Shelly Manne
was one of the greatest jazz drummers in history, appearing on more than a thousand records and enjoying a celebrated career as a Hollywood movie musician. Manne played with a dazzling array of musicians, including Bill Evans, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie, and ran his own hip nightclub in the 1960s.

Although Manne, who was born in New York on June 11, 1920, started out playing the alto saxophone, he was destined to be a percussionist. His father Max, who produced shows at the Roxy Theatre, was an acclaimed drummer. And Max’s friend, Billy Gladstone, a top drummer in the theatres of New York, showed the young Shelly how to hold the sticks and set up a kit. “Then he put Count Basie’s ‘Topsy’ on the phonograph and, as he walked out of the room, said, ‘play!’ That was my first lesson,” Manne once recounted in the book Shelly Manne: Sounds of the Different Drummer, by Jack Brand and Bill Korst.

Although Manne was a talented runner – he was a New York City cross-country champion in high school – his desire to be a musician was sealed by a visit to Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem to hear Roy Eldridge’s band. “I felt what they were doing so strongly that I decided I wanted to do that,” he recalled in an interview with Modern Drummer’s Chuck Bernstein in 1984.