Keith Moore "Red" Mitchell was born September 20, 1927, in New York City and raised in New Jersey by an engineer father and a mother who loved poetry — a combination that shows up later in his life as a bassist who also wrote lyrics and, eventually, published poetry. His first instruments were piano, alto saxophone, and clarinet. Cornell University offered him an engineering scholarship, but by 1947 he was in the U.S. Army instead, where he switched to double bass while playing in a band stationed in Germany. He was out and working by 1948, in a jazz trio in New York.

The next several years were a fast climb through the top tier of working bebop sidemen: Jackie Paris (1947-1948), guitarist Mundell Lowe, Chubby Jackson's big band, and Charlie Ventura's group (1949), followed by two years touring with Woody Herman's Orchestra (1949-1951) and, from 1952 to 1954, a high-profile stint in the popular Red Norvo Trio. A brief run in the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in 1954 was the last stop before Mitchell settled in Los Angeles and became one of the defining bassists of West Coast jazz.

Between 1954 and 1968, Mitchell was everywhere on the LA scene: house bassist in all but title for pianist Hampton Hawes, a member of the MGM studio orchestra, and a regular in film and television session work. His discography from these years reads like a cross-section of the era — he made his leader debut with a Bethlehem session in 1955 (issued as Red Mitchell, 1956) featuring Hawes on piano, Joe Maini on alto, and Conte Candoli on trumpet, followed by Presenting Red Mitchell (Contemporary, 1957), a quartet date with pianist Lorraine Geller and drummer Billy Higgins. He recorded with Ornette Coleman on the pivotal Tomorrow Is the Question! (1959) and, in the early 1960s, co-led a short-lived but well-regarded quintet with tenor saxophonist Harold Land — captured on Hear Ye! (Atlantic, 1962), with trumpeter Carmell Jones and pianist Frank Strazzeri rounding out the band.

It was also in this period that Mitchell began his long musical association with guitarist Jim Hall, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Their West Coast dates together between 1957 and 1960 include Hall's guitar on the trio session Good Friday Blues (Pacific Jazz, 1960) — on which, unusually, Mitchell is on piano rather than bass, with Red Kelly holding down the bottom end — and Rejoice! (Pacific Jazz/World Pacific, 1961), recorded live in Hollywood with Mitchell playing cello rather than bass alongside Hall's guitar. The two reconvened repeatedly over the following two decades, including on the unusual 1980 classical-jazz crossover session A Different Kind of Blues (EMI) alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman, pianist André Previn, and drummer Shelly Manne. Their most celebrated meeting came on January 20 and 21, 1978, at Sweet Basil in New York: a duo concert issued as Jim Hall/Red Mitchell (Artists House), which drew a five-star DownBeat review and remains one of the most intimate small-group recordings either man made.

In 1968, Mitchell moved to Stockholm, Sweden, remaining there for nearly a quarter-century. He led his own groups, worked steadily with Scandinavian musicians, and backed visiting Americans passing through, while also becoming a prolific and inventive duo partner. Sweden produced a run of paired recordings with a remarkable cast: guitarist Barney Kessel (Two Way Conversation, 1973-74), saxophonist Lee Konitz (I Concentrate on You, a Cole Porter tribute recorded in Copenhagen in 1974), singer Karin Krog (But Three's a Crowd, 1979), saxophonist Warne Marsh (The Mitchell-Marsh Big Two — Hot House, recorded live at Stockholm's Fasching club in 1980), pianist Hank Jones (Duo, 1987), and pianist Don Friedman (Half & Half, 1986). He also recorded a genuine solo album, Home Suite... (Caprice, 1985), taped in his own Stockholm apartment on bass, piano, and voice. Around the mid-1960s he had switched his bass's tuning from standard fourths to fifths — the same intervals as a cello — a technical shift that gave his sound the airy, singing quality critics often singled out.

His duo and trio partnership with pianist Kenny Barron produced two records: an informal 1986 living-room session released as The Red Barron Duo (Storyville, 1988), and the more widely heard trio date Talking (Capri, 1991), with drummer Ben Riley. He also reunited repeatedly with pianist Jimmy Rowles, on I'm Glad There Is You (Contemporary, 1987) and Trio (Capri, 1989, with drummer Donald Bailey). Sweden also honored him directly: he won the Swedish Grammis Award twice, in 1986 and 1991, for his recorded performances as bassist, pianist, and vocalist and for his compositions and poetic lyrics, and the Swedish government awarded him the Illis Quorum in 1992.

Mitchell's last studio work came just months before the end. On February 15, 1992, at the Fasching club in Stockholm, he recorded a duo set with guitarist Joe Pass, released posthumously as Finally: Live in Stockholm (Verve, 1993). He returned to the United States that year with his wife, Diane, settling in Oregon. Ten months later, on November 8, 1992, Red Mitchell died of a stroke in Salem, Oregon, at age 65. A collection of his poetry was published after his death. His younger brother, Gordon "Whitey" Mitchell, was also a working jazz bassist and later a television writer and producer.

Mitchell's playing was defined by a big, singing tone and an unusually melodic conception of the bass — qualities sharpened by his own background as a pianist and, later, by his mid-1960s switch to fifths tuning (the same intervals as a cello), which opened up the instrument's upper register and gave his lines an airy quality rare among bassists of his generation. That melodic sensibility made him equally comfortable as a bebop-schooled sideman, a duo partner who could carry half a conversation with a horn or guitar, and — on records like Home Suite... and his frequent vocal and lyric-writing credits — a songwriter in his own right. His long-running duo work, especially with Jim Hall, helped define an intimate, unaccompanied strand of small-group jazz that stood apart from both the "cool" West Coast sound he came up in and the more muscular hard bop of the same years.