Bass player. As a member of the Wrecking Crew, the group of studio musicians who backed up most of the hits that came out of Los Angeles between the 1960s and the early 1980s, Ritz recorded with everyone from Sinatra to Sonny & Cher, from Ray Charles to the Chipmunks. He played bass on the Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling, on the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations and on Herb Alpert's Taste of Honey. It is estimated that there are 5,000 recordings that feature his bass playing.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Ritz studied violin and tuba as a child. While attending college in California, he found a job at the Southern California Music Company in Los Angeles, where he fell in love with the ukulele and recorded two seminal jazz ukulele albums on Verve Records in the 1950s. The albums did well in Hawaii but failed to get much attention on the mainland past hardcore jazz collectors.

Ritz gave up playing the ukulele professionally and switched to bass. He was a member of the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra around 1967 when Frank Zappa recorded the orchestral parts for Lumpy Gravy.

Ritz returned to his ukulele roots in the mid 1980s, releasing a number of more recent recordings as well as an instructional book of his arrangements. He has now retired to Hawaii, where he is regarded as one of the original masters of the ukulele.