Alon Yavnai started playing piano at four years old and was accompanying singers by thirteen, growing up in Israel before formal jazz training took over. He attended the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts and the Givatayim Conservatory, then moved to Boston at twenty-two to study at Berklee College of Music. He won the Great American Jazz Piano Competition outright, an early marker of a career that would run mostly through other people's bandstands before it ran through his own.

By the early 2000s he had become the pianist in Paquito D'Rivera's Latin Jazz Quintet, a chair he held for close to seven years, one of the defining relationships of his career. He released his debut as a leader in 2001, D.S. Al Coda (Whaling City Sound), a sextet record with international personnel that included trumpeter Avishai Cohen. Four years later, D'Rivera and Yavnai formalized their partnership further into a standing trio with cellist Mark Summer, releasing The Jazz Chamber Trio on the audiophile label Chesky Records in 2005. That same partnership eventually delivered a Grammy: in 2008, Yavnai won Best Latin Jazz Album as part of the D'Rivera Quintet for Funk Tango (2007), co-writing the title track himself.

His own catalog as a leader kept expanding alongside the sideman work. Picture This (Bon Rapport Music) followed as a trio record with bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Take Toriyama, with D'Rivera guesting on reeds. Travel Notes (2008, ObliqSound) turned the experience of life on tour into a record, mixing solo piano pieces with trio arrangements featuring bassist and oudist Omer Avital, drawing on stops in Cape Verde, Angola, and Brazil as much as Israel. In 2012, Shir Ahava brought his writing to a 17-piece canvas with Germany's NDR Bigband, his first large-ensemble recording as leader.

The 2016 record Reconnect is one of the more personal turns in his discography: a duo album with Danish trumpeter Jesper Riis, made after the two met at a Miami music school twenty-two years earlier, lost touch, and picked the friendship back up in New York not long before recording. Two years later, Dança Das Águas (2018) paired him with percussionist Joca Perpignan and the NDR Bigband again, this time pulling from Brazilian and West African rhythm alongside his usual Israeli and Middle Eastern vocabulary, credited to "Alon & Joca." That partnership has continued since, including a 2023 piece, "Five Stones" ("Hamesh Avanim"), performed with The Israel Jazz Orchestra.

Beyond his own records and the D'Rivera axis, Yavnai's sideman credits include Nancy Wilson's Turned to Blue (2006, itself a Grammy winner for Best Jazz Vocal Album), Caribbean Jazz Project's Mosaic (2006), New York Voices' 30th-anniversary record Reminiscing in Tempo (2019), and Yo-Yo Ma & Friends' Songs of Joy & Peace (2008), a holiday record that put him on the same tracklist as James Taylor, Diana Krall, and Chris Botti, well outside his usual jazz circles. He has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, and jazz rooms including the Blue Note and Birdland.

Yavnai's playing sits inside a specifically Latin-jazz-inflected strain of the music, shaped by nearly a decade at close range to Paquito D'Rivera's Cuban and Pan-American vocabulary, but it keeps folding in whatever geography he happens to be passing through. D.S. Al Coda and Picture This stayed close to a small-group, bebop-adjacent format. Travel Notes pushed toward a more personal, almost diaristic writing style, tying original compositions to specific places he had actually toured. Shir Ahava and Dança Das Águas moved him into big-band and duo-with-percussion settings respectively, each one built around a different collaborator's sound rather than a fixed formula. The throughline across all of it is compositional: Yavnai writes most of what he plays, and his catalog reads less like a series of standards dates and more like a running travel log set to music, a pattern explicit enough that he named one record after it directly.