Alon Benjamini was born in Tel Aviv in 1996 and came up through the jazz department of the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, the same conservatory pipeline that has produced much of the current generation of New York-based Israeli jazz musicians. He received two scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, in 2014 and 2016, before moving to New York to study at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, graduating in 2018.

His working life in New York's jazz clubs predates his recording career by several years. SmallsLive's own performance archive shows him anchoring trumpeter Hillel Salem's long-running "After-Hours" jam session at Smalls as early as November 2017, and playing regularly through 2018 and 2019 in bassist Alon Near's trio at the same club - the beginning of a working relationship with Near that has continued for close to a decade, including a joint billing under both their names at Mezzrow in March 2024 alongside pianist Tom Oren. That trio, with Yuval Cohen added on soprano saxophone, became the rhythm section for Cohen's 2025 ECM debut, Winter Poems, recorded in September 2023 at Studios La Buissonne and produced by Manfred Eicher.

Benjamini's other recorded credits as a drummer include Linda Sikhakhane's An Open Dialogue (Live in New York) (2020), guitarist Gilad Hekselman's Far Star (2022, Edition Records), pianist Yonathan Peled's Keep It Light! (2022), and vocalist Zohar Amar Mokady's Zoheart EP (2025), on which a press write-up for the release specifically credited him as "ECM Records drummer Alon Benjamini." He released his own debut as a leader, the four-track EP August, in December 2022, playing drums, keyboards, bass and vocals himself alongside pianist Guy Moskovich and guitarist Max Light.

Alongside performing, Benjamini has built a parallel career as a recording, mixing and mastering engineer, working out of Big Orange Sheep Studios in New York. His engineering and mixing credits include records by saxophonist Tobias Meinhart (Sunset Park, 2024), guitarist Max Light (Chaotic Neutral, 2024), the Ari Hoenig Trio (Tea For Three, 2024), drummer Joe Peri (Perillä, 2023), bassist Alexander Claffy (Standards: What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life?, 2018), and saxophonist Alex Hitchcock (Letters From Afar, 2025), among others. He continues to perform regularly at Smalls and Mezzrow in Greenwich Village, including recent appearances with pianist Eden Ladin's trio, bassist Alon Near, and trumpeter Itamar Borochov's Contrafact project.

Benjamini works across two closely related disciplines: playing drums on other musicians' sessions and mixing or mastering them afterward, an unusually direct feedback loop between performing and production for a musician still early in his career. As a player he sits comfortably in modern mainstream and post-bop settings, equally at home behind a chamber-jazz soprano saxophone quartet like Yuval Cohen's, a guitar trio like Gilad Hekselman's, or the singer-songwriter-adjacent material of Zohar Amar Mokady's Zoheart. His own leader debut, August, shows a different side: a solo-recorded, multi-instrumental home production blending jazz fusion, Brazilian rhythm and indie-pop songwriting, credited to him alone on drums, keys, bass and vocals.