Oran Etkin was born in Israel on May 18, 1979 (Wikipedia's own category tags carry an internal inconsistency giving 1969, but the birth year is independently corroborated as 1979 by Wikidata, Discogs, and his own artist bio; 1979 is used here). He moved to the Boston area with his family as a child, started piano at five, and began serious clarinet study at fourteen with Yusef Lateef and George Garzone. He studied at Brandeis University and earned a master's degree in jazz from the Manhattan School of Music, where his teachers included Garzone, Lateef, Dave Liebman, and classical clarinetists Charles Neidich and Tom Martin.

In 1998, while in Boston, he took an African dance class taught by Malian percussionist Mohamed "Joh" Sidi Camara and joined Camara's band, which included Camara's uncle, kora player Balla Tounkara. Subsequent trips to Mali deepened the relationship and led, in 2009, to his debut album Kelenia on Motéma Music — a Bambara word press has described as expressing the connection felt between people who are different from each other. The record brought together Camara, balafon player Balla Kouyate, vocalist Abdoulaye Diabaté, guitarist Lionel Loueke, bassists John Benitez and Joe Sanders, violinist Sara Caswell, and liner notes from Lateef himself.

He has continued mixing settings since: Wake Up, Clarinet! (2010, on his own Timbalooloo imprint, crediting him as clarinet, vocals, saxophone and producer); Gathering Light (2014, Motéma), with drummer Nasheet Waits, bassist Ben Allison, guitarist Lionel Loueke and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, following tours through Indonesia, China, Japan, Israel and West Africa; What's New? Reimagining Benny Goodman (2015, Motéma); the self-released children's project Finding Friends Far From Home: A Journey With Clara Net (2019); and Open Arms (January 2024, GroundUP Music, Snarky Puppy's label), collected from a monthly singles-and-video series recorded on location with musicians in Brazil, Zimbabwe, the Czech Republic, France and Turkey. NPR's Jazz Night in America, hosted by Christian McBride, profiled his cross-cultural collaborations and his children's-education work in a June 2024 feature.

That education work runs alongside the performing career under the name Timbalooloo, a music-education method he began developing while teaching preschoolers in Tribeca after graduate school; it now operates from a studio in Soho with partnerships including UNESCO and the Herbie Hancock Institute. He was voted DownBeat magazine's #1 Rising Star Clarinetist in its 2016 Critics Poll, and contributed a track to Healthy Food for Thought: Good Enough to Eat, a children's compilation nominated for Best Spoken Word Album for Children at the 53rd Grammy Awards. He teaches at The New School and is a repeat guest lecturer at Harvard University, and remains based in New York.

Etkin's music sits at the meeting point of American jazz clarinet tradition — Yusef Lateef and Benny Goodman are the two most explicit reference points, the latter the direct subject of a 2015 album — and the West African material he absorbed through more than two decades of collaboration with Malian musicians, beginning with a 1998 dance class in Boston that led, by his own account, to real trips to Mali and a standing relationship with kora and balafon players. The Open Arms project extends that same instinct outward again, built entirely from real on-location recording sessions with musicians across four continents rather than remote collaboration, treating cross-cultural fluency as the working method rather than a genre label.