Louis Vola was a double bassist and bandleader who led the Paris dance orchestra in which Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli were playing when they formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934, and who was the quintet's original bassist. He was born on July 6, 1902, in La Seyne-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast beside Toulon, into a family of Italian origin. He grew up with the accordion, which he kept playing all his life, and in the 1920s he moved to Paris, where, by the account of French Wikipedia, he worked as a turner-miller at Citroën, played drums at weekend bals-musette and then settled on the double bass as his main instrument.

His link with Reinhardt began on the Riviera. In the spring of 1931 he was leading an orchestra at the Lido in Toulon with Reinhardt and the guitarist Roger Chaput in it, and in June of that year the group recorded "Carinosa" at the Grand Théâtre in Toulon with Reinhardt as soloist. In a 1976 interview Vola recalled finding Joseph and Django Reinhardt playing guitars together on a beach at Toulon and inviting them to join his band. By 1934 he was running a larger orchestra whose players included Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli and the saxophonist Alix Combelle. Reinhardt and Grappelli played as a small band inside it at the tea dances of the Hôtel Claridge on the Champs-Élysées, and a Polydor single of October 1935, the singer André Pasdoc accompanied by L'Orchestre Vola, carries Vola on bass with Reinhardt on guitar and Grappelli and Michel Warlop on violins.

Out of those afternoons came the Quintette du Hot Club de France. Vola is counted among its founding members in 1934, with Django Reinhardt on lead guitar, Stéphane Grappelli on violin, Joseph Reinhardt and Roger Chaput on rhythm guitars, and no drums or horns. He later left the group and came back to it. Discogs credits him on double bass on the quintet's Polydor single "Limehouse Blues" (recorded October 13, 1935), on "Chicago" and "Charleston" for the Swing label (April 1937) and on "Minor Swing" and "Viper's Dream" (recorded November 25, 1937); on "China Boy," the other side of the Polydor single, the bassist is Tony Rovira, so the chair was not yet his alone. By the late 1930s Emmanuel Soudieux usually held it on record.

Alongside the quintet Vola was one of the busiest bassists in Paris. Discogs lists him on the Swing label's sessions of 1937 and 1938 under Michel Warlop (December 21, 1937, with Reinhardt on guitar), under Alix Combelle's Hot Four (about March 4, 1938, with the cornetist Philippe Brun and Joseph Reinhardt), under Brun's own Swing Band (March 1938, with Reinhardt, Grappelli on piano and Combelle) and under the Hot Club Swing Stars (December 1938, with Roger Chaput on guitar). He also played for Willie Lewis and His Entertainers, the American expatriate dance band, on two Pathé sides, "Say You're Mine" and "On Your Toes"; on the first of them the trumpeters include Bill Coleman.

Around 1940 Vola joined Ray Ventura's orchestra, the band that spent the war years in South America, and he stayed in Argentina until 1948. In Buenos Aires he formed a quintet modeled on the Hot Club group, and a recording of "Mi Cielo Azul" made about June 1945 credits him on bass with the guitarists A. Rivera, Henri Salvador and Milton Musco and the violinist Hernán Oliva. After his return to France he worked in Nice and Paris and made few records. In 1978 he took part with Boulou Ferré, and with Svend Asmussen and Elios Ferré by one account, in a commemoration of Django Reinhardt at the festival at Samois-sur-Seine. He was the godfather of the guitarist François Vola, and he passed away in Paris on August 15, 1990, at the age of 88.

Vola was a rhythm-section player by trade, and the records show it: the Hot Club quintet had no drummer, so the bass and two rhythm guitars carried the beat under Reinhardt and Grappelli, and he supplied the same foundation for Warlop's, Combelle's and Brun's bands and for Willie Lewis's dance orchestra. He also played accordion and drums, and in Argentina he led as well as accompanied. German Wikipedia remembers him mainly as an early discoverer and promoter of Django Reinhardt and possibly the catalyst who brought Reinhardt and Grappelli together, and as a respected session musician. His own name seldom appears first on a record, and Discogs files no album under it, so his legacy lies in the bass lines on the Swing and Polydor singles of 1935 to 1938 and in the orchestra that gave the Hot Club quintet its start.