Herbie Mann was born Herbert Jay Solomon on April 16, 1930, in Brooklyn. His first instrument was clarinet, and he began his professional career primarily as a tenor saxophonist, but by the late 1950s had shifted his focus to flute, an unusual choice for a jazz musician's primary voice at the time. He began his career in the early 1950s while stationed in Italy with the U.S. Army, later working with Dutch jazz accordionist Mat Mathews and arranger Pete Rugolo before forming his own Afro-Jazz Sextet in 1959.

Mann toured extensively through the 1960s, traveling to Africa under the auspices of the U.S. State Department as well as to Japan, Europe, and Latin America. He helped introduce Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music to American audiences and did more than almost any other musician to popularize the flute as a legitimate jazz instrument, blending jazz with R&B, soul, and a broad range of world musics from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. His single "Hijack" became a Billboard No. 1 dance hit for three weeks in 1975.

Mann relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the late 1980s after spending most of his life in his native New York, and died there July 1, 2003, following an extended battle with prostate cancer, at age 73.

Mann's genre-crossing instinct, absorbing Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, African, and Middle Eastern musical traditions decades before "world music" existed as a category, made him one of the most commercially successful crossover figures of his era, and his flute-centered sound directly shaped how the instrument would be heard in jazz for decades afterward.