Avi Adrian is an Israeli jazz pianist, composer, and educator, and a winner of the 2007 Israeli Prime Minister's Award for Jazz Composers. Largely self-taught on piano, he nonetheless studied under respected teachers at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, including Bat-Sheva Rubinstein, Claude Abravanel, and composer Mark Kopytman, and maintained a professional and personal relationship with Weather Report co-founder Joe Zawinul, who shared ideas on real-time composition with him.

During his Israeli Army service, Adrian served the IDF Orchestra in an unusually wide range of roles at once: trombonist, pianist, music producer, and conductor. He has since built a teaching career across three of Israel's leading music programs: the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, and the Mizmor School for Contemporary Jewish-Israeli Music.

As a performer, Adrian's concert history includes dates alongside a substantial list of visiting American jazz figures: saxophonist David Liebman, drummer Billy Cobham, bassist Eddie Gomez, percussionist Airto Moreira, vocalist James Moody, and, by his own biography, trumpeter Lew Soloff. In 2004 he was invited to give a solo recital at the Israel Festival built around Hassidic melodies from the Polish town of Modzitz, a program that drew warm reviews from a diverse audience. He continues to perform solo or lead a trio billed as "Jewish Standards & Original Jazz," a name that captures the two poles of his musical identity.

Outside the conservatory system, Adrian also taught piano privately, and it was in that role that he began mentoring Adar Broshi starting at age seven. Broshi went on to show striking musical promise before he was diagnosed with cancer; he died on April 5, 2019, at nineteen, after a two-and-a-half-year illness. Adrian, joined by bassist Gilad Abro and drummer Israel Nahum, recorded a tribute album of Broshi's own compositions, Songs From a Dream: The Music of Adar Broshi, at the Jerusalem Music Centre in July 2019 on a Concert Steinway D. The album, produced by Adar's father Oded Broshi and mastered by Scott Hull at Masterdisk in Peekskill, New York, directs all proceeds to childhood cancer research.

A second volume, Songs From a Dream 2, followed on May 6, 2022, this time with drummer Ofri Nehemya and bassist Barak Mori rounding out the trio, both already profiled elsewhere in this project, and Mori a fellow member of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance faculty alongside Adrian.

Beyond his own two leader albums, Adrian's discography as a sideman runs back to the mid-1980s, spanning a run of Beatles-repertoire jazz projects (Jazz Beatles, 2000; Hard Jazz Knights' Jazzing the Beatles, 2008) alongside studio credits with Israeli pop and folk artists including Yehudit Ravitz and Shuly Rand.

Adrian's music sits at a specific crossing point: mainstream, post-bop jazz vocabulary layered with material drawn from Jewish liturgical and folk sources, most visibly Hassidic melody. That combination showed up early, in his 2004 Israel Festival recital built on Hassidic tunes from Modzitz, and it runs through his own trio's billing, "Jewish Standards & Original Jazz." His two tribute albums for Adar Broshi approach the same crossing point from a different angle, fusing Broshi's own stated influences (Bach, Thelonious Monk, and Stevie Wonder) into a single, coherent trio-jazz language. Adrian has credited his contact with Joe Zawinul as formative for his approach to real-time, in-the-moment composition, and his own path as a largely self-taught pianist studying alongside classically trained composition teachers (Bat-Sheva Rubinstein, Claude Abravanel, Mark Kopytman) gives his writing a harmonic depth that draws as much from composed concert music as from the jazz tradition.