Norris Jones, who took the name Sirone, was born in Atlanta on September 28, 1940. He started on trombone as a boy and moved to the bass at seventeen, keeping the horn player's sense of line and breath that later listeners heard in his phrasing. Late in the 1950s and into the early 1960s he worked around Atlanta in a band called The Group, whose saxophonist was a local contemporary named George Adams. The paying work was rhythm and blues, and Sirone took session dates behind singers including Sam Cooke and Smokey Robinson before he had recorded a note of jazz.

In 1966 Marion Brown telephoned from New York and Sirone moved north. Within months he was on record, and within two years he had played on most of the important small-label documents of the second free-jazz wave. With pianist Dave Burrell he co-founded a working unit called the Untraditional Jazz Improvisational Team, filled out by saxophonist Byard Lancaster and drummer Bobby Kapp. He recorded Noah Howard's At Judson Hall on October 19, 1966, Brown's Why Not four days later, and Brown's Impulse! date Three for Shepp on December 1, 1966. Gato Barbieri's In Search of the Mystery followed on March 15, 1967, then Burrell's own sessions of February 6 and September 9, 1968, Sonny Sharrock's Black Woman that October, and Pharoah Sanders's Izipho Zam on January 14, 1969. He also worked with Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Sunny Murray, and, in the last stretch of the saxophonist's life, with John Coltrane, an association that left no recording behind.

Late in 1970, over a table at Liberty House on Bleecker Street, Sirone and violinist Leroy Jenkins worked out the group that made both their reputations. The Revolutionary Ensemble was founded in 1971 with drummer Frank Clayton, who was quickly replaced by Jerome Cooper, and it operated as a cooperative with no designated leader for six years. Its five records are a compact history of what a string-heavy trio could do outside the conventional rhythm-section hierarchy: Vietnam, taped at the Washington Square Methodist Church that everyone called the Peace Church and released by ESP-Disk in 1972; Manhattan Cycles, recorded live on the last day of 1972 and built on an extended composition by Wadada Leo Smith; The Psyche, put out on the group's own RE Records; The People's Republic, cut December 4 to 6, 1975 at Kendun Recorders in Burbank for A&M's Horizon imprint; and Revolutionary Ensemble, taped at Moosham Castle in Austria on August 18, 1977 for Enja. The Horizon album was the closest the trio came to a major label, and it did not go smoothly. Sirone later recounted that when Herb Alpert played an excerpt for Quincy Jones, Jones reacted badly and said he had been conned, that what he was hearing was not jazz. Sirone's answer was that Jones had missed the point: everybody can sing, whether or not you like the voices. The group broke up in 1977.

The same decade kept him busy elsewhere. He played on Clifford Thornton's Communications Network in 1972, on the Jazz Composer's Orchestra's Plays Numatik Swing Band, composed and conducted by Roswell Rudd, and on Jenkins's own large commissioned score For Players Only, recorded for JCOA in 1975. He made two albums with Dewey Redman for Impulse!, The Ear of the Behearer (June 8 and 9, 1973) and Coincide (September 9 and 10, 1974), doubling on wood flute for the first. Then came Cecil Taylor. Sirone first recorded with him at Town Hall on November 4, 1973, the concert issued as Spring of Two Blue-J's, and in 1978 became the bassist in the Cecil Taylor Unit sextet alongside Jimmy Lyons, Raphé Malik, Ramsey Ameen and Ronald Shannon Jackson. That band recorded twice in April 1978 at Columbia's 30th Street studio, producing The Cecil Taylor Unit and 3 Phasis, then documented itself twice more on a European tour: at a radio concert in Kirchzarten in the Black Forest on June 3, 1978, and at the Liederhalle in Stuttgart eleven days later, the second issued by hat Hut as One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye.

