Herbie Mann was born Herbert Jay Solomon on April 16, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, to Harry C. Solomon and Ruth Rose Solomon, both dancers and dance instructors — his father of Russian-Jewish heritage, his mother a Romanian Jew born in Bukovina. He began on clarinet in grade school and, by the time he graduated Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach, had added saxophone and flute. He started playing professionally at fifteen. After high school he served four years in the U.S. Army, stationed mostly in Italy with the 98th Army Band — an unglamorous, road-band apprenticeship rather than a jazz education, but one that put him in front of an audience nightly for years before he ever cut a record.

Discharged in the early 1950s, Mann worked with Dutch-American accordionist Mat Mathews and arranger Pete Rugolo before recording his own debut for Bethlehem Records in December 1954 with a quartet of guitarist Benny Weeks, bassist Keith Hodgson, and drummer Lee Rockey — released as Herbie Mann Plays (1956). Through the back half of the 1950s he built a reputation as a bebop-rooted flutist working alongside players like Bobby Jaspar (their co-billed Flute Flight, cut for Prestige with Tommy Flanagan on piano and Eddie Costa on vibes, is one of the era's better-remembered flute-and-vibes sessions), Phil Woods, Sam Most, and Buddy Collette. Down Beat named him the magazine's top flutist in its readers' poll four years running, 1957 through 1960 — a genuinely unusual honor, since almost no other jazz musician of the period was building a career primarily as a flutist rather than a saxophonist who doubled on the instrument.

The turn toward what would become his signature sound came in 1959. Mann formed his own group, billed on record as the Herbie Mann Afro-Jazz Sextet, and recorded the African Suite. The U.S. State Department, after hearing it, funded a tour that took the band through more than a dozen African countries — one of the cultural-diplomacy jazz tours the State Department ran through the late 1950s and '60s, the same program that later sent Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong abroad. Mann came back from Africa and cut Flautista! Herbie Mann Plays Afro-Cuban Jazz (1959, Verve), built around a Latin percussion section of Patato Valdés on congas and José Mangual on bongos, and then signed to Atlantic Records, where he'd stay through most of the next two decades. His first Atlantic album as the Afro-Jazz Sextet, The Common Ground (1960), is a genuine period artifact: the personnel includes Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, a trumpet section led by veteran Doc Cheatham, and, on vocals, a 32-year-old Maya Angelou — seven years before her first book was published.

In 1961 Mann took the same instinct to Brazil, traveling there to record with local musicians at a moment when almost no American jazz audience had heard the word "bossa nova." Do the Bossa Nova (1962, Atlantic) was arranged and conducted by Antônio Carlos Jobim himself and features guitarist Baden Powell and drummer Dom Um Romão — Mann recording the style in its country of origin, alongside the musicians who invented it, ahead of the wave of American bossa nova records that followed Stan Getz and João Gilberto's Getz/Gilberto two years later. The same period produced Herbie Mann at the Village Gate (1962), a live album cut at the Greenwich Village club that became so identified with Mann's residencies there over the following years — Herbie Mann Returns to the Village Gate, Monday Night at the Village Gate — that the room and the musician are still cross-referenced in jazz history as a package. Nirvana (1964), billed to "Herbie Mann and the Bill Evans Trio" with Chuck Israels on bass and Paul Motian on drums, showed a different side entirely: Mann's flute set against Evans's harmonic language in a mostly acoustic, unhurried session, a long way from the Latin percussion of his other 1960s dates. Mid-decade, Mann also hired a young, then-unknown Chick Corea for his working band, years before Corea's own career took off. Today! (1966) and Impressions of the Middle East (1967) pushed the same crossover instinct toward Armenian and Middle Eastern folk material, with oud player Charles Ganimian and clarinetist/percussionist Hachig Kazarian sitting alongside Mann's flute and a jazz rhythm section.

