Roni Eytan was born in Jerusalem and trained early at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance before winning a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music, where he studied with George Garzone, Joe Lovano, John Patitucci, Julian Lage, Adam Cruz and Simon Shaheen as part of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute. In 2013 he was selected for the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead workshop at the Kennedy Center, led by Jason Moran. He went on to become — by the account of both UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation — the first harmonica player ever selected for the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz (formerly the Thelonious Monk Institute) at UCLA, chosen by a panel including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ambrose Akinmusire and James Newton; sources disagree on the exact class year, giving either 2018 or 2020.

In 2014 he joined pianist Danilo Pérez's band, touring internationally for two years and playing major venues including the Sydney Opera House, the Kennedy Center, and the Newport and Detroit jazz festivals. He plays and helped engineer a custom microtonal harmonica, built to produce the pitch nuances of Middle Eastern maqam music — described by his own materials as the world's first instrument of its kind. He is now a faculty member in jazz harmonica performance at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music and is based in New York, where he has a regular quintet with pianist Omri Mor. He has recorded as a sideman on releases by Hironori Suzuki, Lefteris Kordis, Sofia Ribeiro, Mauricio Morales, Mario Romano, Yosef Gutman Levitt and Yotam Ishay, but has not yet released an album under his own name. His debut, Melody People, produced by pianist Shai Maestro and described as a tribute to his grandfather, is scheduled for release on October 30, 2026, preceded by the single "Hopeful" on September 25, 2026, with a chamber ensemble including guitarist Nitzan Bar, bassist Barak Mori and drummer Daniel Dor.

Eytan's signature is the custom microtonal harmonica he plays and helped develop, built specifically to render the pitch inflections of Middle Eastern maqam scales inside a jazz vocabulary — a genuinely rare technical and conceptual niche within jazz, where the harmonica itself is already uncommon. His training runs through both the American jazz mainstream (Berklee, Danilo Pérez's band, the Herbie Hancock Institute) and Israeli/Middle Eastern musical roots, a combination his forthcoming debut album is explicitly built around.