Wilton Lewis Felder was born August 31, 1940, in Houston, Texas, and took up alto saxophone before he turned ten. While attending Phillis Wheatley High School he joined forces with pianist Joe Sample and drummer Stix Hooper in the group that would become the Jazz Crusaders; he went on to study music at Texas Southern University. He remained with the band, through its various lineups and its 1971 rename to the Crusaders, for more than thirty years, from their 1961 debut Freedom Sound through the group's commercial peak on 1979's Street Life. The band's own story is told in full in The Crusaders' JazzProfiles.com profile.

Alongside his work in the band, Felder built a second career as one of Los Angeles's most in-demand session musicians, primarily on electric bass. When Motown Records opened its Los Angeles operation in the early 1970s, Felder became one of the label's in-house bass players, appearing on Jackson 5 recordings and sessions for Marvin Gaye. His studio credits extended well beyond Motown to Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Billy Joel, Randy Newman, and Joan Baez. In 1969 he wrote and recorded "Theme from Bullitt" for the Steve McQueen film Bullitt, one of his earliest outside-the-band projects.

He also built a solo recording career, releasing We All Have a Star (1978), Inherit the Wind (1980), and 1985's Secrets, which reached No. 77 on the UK Albums Chart. He continued recording into the 1990s with Nocturnal Moods (1991) and Forever, Always (1993).

Felder died September 27, 2015, at his home in Whittier, California, at age 75, from multiple myeloma, a year after bandmates Joe Sample and Wayne Henderson both passed away.

Felder's dual identity, a jazz-rooted tenor saxophonist inside the Crusaders and a groove-first session bassist outside it, made him one of the clearest embodiments of the crossover-jazz aesthetic this project covers: a musician equally credible in a jazz combo and on a Motown session sheet, moving fluidly between the two rather than treating them as separate careers.