The commercial peak came in 1969 with Memphis Underground, recorded at Chips Moman's American Sound Studio with the studio's house rhythm section — Tommy Cogbill, Gene Chrisman, Bobby Wood, Bobby Emmons — plus guitarists Larry Coryell, Reggie Young, and Sonny Sharrock. It fused Mann's flute with Memphis soul in a way that crossed over to a pop audience and became the album most listeners still associate with his name. Mann followed the commercial logic: in 1970 he founded his own label, Embryo Records, distributed through Atlantic's Cotillion imprint, releasing his own records — Muscle Shoals Nitty Gritty (1970), cut at the FAME studio orbit with bassist Miroslav Vitous and the Muscle Shoals rhythm section — alongside albums by other artists including Ron Carter, Vitous, Phil Woods, and Dick Morrissey. Push Push (1971) is Embryo's best-remembered title now, mostly for its guitarist: Duane Allman appears on the session, recorded not long before his death, alongside bassists Chuck Rainey, Donald "Duck" Dunn, and Jerry Jemmott and drummers Al Jackson Jr. and Bernard Purdie.

By the mid-1970s Mann had moved fully into funk and disco without apology, drawing sustained criticism from jazz purists but also real chart numbers — by his own later account, at least 25 of his albums reached the Billboard 200, a run almost no other jazz artist of his generation could claim. Waterbed (1975, with Steve Gadd on drums and Cissy Houston on backing vocals) contained "Hijack," a cover of a track by the Spanish group Barrabás that became a Billboard No. 1 dance hit for three weeks in 1975 and one of the first 12-inch dance promos ever pressed in Europe. Super Mann (1978) pushed further into disco, made with New York producer Patrick Adams, and included Mann's cover of Celi Bee's "Superman" theme, which reached No. 26 on the Billboard singles chart.

Mann's late-career work turned back toward Brazil. Jasil Brazz (1987, RBI Records) introduced a New York-based Brazilian quartet built around drummer Duduka Da Fonseca, guitarist Romero Lubambo, bassist Paul Socolow, and keyboardist Mark Soskin — the same Da Fonseca/Lubambo pairing that, a year later, became half of the founding lineup of Trio da Paz. Caminho de Casa (1990, Chesky Records), his first album for the label, kept Lubambo and Socolow while bringing in drummer Ricky Sebastian. In the mid-1990s Mann started a second label, Kokopelli Records, releasing his own Deep Pocket (1994) — a soul-jazz session with Les McCann, Roy Ayers, David "Fathead" Newman, and Cornell Dupree — and, that same year, guesting on flute for Trio da Paz's own Black Orpheus (1994, Kokopelli), reuniting with Da Fonseca and Lubambo, this time as their guest rather than their employer. In 1996 he collaborated with the British band Stereolab on a cover of "One Note Samba/Surfboard" for the AIDS-benefit compilation Red Hot + Rio.

Mann's last performance was May 3, 2003, at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997, and after a long illness he died at his home in Pecos, New Mexico — a small village outside Santa Fe, where he had relocated in his later years — on July 1, 2003, at age 73. He was survived by his wife, Susan Janeal Arison, and four children: Paul, Claudia, Laura, and Geoffrey Mann, the last a drummer who went on to play in the band Here Lies Man.

Mann's defining trait wasn't a single sound but a refusal to stay inside one: he moved from Afro-Cuban percussion to Brazilian bossa nova to Middle Eastern folk instrumentation to Memphis soul to disco over roughly two decades, absorbing each idiom on its own terms — recording in Brazil with Jobim and Powell rather than covering bossa nova secondhand, touring Africa on a State Department grant rather than sampling African rhythm from records — well before "world music" existed as a marketing category. That instinct made him one of the most commercially successful jazz artists of his generation, with a reported 25-plus albums charting on the Billboard 200, even as it drew steady criticism from jazz critics who read the R&B, funk, and disco phases as a retreat from serious playing. His choice of flute as a primary voice was itself unusual for the era, when the instrument was almost always a saxophonist's secondary horn; Mann's Down Beat poll wins in the late 1950s helped establish it as a legitimate lead voice in jazz in its own right, a lineage that runs forward through later jazz flutists who followed his lead. Across every phase, the constant was Mann's ear for strong collaborators and studio bands rather than a single fixed working group — Bill Evans, a young Chick Corea, the Muscle Shoals and Memphis rhythm sections, Duane Allman, Steve Gadd, and, in his final Brazilian-jazz period, Duduka Da Fonseca and Romero Lubambo — pairing his flute against whatever ensemble best suited the idiom of the moment.