Mat Maneri was born October 4, 1969, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of saxophonist and composer Joe Maneri and visual artist Sonja Maneri. Joe Maneri had spent the 1950s and 1960s playing clarinet and saxophone on the Catskills wedding-band circuit before an unlikely late-career pivot: hired onto the New England Conservatory faculty in 1970 at the urging of Gunther Schuller, he went on to develop a 72-tone microtonal theory and composition system — the equal division of the octave into 72 parts — and in 1988 founded the Boston Microtonal Society to promote it. That system, and the ear it demanded, is the inheritance Mat Maneri grew up inside.

He began violin at five, and by his teens was serious enough about the classical track to win a full scholarship as principal violinist at Walnut Hill School and the New England Conservatory of Music. His principal teacher there, Robert Koff — a co-founder of the Juilliard String Quartet — steeped him in Baroque and chamber repertoire, a grounding that stayed audible in his playing long after he left the classical path in his late teens to work in his father's world instead. He added viola roughly fifteen years after starting on violin, expanding the instrumental range he'd bring to microtonal improvisation.

His earliest appearances on record came in the mid-1990s: a 1994 duo session, In Time, with pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and Three Men Walking (1996, ECM), a trio billing him alongside his father and guitarist Joe Morris — his first appearance for the label that would become his most frequent home. His official debut as a leader followed in 1998 with Acceptance (hatOLOGY), a quintet session with his father, bassist Ed Schuller, drummer Randy Peterson, guitarist John Dirac, and trombonist Gary Valente, produced by Chick Corea's ECM contemporary and fellow traveler in the downtown scene.

The most sustained thread in Maneri's discography is the duo and trio work he made with his father across roughly a decade: Blessed (1998, ECM), their first duo record; Tales of Rohnlief (1999, ECM), a trio with bassist Barre Phillips; Angles of Repose (2004, ECM), another Phillips trio date; and the more loosely structured Club D'Elf and Maneri Ensemble sessions of the early 2000s, including Going to Church (2002), which also featured pianist Matthew Shipp. Pentagon (2005, Thirsty Ear) brought both parents into the studio together — Joe Maneri on reeds, organ, and voice, and Sonja Maneri contributing voice — alongside Craig Taborn, John Hébert, and Tom Rainey. Joe Maneri died in 2009; the body of recordings father and son made together remains one of the most extensive documents of microtonal jazz on record.

Running alongside the family recordings is a decades-long partnership with pianist Matthew Shipp, beginning with the 2000 duo album Gravitational Systems and continuing through Blue Decco (2000, a quartet date with William Parker and Gerald Cleaver), Chamber Trio (2005), A Violent Dose of Anything (2013, a film-soundtrack trio with Ivo Perelman), Vessel in Orbit (2017, with drummer Whit Dickey), and Conference of the Mat/ts (2018) — more than a dozen recordings across two decades. A parallel, equally extensive partnership developed with saxophonist Ivo Perelman, running through Leo Records' "Strings" series and a string of duo and trio dates between 2013 and 2023.

Maneri's most significant free-jazz encounter outside his own circle came in 1999, when the Library of Congress commissioned a duo performance with pianist Cecil Taylor; the recording was released in 2004 as Algonquin (Bridge Records), pairing two of the music's most uncompromising improvisers for a single continuous conversation. He crossed paths repeatedly with bassist William Parker — on Blue Decco, on the 2002 quartet date Sustain (Thirsty Ear, with Joe McPhee, Craig Taborn, and Gerald Cleaver), and on the Matthew Shipp String Trio's Symbolic Reality (2019) — and with Cleaver on those same sessions plus Breaking Point (2016, with Perelman and Joe Morris) and Live at Scholes (2021).

Since 2013, Maneri's central creative partnership has been with Romanian pianist Lucian Ban, beginning with Transylvanian Concert (ECM), a live duo recording made in Ban's hometown of Târgu Mureș. The collaboration deepened into the Retracing Bartók project, revisiting the Transylvanian folk songs Béla Bartók collected on wax-cylinder field recordings in the early twentieth century — Transylvanian Folk Songs (2020) and Transylvanian Dance (2024, both eventually joined by saxophonist John Surman), and Cantica Profana and The Athenaeum Concert (both 2025). Ban and Maneri also recorded Oedipe Redux (2023, Sunnyside), a reworking of George Enescu's opera Œdipe with a larger ensemble including trumpeter Ralph Alessi. Separately, in 2017, Maneri assembled the trio behind Sounding Tears (Clean Feed) with Ban and British saxophonist Evan Parker — his first release under his own name in over a decade.

Since 2018, Maneri's working quartet with Ban, bassist John Hébert, and drummer Randy Peterson has released a trilogy of albums for Sunnyside meditating on loss and its aftermath: Dust (2019), Ash (2023), and Mist (2026), the last recorded in April 2025 and framed by the label as the trilogy's turn toward hope. Beyond his own projects, Maneri has taught privately for more than fifteen years and has held teaching positions at the New England Conservatory and the New School, alongside workshops on improvisation, ear training, and theory across Europe and North America.

Maneri's playing fuses two lineages that don't often meet: a classical grounding in Baroque and chamber music by way of his teacher Robert Koff, extending to the twentieth-century harmonic language of the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) and composer Elliott Carter, and the 72-tone microtonal system his father Joe Maneri developed and taught at the New England Conservatory. Where the elder Maneri had to engineer custom fingerings to coax microtones out of a saxophone, the violin and viola are fretless by nature — Mat Maneri's choice of instrument let him inherit his father's ear for pitches between the cracks of the piano keyboard and make it fully idiomatic to a string player, sliding and bending between tones rather than approximating them. All About Jazz has credited him with changing the way the jazz world listens to the violin and viola, and the Chicago Reader once described him as having "a mahogany tone and muscular low register."