Sheldon "Shelly" Manne was born on June 11, 1920, in Manhattan, New York City. His father, Max Manne, and his uncles were drummers; as a boy he admired Jo Jones and Dave Tough, and Billy Gladstone, a colleague of his father's and the most admired percussionist in New York's theater orchestras, gave him tips and encouragement. He came up in the clubs of 52nd Street in the late 1930s and 1940s and took his first job with a well-known big band in 1940, with Bobby Byrne's orchestra. In those years he recorded with Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Shavers and Don Byas, and with musicians from the Duke Ellington orchestra including Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Lawrence Brown and Rex Stewart. He served in the Coast Guard from 1942 to 1945. In 1943 he married Florence Butterfield, a Rockette known as Flip; the marriage lasted 41 years, until his death.

When bebop arrived in the 1940s he took to it quickly and played with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, as well as with Flip Phillips, Charlie Ventura, Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz. His national reputation came with two working bands of the late 1940s and early 1950s, those of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. Herman's band let him play the bebop he loved; Kenton's "progressive jazz" orchestra, whose dense arrangements could be hard to swing, gave him the freedom to experiment with new colors and rhythms and to learn to support a band in many kinds of settings. He won awards and a following with both at a time when jazz was among the most popular music in the United States.

In the early 1950s Manne left New York and settled permanently on a ranch in an outlying part of Los Angeles, where he and his wife raised horses. He became a central figure of the West Coast school, working with Shorty Rogers, Hampton Hawes, Red Mitchell, Art Pepper, Russ Freeman, Frank Rosolino, Chet Baker, Leroy Vinnegar, Conte Candoli and many others. Producer Lester Koenig's Contemporary Records became his main label, and for a period he recorded as an exclusive Contemporary artist. His first sessions there, in 1953, were issued as a 10-inch LP of Shelly Manne & His Men and later folded into the album The West Coast Sound. One of his best-selling records came on August 17, 1956, when he, pianist André Previn and bassist Leroy Vinnegar met at Contemporary's Los Angeles studio and cut Modern Jazz Performances of Songs from My Fair Lady, billed to Shelly Manne & His Friends. It was the first album made up entirely of jazz versions of tunes from one Broadway musical, it was recorded in a single session, and it became one of the best-selling jazz albums of its day. Contemporary followed it with more show-tune sets by Manne and Previn, among them Li'l Abner, Pal Joey, Gigi and West Side Story, with Red Mitchell taking over from Vinnegar on the later ones.

The same studio produced several other landmark records in the following years. From March 1957 he joined guitarist Barney Kessel and bassist Ray Brown as the trio The Poll Winners, named for the magazine polls all three kept winning, and the group made five albums. Also in 1957 he and Brown backed Sonny Rollins on Way Out West, a pianoless trio session. In 1959 he played on Ornette Coleman's Tomorrow Is the Question! and, in the same year, led Shelly Manne & His Men (trumpeter Joe Gordon, tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca, pianist Victor Feldman and bassist Monty Budwig) for a three-night run at the Black Hawk in San Francisco, September 22 to 24, 1959; the live recordings were issued as four LPs and are highly regarded as an innovative live jazz recording.

Manne was one of the first jazz drummers to work extensively in Hollywood. His film credits began with The Wild One (1953). On The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) he played drums throughout, worked as a personal assistant to director Otto Preminger and tutored Frank Sinatra, and the soundtrack album credited him for the drumming sequences. He played on Johnny Mandel's jazz score for I Want to Live! (1958) and worked closely with Henry Mancini, shaping the percussion on the series Peter Gunn and on films including Breakfast at Tiffany's, Hatari! and The Pink Panther. He began writing his own scores with The Proper Time (1959), also recorded by his group, and later wrote and played the music for the film Young Billy Young (1969), the television series Daktari (1966 to 1969) and the film Trader Horn (1973).

From 1960 to 1972 he was part-owner of Shelly's Manne-Hole at 1608 North Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood, where the house band was Shelly Manne & His Men, at various times with Russ Freeman, Monty Budwig, Richie Kamuca, Conte Candoli, Frank Strozier, John Morell and Mike Wofford. Visiting headliners included Ben Webster, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, John Coltrane, Sonny Stitt, Thelonious Monk, Carmen McRae, Milt Jackson and Miles Davis, and the club produced a run of live albums: Live! Shelly Manne & His Men at the Manne-Hole (1961), Bill Evans's At Shelly's Manne-Hole (1963), Cannonball Adderley Live! (1964), Les McCann's Live at Shelly's Manne-Hole (1965) and Keith Jarrett's Somewhere Before (1969). A second location in the restaurant Tetou's on Wilshire Boulevard followed, and he closed the club for financial reasons in late 1973, with Stan Getz the last headliner. Away from the club he made Empathy (1962) and A Simple Matter of Conviction (1966) with Evans.

In the 1970s he turned back to his own playing and recorded with Red Rodney, Hank Jones, Art Pepper, Lew Tabackin and Oliver Nelson. From 1974 to 1977 he was the drummer of the L.A. Four with guitarist Laurindo Almeida, saxophonist and flutist Bud Shank and bassist Ray Brown, making four albums with them before Jeff Hamilton succeeded him. In the 1980s he recorded with Harry "Sweets" Edison, Zoot Sims, Joe Pass, Herb Ellis and pianist John Lewis, and in 1980 led a live date at the Los Angeles club Carmelo's with pianists Bill Mays and Alan Broadbent and bassist Chuck Domanico. Weeks before his death the City of Los Angeles and the Hollywood Arts Council declared September 9, 1984, Shelly Manne Day. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on September 26, 1984, at 64.

Manne's drumming was personal, precise and clear, with a very wide range of colors, and he thought of it as melodic: he contrasted his approach with Max Roach's by saying that Roach plays melodically out of the rhythms, while he plays rhythms out of melodic thinking. His first models were Jo Jones and Dave Tough, and he took things from contemporaries such as Kenny Clarke and Roach and, later, from Elvin Jones and Tony Williams. He worked in experimental groups of the early 1950s, including those of Jimmy Giuffre and Teddy Charles, but never let the music go cerebral at the expense of time; whether in Dixieland, bebop, avant-garde jazz, big bands or small groups, he said his aim was to make the music swing, and fellow musicians praised how closely he listened and how he made the others sound better rather than calling attention to himself. Nat Hentoff called him one of the most musical and imaginatively illuminating drummers in 1957, and Benny Carter, who worked with him over several decades, said he could read anything and get any sort of effect. Singers prized him too: he played behind Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Tormé, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Blossom Dearie and Nancy Wilson, among others, and Jackie Cain of Jackie and Roy said she had never heard a drummer play so beautifully behind a singer. He used percussion colors well beyond the kit on records such as Sounds Unheard Of! with guitarist Jack Marshall. Critics tied him to West Coast jazz and sometimes dismissed the lighter show-tune albums, though he did not care for the label and his playing ranged from swing-era sessions through bebop and hard bop to the free-leaning music of Ornette Coleman. The popular, light-styled records may be one reason he is often left out of surveys of the great jazz drummers of the century.