Ray Brown was born October 13, 1926, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and moved to New York City in 1945 at nineteen, where he began playing with Dizzy Gillespie. In 1948 he married singer Ella Fitzgerald and became musical director on her solo and Jazz at the Philharmonic tours until the couple's breakup in 1952.

From 1951 to 1966 he was a member of the Oscar Peterson Trio, widely regarded as one of the finest small groups in jazz history, where his bass playing first began drawing serious attention, anchoring the trio's sound in both piano-guitar (with Barney Kessel, later Herb Ellis) and, after Ellis's departure, piano-drums (with Ed Thigpen) configurations. Bassist Sam Jones, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, succeeded him in the trio in 1966.

After leaving Peterson, Brown settled in Los Angeles, working extensively in the recording studios, continuing to record jazz, and managing several artists. He joined the L.A. Four starting in 1974. He was inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 2003. Brown died July 2, 2002, in Indianapolis, Indiana, at age 75.

Brown's rock-solid, harmonically sophisticated bass playing, developed across two decades anchoring the Oscar Peterson Trio, set a standard for jazz bass technique that shaped how the instrument was played in small-group settings for generations afterward.