Omer Klein was born in Netanya in 1982, the grandchild of immigrants from Tunisia, Libya, and Hungary — a mix that shows up directly in how he plays rather than sitting as a biographical footnote. He started on keyboard at 7, shifted his focus to piano around 13, and trained at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts before a scholarship took him to the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he studied jazz piano under Danilo Perez and Ran Blake and classical piano under Alexander Korsantia.

He moved to New York in 2005 and studied privately under Fred Hersch, one of jazz's most decorated living pianists — a mentorship that shaped his sense of touch and harmonic color as much as any conservatory class did. His recorded output as a soloist began soon after: Duet (2007, Fresh Sound New Talent, a duo with bassist Haggai Cohen Milo — six years before their trio formed), Introducing Omer Klein (2007, Smalls Records; bassist Omer Avital, also profiled separately in this system, plays on it), the solo-piano record Heart Beats (2008, Smalls Records), and Rockets on the Balcony (2010, on John Zorn's Tzadik label), followed by To The Unknown (recorded October 2011 at Systems Two Studios in Brooklyn, released 2013 on Plus Loin Music).

In 2013 he formed the Omer Klein Trio with bassist Haggai Cohen Milo and drummer Amir Bresler. Their debut as a trio, Fearless Friday (2015, Neuklang Records, recorded at Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg), was called one of the most rewarding piano trio releases of its year by All About Jazz's Ian Patterson, who compared one track to "a Bach-inspired Brad Mehldau interpreting Radiohead." The trio kept working: Sleepwalkers (2017) explored themes of society in the information age and won the Omer Klein Trio the 2018 ECHO Jazz award, Germany's major music-industry prize; Radio Mediteran (2019) added analog synthesizers and percussion to the classic trio format; Personal Belongings followed in 2021. Ten years after the trio's formation, they marked the anniversary with 2023's Life & Fire, recorded in Berlin and released on Warner Music, one of the world's three major label groups and the home for five of Klein's records to date. A holiday-themed detour, Season Bright, followed on Warner in December 2023. His newest record, The Poetics (2026, XJAZZ! Music), expands the working unit into a sextet with saxophonists Tineke Postma and Omri Abramov, bassist Haggai Cohen Milo, drummer Amir Bresler, and percussionist Tupac Mantilla.

He's not only touring anymore, either. In fall 2025 Klein took up a post as Professor of Jazz Piano at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München (HMTM), Munich's leading conservatory for music and theater, effective October 1, 2025 — two decades of playing and composing, dating back to his 2005 move to New York, now feeding directly into a classroom. He was also Artist in Residence at Frankfurt's Alte Oper during the 2024/2025 season, and has performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Elbphilharmonie, Philharmonie Berlin, and the London Jazz Festival.

Klein plays modern jazz threaded through with Israeli and North African melodic material — an inheritance from his Tunisian, Libyan, and Hungarian family background that he treats as source material rather than seasoning. His time studying privately with Fred Hersch, and his conservatory training under Danilo Perez and Ran Blake, both show up in a harmonically sophisticated, touch-conscious approach to the piano; critics have reached for comparisons to Brad Mehldau's genre-blurring instincts, particularly on the trio's more rock- and pop-adjacent material. With Haggai Cohen Milo and Amir Bresler, he's built one of the longer-tenured working trios in contemporary European jazz — over a decade together by Life & Fire — which gives the group's interplay a settled, conversational quality that shows even as the instrumentation around them expands, as on the newer sextet configuration of The Poetics.