton on bass; the spare, two-guitar setting impressed the producer Enoch Light, who wanted to record Mottola in the same transparent way.

Light's Command label issued Mr. Big: Tony Mottola...Guitar in 1959, a program of standards such as "What's New," "Prelude to a Kiss" and "Am I Blue" played with a guitar section of Al Caiola, Bucky Pizzarelli, Al Casamenti, Don Arnone and Tommy Kay, with Bob Haggart on bass. Over the next decade and a half Mottola made more than fifty albums for Command and Light's Project 3, a run that Vintage Guitar ranks second in popularity only to the guitar albums of Chet Atkins. Roman Guitar reached No. 26 on the US album chart and was certified Silver by the RIAA. These are easy-listening records, and AllMusic files them there: Latin and Italian themes, movie songs and the pop hits of the day, played on acoustic and electric guitar with Lew Davies or Chris Dedrick arrangements, a spare rhythm section and the audiophile engineering Light was known for. His one charting single, "This Guy's in Love with You," reached No. 22 on the Easy Listening chart in the summer of 1968. At Project 3 he also worked as an associate producer and A&R man, and he is credited as a producer or associate producer on jazz dates for the label, among them pianist Ralph Sutton's Knocked Out Nocturne (1969, with trumpeter Yank Lawson and saxophonist Bob Wilber), the World's Greatest Jazzband's Extra! (1969), Dick Hyman's The Sensuous Piano of Dick Hyman (1971) and trombonist Urbie Green's Bein' Green (1972), on which he also plays guitar. Around him on the later albums are jazz-trained players: Dick Hyman and Bucky Pizzarelli on Tony Mottola Joins the Guitar Underground (1969), and Al Caiola, Vinnie Bell, Al Casamenti, Don Arnone, Hyman and Derek Smith on Tony Mottola and the Quad Guitars (1973). Light asked that he play at his memorial service in 1978, and Mottola chose a medley of "Yesterday" and "Yesterdays."

In 1980 Sinatra, who had never lost his admiration for him, made Mottola his first pick to replace the retiring Al Viola in his touring band. Mottola and his wife Mitzi traveled with Sinatra for eight years, and every show gave him a solo spot and often a duet with the singer, played on a nylon-string guitar. He played behind Sinatra on the 1983 Warner Bros. single "It's Sunday," and that year he recorded his last Project 3 album, All the Way, a Sinatra tribute. Their appearances together included Carnegie Hall and the White House. Mottola retired in 1988 and kept playing at home almost every day. He passed away on August 9, 2004, in Denville, New Jersey, at 86, after a stroke and double pneumonia.

Mottola was a self-taught player who slowed the family Victrola to learn from records by Eddie Lang, Nick Lucas and Django Reinhardt, and who then learned the working musician's craft from Kress and McDonough. His 1940s recordings show swing-era fluency and a fast, clean technique. What defined him after that was tone and economy: Bucky Pizzarelli described his sound as warm, tender and expressive and said he never played a bad note, and the Command and Project 3 records are built around that sound rather than around improvisation.

His own account of where he stood is plain. In a December 2003 interview he said he never considered himself a jazz player, only an all-around player who did whatever job the session required, whether banjo, classical guitar, country or rock and roll. Leonard Feather's 1960 Encyclopedia of Jazz gave him one line as a fine Spanish and electric guitarist. AllMusic lists his genres as easy listening, holiday and jazz, and his style as guitar and easy listening. The honest description is a first-call studio and television guitarist with a documented set of jazz sessions and a strong swing foundation, who became best known for pop, Latin and mood-music guitar albums and for his place beside Frank Sinatra on the road.