Yaron Gottfried was born in Jerusalem in 1968, the son of pianist Dan Gottfried — founder of the jazz department at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (1981) and of the Red Sea Jazz Festival (1987), and pianist on the first instrumental jazz album ever recorded in Israel. Yaron started piano at five, went through the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, and graduated the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (the Rubin Academy), studying composition with Noam Sheriff and conducting with Mendi (Mandy) Rodan. Like his father before him, he served as pianist, arranger and assistant conductor in the Israeli Air Force Orchestra. A 2010-era Haaretz feature, "Apple & Tree: Danny and Yaron Gottfried," described the two as having "a rare type of relationship, that of master and pupil, as in the Renaissance" — both trained classically as children and both passed through the same Air Force Orchestra posting, though no source documents a joint performance or recording between them.

His career diverged from his father's toward classical conducting and composition rather than straight-ahead jazz combo work. He was Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Netanya Kibbutz (Chamber) Orchestra from 2002 to 2013, has guest-conducted the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra — substituting for Valery Gergiev in 2015 and conducting all eleven of its season-opening concerts in October 2016 in place of Zubin Mehta — and conducted "Orfeo ed Euridice" for the Israeli Opera with the Macao Symphony Orchestra. His compositions are published internationally by Sikorski, alongside Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt and Shostakovich, and distributed on Naxos. He won the 2014 Israeli Prime Minister's Prize for Composers, first prize in the Israel Philharmonic/America-Israel Cultural Foundation Young Artists Conductors competition, and first prize in the Red Sea Jazz Festival Composition Competition; he was a MacDowell Colony fellow in the United States.

His signature work is the Baroque Jazz Project, pieces written for jazz trio (piano, bass, drums) plus full orchestra that blend Baroque-era themes with jazz idiom — performed more than fifty times with orchestras worldwide — and his best-known individual composition, "After Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition, Remake," a jazz-trio-and-orchestra reworking of Mussorgsky that had a German premiere with the WDR Funkhausorchester. He has performed alongside visiting jazz artists including Eddie Gomez, Eddie Daniels, Dave Liebman, Randy Brecker, Benny Golson and Jimmy Heath. He headed the Composition, Arranging and Conducting track at the Rimon School for Contemporary Music and Jazz from 2013 to 2021, and has served as Head of the Music School at Ono Academic College since October 2021. As a session pianist and arranger, his Discogs credits span decades of Israeli pop and vocal recordings, including Yehoram Gaon, Yafa Yarkoni, and Yasmin Levy, for whose 2013 live album Tango he served as arranger.

Gottfried's work sits at the deliberate intersection of classical orchestral writing and jazz-trio improvisation, most fully realized in the Baroque Jazz Project — a format literally built to set an improvising rhythm section against a full orchestra playing Baroque-derived material. That same instinct runs through his Mussorgsky reworking. It's a career shape distinct from his father's straight-ahead jazz path, closer to the "third stream" tradition of composed/improvised fusion, and it explains why he is framed by nearly every source as a conductor-composer first and a jazz pianist second.