Miroslav Ladislav Vitouš was born on December 6, 1947, in Prague. He began on the violin at six, moved to piano after about three years, and settled on the bass at fourteen. One of his first groups was the Junior Trio, with his brother Alan on drums and Jan Hammer on keyboards. Vitouš studied at the Prague Conservatory under František Pošta and in 1966 won a music contest in Vienna whose prize was a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music in Boston. After a year there he went to Chicago to play in a group co-led by the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and the flugelhorn player Clark Terry.

Miles Davis heard him in Chicago in 1967 and invited him to join his group at the Village Gate in New York, where Vitouš first worked alongside Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. In 1968 he became a regular on Herbie Mann's Atlantic and Embryo records, starting with Windows Opened and running through 1971, and he shared the bass chair with Ron Carter on Roy Ayers's Stoned Soul Picnic. That same year he joined the pianist Chick Corea and the drummer Roy Haynes for Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, released on Solid State, and played on Jack DeJohnette's debut as a leader, The DeJohnette Complex. In 1969 he recorded his own first album, Infinite Search, for Mann's Embryo label, with Hancock on electric piano, Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, John McLaughlin on guitar, and DeJohnette and Joe Chambers sharing the drum chair. It was reissued in 1972 on Atlantic as Mountain in the Clouds, with one added track. Around it came Super Nova with Shorter (Blue Note), Spaces with Larry Coryell, and in 1970 a second leader record, Purple, with McLaughlin, Billy Cobham and Joe Zawinul, issued in Japan on CBS/Sony.

In 1970 Vitouš, Shorter and Joe Zawinul formed Weather Report. The origin is disputed: Zawinul said he and Shorter recruited the bassist, while Vitouš maintained that he and Shorter started the band and brought in Zawinul afterward. He played on the self-titled debut (1971), I Sing the Body Electric (1972), Live in Tokyo (1972, CBS/Sony) and Sweetnighter (1973), bowing his upright bass through effects pedals to give Shorter a second horn-like voice. He left after clashing with Zawinul over the band's turn toward funk and commercial success, and his last contribution was "American Tango," co-written with Zawinul, which appeared on Mysterious Traveller (1974). He later said that he had been an equal partner in the band's corporation and received nothing when the partnership broke down.

After Weather Report he worked mainly as a leader and collaborator, with Coryell, Alphonse Mouzon, Stan Getz and Flora Purim among others. He made Majesty Music (1976) and Miroslav (1977) for Arista, Magical Shepherd (1976) for Warner Bros., and in Japan Guardian Angels (1979) with George Otsuka, John Scofield and Kenny Kirkland. He joined ECM in 1978 in a trio with the guitarist Terje Rypdal and DeJohnette, then led First Meeting (1980) with John Surman, Kirkland and Jon Christensen, Miroslav Vitous Group (1981) and Journey's End (1983), and recorded the solo double bass album Emergence (1986). In 1982 he reunited with Corea and Haynes for Trio Music and followed it with Trio Music, Live in Europe (1986); the three played together again in 2001 for a concert celebrating Corea's sixtieth birthday, documented on Rendezvous in New York (2003). In 1988 he left the United States to concentrate on composing and moved back to Europe.

On ECM he made Atmos (1993), a set of duets with Jan Garbarek, and the larger-scale Universal Syncopations (2003) with Garbarek, Corea, McLaughlin, DeJohnette and three brass players, followed by Universal Syncopations II (2007), Remembering Weather Report (2009) with the French clarinetist Michel Portal, and Music of Weather Report (2016). In 2005 he released Miroslav Philharmonik, a sample library of orchestra and choir recorded with players of the Czech Philharmonic at the Rudolfinum in Prague. After leaving the United States he lived in Italy, and according to Czech Wikipedia he moved to the Czech Republic in 2017. His most recent album, Mountain Call (ECM, released March 27, 2026), was recorded over seven years at his Prague studio and features Portal, DeJohnette and the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, who sings his lyrics on the suite "Rhapsody"; ECM's notes call Portal and DeJohnette late. He has also published a Czech-language autobiography, Klíč k životu, and the director Petr Kaňka made a documentary about him in 2017.

Vitouš came to the bass from a classical education, and he plays it as a melodic voice as much as a timekeeper, with arco playing a large part in his solo and duo work. In Weather Report, which gave every member room to improvise continuously instead of dividing the band into soloist and accompaniment, he and Joe Zawinul ran their instruments through effects pedals more commonly used by rock guitarists, and his distorted bowing sat beside Wayne Shorter's saxophone as a second horn. The critic Robert Christgau heard the band's early records as a keyboards-and-saxophone development from Miles Davis's In a Silent Way, an album on which Zawinul and Shorter played but Vitouš did not. On Emergence, an unaccompanied record with no overdubs, AllMusic's David R. Adler heard an austere, demanding program in which pizzicato and arco share the time equally. On ECM, whose catalog mixes jazz, classical and world influences, his classical training and give-and-take approach to leading a band fit the house sound, and he has called Jan Garbarek his musical brother, citing a shared Slavic outlook. He also writes for large forces, from the brass and orchestral writing on Universal Syncopations to the Czech Philharmonic sample library, and ECM describes him as a creative sampling pioneer.