His own leader catalog started late and stayed small. Artistry, recorded July 5, 1978 at Generation Sound in New York and released the following year on the tiny Of The Cosmos label, is a chamber quartet with no drum kit: flutist James Newton, cellist Muneer Bernard Fennell and Famoudou Don Moye on percussion, with all four compositions by Sirone and liner notes by Stanley Crouch. Live caught a trio with alto saxophonist Claude Lawrence and drummer Dennis Charles at the Public Theater on November 7, 1980, and came out in 1981 on Serious Music, the label and publishing company Sirone ran himself; Atavistic reissued it in 2005 in its Unheard Music Series. Between them sits Life Rays, recorded February 4 and 5, 1982 at Barigozzi Studios in Milan with vibraphonist Walt Dickerson and drummer Andrew Cyrille, and released by Soul Note with a Nat Hentoff liner essay. It was Dickerson's last record.

The 1980s put him in the middle of two very different bands. Phalanx had been running since 1985 as a quartet co-led by guitarist James Blood Ulmer and George Adams, with Amin Ali on electric bass and Grant Calvin Weston on drums. In late 1986 or early 1987 that rhythm section was replaced wholesale by Sirone and Rashied Ali, and the reconstituted group made both of its studio albums for the Japanese label DIW, Original Phalanx (February 13 and 14, 1987) and In Touch (February 27 and 29, 1988). Sirone wrote four of the band's pieces, "Free Spirit" and "Angel Love" among them. The other band was violinist Billy Bang's, and it led to a run of Silkheart sessions at A&R Recording in New York in April 1988 with Charles Gayle: Always Born on the 10th and 11th, then Homeless and Spirits Before on the 13th and 14th, three albums that reintroduced Gayle to the record-buying world after two decades of near silence. That March, Sirone had already cut Bang's Valve No. 10 in Milan with Frank Lowe on tenor and Dennis Charles on drums. In September 1986 he had been one of two bassists, with Fred Hopkins, in The Group, a six-piece with Marion Brown, Bang and Andrew Cyrille whose only concert recording surfaced on NoBusiness in 2012. In August 1988 he played on George Adams's Blue Note ballad album Nightingale.

From 1989 Sirone lived in Berlin, where he led a quartet called Concord with saxophonist Ben Abarbanel-Wolff and violinist Ulli Bartel; that group made Sirone's Concord in June 2003, his first album under his own name in more than twenty years. He worked in theater and film, appearing in Garin Nugroho's 2008 Teak Leaves at the Temple, and was a practicing Buddhist. The last decade brought him back into view in New York as well. The Revolutionary Ensemble reformed in 2004 and recorded And Now... at Systems Two in Brooklyn on June 18 of that year for Pi Recordings, with two later concerts, Warsaw in May 2005 and Genoa that November, issued by Mutable Music after Jenkins's death. In November 2004 he and Bang co-led the Sirone Bang Ensemble, with Gayle on saxophones and a young Tyshawn Sorey on drums, at CBGB's Gallery for the album Configuration. Six months earlier he had taken one of four bass chairs, next to William Parker, Henry Grimes and Alan Silva, in Parker's bass quartet at the Vision Festival, recorded as Requiem. His last sessions were a 2008 trio at the Brecht Forum with Oluyemi Thomas and Michael Wimberly and another in Brooklyn that June with Sabir Mateen and Andrew Barker, both released after his death. He passed away in Berlin on October 21, 2009, at sixty-nine.

Sirone came to the bass from the trombone, and the two habits that most distinguished him both trace back to that: a singing, horn-like line in the upper register, often bowed, and an unusual willingness to state ideas rather than support them. Commentators have consistently placed his attack between two models, Charles Mingus's very physical way of making the sound of fingers against string audible, and Jimmy Garrison's flamenco-style strumming. What he added was a trembling high-register tone that meshed with Leroy Jenkins's violin, which is why the Revolutionary Ensemble worked as a texture rather than as a violin trio with accompaniment. Gary Giddins, writing about The People's Republic, described a "redwood-heavy bass" and singled out the arco technique; the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings judged his own playing the revelation of the 1981 Live album, and AllMusic gave that record five stars and Artistry four and a half. He was also a composer, writing all four pieces on Artistry, most of Sirone's Concord, and material for both Phalanx and the Revolutionary Ensemble. He was impatient with the label attached to the music he made: free, in his account, had been abused into a synonym for noise, and the discipline of the Revolutionary Ensemble was his standing answer to that.