Riccardo Del Fra was born in Rome on 20 February 1956. He started on guitar and switched to the upright bass at sixteen, then studied at the Frosinone Conservatory under Franco Petracchi and Franco Noto while reading sociology and anthropology at the University of Rome.

Through the 1970s he worked the two halves of the Roman music economy at once. He played in the RAI orchestra and took film-score sessions on one side, and on the other he was the bassist the clubs called when an American came through: Art Blakey, Art Farmer, Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Lee Konitz, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Motian, Kai Winding.

His first documented studio work sits squarely inside the Italian scene of that generation. In 1980 he recorded Hinterland for Edipan with the Claudio Fasoli Jazz Group, a band that also carried Enrico Pieranunzi on piano, Roberto Gatto on drums, Bruno Tommaso on second bass and Giancarlo Schiaffini on trombone. The same year he appears on Soft Journey, the record Chet Baker made with Pieranunzi.

Baker is the relationship that defined the next decade. The two met in Rome in 1979 and worked together until Baker's death on 13 May 1988: twelve albums, tours across Europe and Japan, radio and television dates. On 25 November 1987 Del Fra played bass on a single filmed take of "I'm a Fool to Want You," recorded at Clap's studio in Paris with Alain Jean-Marie on piano and George Brown on drums for Bertrand Fèvre's short film Chet's Romance, which won the 1989 César for Best Documentary Short.

Del Fra settled in Paris in the early 1980s and joined a working rhythm section with Jean-Marie and drummer Al Levitt, which made him the regular bassist for Johnny Griffin, Barney Wilen and Bob Brookmeyer. Brookmeyer mattered twice over: Del Fra took his composition classes in Cologne, and Brookmeyer then brought him into the Bob Brookmeyer New Quartet, whose Paris Suite took a prize from the Académie du Jazz.

A Sip of Your Touch (IDA Records, 1989) was his first album as a leader and his first answer to Baker's death. It is built as a sequence of duets, with Art Farmer on flugelhorn, Dave Liebman on soprano saxophone, Enrico Pieranunzi and Michel Graillier at the piano and Rachel Gould singing. It won the Grand Prix FNAC in 1989.

Del Fra's writing widened well past the jazz quartet from there. Silent Call (1993) set one in front of a string orchestra at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. Inner Galaxy (1995), for solo tenor saxophone, double bass and cello quartet, premiered at the Flanders Festival in Antwerp. He studied composition with Paul Méfano's Ensemble 2e2m and recorded an album of Tōru Takemitsu's chamber works with them. Ensemble Intercontemporain then commissioned Sky Changes and Tree Thrills, premiered at the Cité de la Musique on 12 March 2009 under Susanna Mälkki with Dave Liebman as soloist, and performed by the Manhattan School of Music in October 2010 before a recording followed in 2012. Mystery Galaxy, a symphonic poem for jazz quintet and symphony orchestra, opened at the Toulon Opera House in February 2022 under Léo Margue. Une Folle Allure, a suite for three soloists and string ensemble, was created at the Les Émouvantes festival in Marseille in September 2024.

He also writes for film. He has scored five features for the Belgian director Lucas Belvaux, beginning with Pour Rire! and continuing through the Belvaux trilogy (Un couple épatant, Après la vie, Cavale), La Raison du plus faible and Rapt. On other people's scores he plays rather than writes: bass on Philippe Sarde's Quai d'Orsay (2013), jazz bass on Alexandre Desplat's The Outfit (2022), and sessions for Ennio Morricone and Piero Umiliani in Italy.

A parallel strand of his catalogue is Breton. In 1996 he began working with Annie Ebrel, a singer who performs in the Breton language, and their duo album Voulouz Loar / Velluto di Luna took a Choc du Monde de la Musique and a Diapason d'Or. The project expanded in 2001 into Flouradenn, with Paolo Fresu on trumpet, Laurent Dehors on reeds, Kuljit Bhamra on tabla and Jean-Luc Landsweerdt on drums. Fresu and Del Fra are co-billed again on Jean-Marie Machado's Lyrisme (JMS, 2001) alongside Andy Sheppard.

Teaching became the other half of his working life. Del Fra joined the faculty of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris in 1998, and in September 2004 he took over its Jazz and Improvised Music department, succeeding the double bassist Jean-François Jenny-Clark. He ran it until 2024. In 2005 he assembled the Jazoo Project from young conservatory players and recorded Roses & Roots for Nocturne with them, adding Bruno Ruder on piano, Sylvain Rifflet on reeds and Joey Baron on drums; the record collected four Jazzman stars, Jazzmag's "Disque d'émoi" and four-star reviews in Télérama and Le Monde de la Musique. France recognised the work directly: Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2003, a Django d'Or in 2006, the Académie du Jazz's European Musician prize in 2008, and promotion to Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2014.

My Chet My Song (Cristal Records, 2014) returned to Baker twenty-five years after A Sip of Your Touch, this time with a quintet of Airelle Besson, Pierrick Pédron, Bruno Ruder and Billy Hart set against the Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg. It grew out of a commission from the Jazz in Marciac festival in August 2011, whose first version featured Roy Hargrove, Pierrick Pédron, Bruno Ruder, Billy Hart and the orchestra of the Toulouse Conservatoire. Chet Visions (2019) paired the 1989 and 2014 records in a single CD book.

Moving People (2018) points forward instead. Built around journeys toward better lives, it features Kurt Rosenwinkel as special guest alongside Tomasz Dąbrowski, Jan Prax, Rémi Fox, Carl-Henri Morisset and Jason Brown, and the band toured seven European countries. It won a Choc from Jazz Magazine, a France Musique Choice and a Coup de Cœur from the Académie Charles Cros.

On 27 March 2026, Frémeaux & Associés and Cristal Records issued Songs for Chet, Songs for Now, a three-CD set with a twenty-page booklet collecting A Sip of Your Touch, My Chet My Song and Moving People. Thirty-two tracks, and a fair summary of a fifty-year career: nine years spent holding up another man's songs, and the rest spent writing his own.

Del Fra plays a warm, singing, melodically foregrounded double bass rather than a purely time-keeping one, which is why so much of his own writing puts the bass in dialogue with a single voice or horn instead of underneath a full rhythm section. A Sip of Your Touch, Soft Talk, Double Take, Sorserez and the Annie Ebrel records are all duos or near-duos, and that format recurs across four decades of his catalogue.

His declared admirations run in two directions at once, from Charlie Parker and John Coltrane to Gustav Mahler and György Ligeti, and he has described himself as an eclectic musician without apology. The practical result is a body of work that moves between a jazz quintet and a symphony orchestra without treating the crossing as an event: the writing for Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Takemitsu recording with Ensemble 2e2m, the string-orchestra setting of Silent Call and the orchestral frame of My Chet My Song all come from the same pen as the trio records on Sketch.

Chet Baker is the clearest single influence, though less as a stylistic model than as a subject. Two of Del Fra's own albums are written about Baker rather than in his manner, and the orchestral arrangements on My Chet My Song deliberately move the material away from the small-group sound Baker himself worked in.

Bob Brookmeyer is the other decisive figure, and the one who converted a bassist into a composer. Del Fra's large-ensemble writing, with its layered horn voicings and long-form structures, is traceable to the composition classes he took with Brookmeyer in Cologne before joining his quartet.