Mel Keller (Melvin Jerome Keller) was born March 16, 1920, in the Bronx. He earned a business degree from NYU in the late 1930s, played briefly with Ziggy Elman's band and with singer Ray Eberle, and served as a U.S. Navy gunnery officer in World War II before postwar study in orchestration, conducting and clarinet at the Paris Conservatory and a year in Italy. He arrived in Israel in 1951, initially on a visit, and decided to stay.

He joined the Haifa Orchestra as clarinetist and then the Kol Israel (Israel Broadcasting Authority) orchestra in Jerusalem, returning to jazz playing in 1956 with a quartet that included Naftali Aharoni. Through the 1950s he led jazz sessions at the Zionist Organization of America House in Tel Aviv on Friday afternoons. In the early 1960s he founded the Kol Israel Jazz Quartet — Keller on sax and clarinet, pianist Danny Gutfried (later Dan Gottfried), drummer Mel Lipman, and bassist Sam Feinstein — widely credited as Israel's first dedicated jazz combo; a Rutgers University master's thesis on Israeli jazz education quotes an interviewee calling Keller "much more of the father of jazz in Israel. He established the first jazz quartet and things like that." Lipman was later replaced by drummer Aharon "Arale" Kaminsky, who went on to co-found the pioneering band Platina; Feinstein left at the end of 1961 to teach music in Kiryat Tivon and was replaced by bassist Alex Weiss. A second, later quartet under Keller's name — with guitarist Richard Perez — recorded the group's one documented release, Love & Jazz (Hed-Arzi, 1968), a spoken-word album pairing actor Gideon Shemer reading love poetry against the quartet's musical accompaniment.

Keller taught jazz from his home in Herzliya from the 1960s onward; saxophonist Albert Piamenta studied under him as a teenager before becoming a pioneering figure in Israeli ethno-jazz fusion. Keller composed scores for several Israeli films in the 1960s, wrote the Israeli educational television network's signature theme (1970–1977), and contributed songs for artists including Uri Zohar and Chava Alberstein. He returned to New York in 1978, continuing to perform with his own orchestra there, including Broadway engagements, and appeared in Woody Allen's Radio Days (1987). He revisited Israel for the Red Sea Jazz Festival in 1991. He married filmmaker and sculptor Helga Keller in 1961 and adopted a daughter, Liora, in 1964; their story was the subject of a 2015 Haaretz feature on the adoption. He died in the United States in 1998, following an Alzheimer's diagnosis three years earlier.

Keller's importance rests less on a large recorded output — his only documented release is a single 1968 spoken-word-with-jazz-quartet LP — than on his role as Israel's first dedicated jazz bandleader and, through decades of teaching, a direct link to the next generation of Israeli jazz musicians. Dan Gottfried, who went on to found the jazz department at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and the Red Sea Jazz Festival, and Albert Piamenta, a pioneer of Israeli ethno-jazz fusion, both passed through his bands or his teaching before building their own, larger careers.