Yaki Levy is an Israeli jazz drummer, composer, and pianist who studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston and then spent over a decade based in New York, where his own biography states he taught at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and performed and recorded with McCoy Tyner, Kenny Werner, Jimmy Heath, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Kurt Elling, Frank Foster, and both Philip Catherine and Leni Stern (self-reported; not independently discography-verified, see notes.md). After returning to Israel, that same biography credits him with performing and recording alongside Achinoam Nini (Noa), Rita, Yehudit Ravitz, Danny Sanderson, Shalom Hanoch, Gidi Gov, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra -- a mix of Israel's best-known pop and rock names that reflects the kind of session-drummer versatility common among veteran Israeli jazz musicians.

Independent of that self-reported list, Discogs documents a real, dated cluster of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem studio credits under the artist name "Yaaki Levy" (with "Yaaki Levi" logged as an alias of the same Discogs entity). In 2000 he played drums and percussion on Ittai Rosenbaum, Atcha Bar & The Yellow Submarine Ensemble, recorded at Jerusalem's Yellow Submarine studios. The following year he split drum duties on the Damon Brown-Jonathan Gee Quartet's Good Cop Bad Cop (2001, 33 Records) with fellow Israeli drummer Shai Zelman -- Zelman plays five of the nine tracks and Levy the other four -- a session that grew out of British trumpeter Damon Brown's quintet staying on in Israel after a well-received set at the 1999 Red Sea Jazz Festival. A decade later, in 2013, the same Discogs identity is credited with drums on fingerstyle guitarist Avner Strauss's instrumental album Equator, a folk/world record rather than a jazz date, showing the same session drummer's reach beyond jazz specifically.

Levy is now a faculty member of the Jazz Performance Department at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (JAMD), where the school's own site credits him leading a multi-disciplinary faculty forum and conducting student jazz ensembles at its affiliated conservatory; his own biography adds a teaching post at the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv. Alongside teaching, he leads the Yaki Levy Trio, performing his own original compositions -- documented playing Jerusalem's Yellow Submarine venue, a well-known room for the city's jazz scene -- and a separate project titled "Motian," built around original compositions dedicated to the American jazz drummer Paul Motian.

Levy's stated New York-era colleagues span a wide stretch of the jazz mainstream, from McCoy Tyner's post-Coltrane modal language and Jimmy Heath and Frank Foster's bebop-and-big-band lineage (Foster later led the Count Basie Orchestra) to more contemporary voices like guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and vocalist Kurt Elling. His own tribute project to Paul Motian, a drummer famous for loosening jazz's rhythmic time-keeping role rather than reinforcing it, suggests a stylistic reach beyond straight bebop drumming into a more open, conversational approach to the kit. His documented Tel Aviv sideman work sits squarely in a mainstream, hard-bop-rooted small-group idiom, consistent with his teaching posts in two conservatories' jazz departments.