André Manoukian was born in Lyon on April 9, 1957, to Armenian parents who ran a ready-to-wear clothing business. His father played piano and violin as an amateur and introduced him to classical music early, and he took classical piano lessons from childhood. He attended the Lycée Ampère in Lyon, started medical studies and left after the first year, then worked in a bank and earned a living demonstrating synthesizers and electric organs in supermarkets. In 1977 he went to the United States and enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied composition, arranging and harmony.

Back in Lyon he founded the big band Horn Stuff with the trumpeter Pierre Drevet. The group made two albums, Horn Stuff (Adda, 1981), with the singer Elisabeth Kontomanou, and a second Horn Stuff (Metro Records, 1982), with the singer Cathy Valdes. Manoukian and Drevet are credited as composers and arrangers on the first, and Manoukian plays acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes, adding a Prophet 5 synthesizer on the second.

The turn toward the French pop and chanson world began in 1983, when he met the singer Liane Foly. They were a couple from 1984 to 1995, and he wrote and arranged her first successes, including "Au fur et à mesure" and "Doucement." He is credited as producer on her albums The Man I Love (1988), Rêve orange (1990) and Les petites notes (1993), the last of which also appeared in an English-language version, Sweet Mystery. He went on to write or produce for Viktor Lazlo, Gilbert Bécaud, Dick Rivers, Nicole Croisille, Natacha Atlas and the singer Malia, whose albums Yellow Daffodils (2002), Echoes of Dreams (2004) and Young Bones (2007) he produced. Film credits include the scores for Quatre étoiles and Jean-Philippe (both 2006).

His most direct jazz production credit of those years is Charles Aznavour's Jazznavour (EMI, 1998), on which Aznavour re-recorded his own songs with jazz orchestrations. Manoukian is credited as producer, plays piano on five of the fourteen tracks (electric piano on one) and is listed for the arrangements on three. The album's players include the pianists Michel Petrucciani and Jacky Terrasson, the organist Eddy Louiss and the accordionist Richard Galliano, and Dianne Reeves sings two duets with Aznavour.

Most French viewers know him from television and radio rather than from records. He was a judge on the talent show Nouvelle Star from its first season in 2003, through its M6 and D8 runs, for more than a decade, playing the part of the show's resident poet and philosopher. He presented Dédé les doigts de fée on Paris Première from 2007, appeared as the character Thierry Kalamian in the France 2 comedy series Fais pas ci, fais pas ça between 2009 and 2016, finished eighth and last in the first season of Danse avec les stars in 2011, and has worked on France Inter in programs including Partons en live and Par Jupiter !. Since 2015 he has presented La Vie secrète des chansons on France 3, receiving his guests at the piano. He is the author of the autobiography La Mécanique des fluides (2008) and of Deleuze, Sheila et moi (2010). France made him a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in January 2014 and an Officier in 2023.

His own recordings run in parallel with all of this. Inkala (2008), a piano trio album with the bassists Ira Coleman and Pierre Boussaguet and the drummer Laurent Robin, mixes original pieces, Armenian folk songs and improvisation. So in Love (2010) is a set of jazz and pop standards sung by a younger generation of French singers, with Manoukian at the piano. Melanchology (2011) followed on Universal's jazz imprint, written with co-composers including the saxophonist Hervé Gourdikian and the singer Elina Duni. In 2010 he created the Cosmojazz festival in Chamonix, and in March 2012 he presented the Armenian-rooted program Manoukian, mes rêves d'Orient at the Vagamondes festival in Évry with Ibrahim Maalouf, Elina Duni and the Chemirani brothers.

Apatride (MadChaman, November 17, 2017) added a string and percussion palette, with the cellists Guillaume Latil and Özer Arkun, the percussionists Keyvan Chemirani and Said Shanbehzadeh, Gourdikian on saxophone, and the singer Lena Chamamyan. Les pianos de Gainsbourg (Decca / Blue Note, April 23, 2021) reinterprets Serge Gainsbourg's songs with a small band and guest vocalists including Melody Gardot. Anouch (November 4, 2022) was released on [PIAS] Le Label, and La Sultane (October 10, 2025), recorded with the tabla player Mosin Khawa, the bassist Gilles Coquard and the cellist Guillaume Latil, is his most recent album to date.

Manoukian is a case where the jazz and the celebrity sit side by side and neither cancels the other. AllMusic describes him as a French jazz musician, composer and producer who is best known as a judge on Nouvelle Star, and that is an accurate summary: his public profile in France was built on television and on pop and chanson production, while his own albums are instrumental jazz piano with a strong Armenian and Eastern Mediterranean accent. Discogs files his leader albums under jazz, and his records have appeared on Blue Note, Capitol Jazz and Universal's jazz imprint.

As a pianist he works in the tradition of the modern European piano trio. French Wikipedia compares Inkala to groups such as The Bad Plus, E.S.T. and Avishai Cohen's trios, and singles out his use of Armenian modal singing and its blue-note inflections as what sets the record apart. His Berklee training shows in the arranging, and the pop background shows in how compact the tracks are: the twelve pieces on Apatride run between about three and four and a half minutes. He presents the standards on So in Love as a tribute to his masters, and his later albums keep returning to Armenian and Middle Eastern material, as the track titles on Apatride ("Persian Blues," "Alaturka") and the 2025 La Sultane suggest.