Gabriele Coen was born in Rome on September 16, 1970. Italian Wikipedia says he took a saxophone diploma at the Conservatorio "Francesco Morlacchi" in Perugia, specialized afterward at the Siena Jazz association, and also holds a degree in Political Science from La Sapienza University, where his chair was in Modern History. He plays soprano and tenor saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet and flute, and since the early 1990s his career has been organized around one idea: the meeting of jazz with Mediterranean and Eastern European music, above all the Jewish repertoires of Ashkenazi klezmer, Yiddish song and Sephardic ballads.

The first vehicle was KlezRoym, which he founded in 1995 with Andrea Pandolfo, Pasquale Laino, Riccardo Manzi, Marco Camboni, Leonardo Cesari and Eva Coen. Italian Wikipedia calls it the best-known Italian group devoted to renewing Jewish musical heritage and credits it with six albums on the CNI label. Discogs documents four of them: KlezRoym (1998), Scenì (2000), Yankele nel Ghetto (2002, built on songs collected from the Lodz ghetto, 1940-1945) and a second self-titled album in 2003. In the same period Wikipedia places him in the groups Circo Diatonico and La Porta Magica (both from 1998), and dates his founding of Atlante Sonoro, with pianist Pietro Lussu, bassist Marco Loddo and drummer Luca Caponi, to 2001. That quartet's Duende (2004) and Alhambra (2006, with guitarist Lutte Berg on two tracks) are the first two albums released under his name, and Discogs tags both as Jazz, with Klezmer as a second style on Alhambra. In 2004 he also recorded Solo Trio with drummer Leo Cesari and pianist Riccardo Fassi.

From 2005 he led the Jewish Experience project, which produced four records: Golem (2009, Alfamusic), and two for the New York label Tzadik, run by John Zorn: Awakening (2010) and Yiddish Melodies in Jazz (2013). Awakening adds Bernardino Penazzi on cello, Massimo Coen on violin and Simone Haggiag on percussion to the Lussu, Loddo, Caponi and Berg core, and All About Jazz's review notes that only two of its ten tracks are traditional pieces. Yiddish Melodies in Jazz strips the band to a quartet and runs through Yiddish songs as played by jazz musicians, with source material that includes the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Terry Gibbs, Herbie Mann and Mickey Katz; "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" is one of its ten tracks. The fourth Jewish Experience record, Sephirot. Kabbalah In Music (2017, Parco della Musica Records), turns to electric instruments: Coen leads a sextet with Berg on electric guitar, Lussu on Fender Rhodes and electric organ, Loddo on electric bass, Caponi on drums and Arnaldo Vacca on percussion, ten tracks named for the ten sephirot of the Kabbalistic tree of life, and Discogs tags it Jazz with a Jazz-Rock style. Mario Rivera, credited as producer, mixer and recording engineer, also plays bass on four tracks.

Since 2013 Italian Wikipedia says he has led a quintet under his own name, which after tributes to Kurt Weill and to Zorn released Leonard Bernstein Tribute (Parco della Musica Records, 2020). Its lineup is pianist Alessandro Gwis (also on electronics), cellist Bernardino Penazzi, bassist Danilo Gallo and drummer Zeno De Rossi, with arrangements by Andrea Avena. The program moves from West Side Story to "Ilana, The Dreamer" from the Four Sabras, the first movement of the Chichester Psalms, "Yigdal" and "Some Other Time." The same quintet name carried the next record, Sephardic Beat (2023), which the Auditorium Parco della Musica describes as Coen's eighth album under his own name and his third for Parco della Musica Records. Only Gwis carries over from the Bernstein lineup: Ziad Trabelsi on oud, live electronics and vocals, Gwis on piano and live electronics, Rivera on double bass and electric bass, and Vacca on frame drums, percussion and vocals. The repertoire is Sephardic, from "Yo m'enamori d'un aire" to a Cantiga de Santa Maria and "Ma'oz Tsur," and a Blogfoolk review of the album also notes that Coen's family traces Sephardic roots to fifteenth-century Toledo. Coen and Trabelsi followed it with the duo-centered Dialoghi (Moonlight Records, 2025), with Loddo on double bass.

He has also worked outside his own bands. On the jazz side, Discogs credits him on soprano and tenor saxophone on the Ares Tavolazzi and Daniele Pozzovio Quintet's Stand Up...One More Time (2010, Helikonia), alongside Ares Tavolazzi, and on clarinet, bass clarinet and soprano saxophone on singer Elisabetta Antonini's Un Minuto Dopo (2009), a record that also features oboist and soprano saxophonist Paul McCandless. He played on guitarist Giovanni Palombo's Taccuino di Jazz Popolare (2019), and on several folk and world albums by oud and bouzouki player Stefano Saletti with Banda Ikona, including Soundcity (2016), Mediterraneo Ostinato (2021) and Mediterranima (2025). His bass clarinet appears on records by Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld, among them Fall (2017) and the live album Live In Berlin (2023). With Rivera he has written film music, credited on the soundtrack to Notturno Bus (2007, Davide Marengo), and Italian Wikipedia adds scores for Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio (2010) and Cristina Comencini's Tornare (2020). He co-wrote Musica errante. Tra folk e jazz: klezmer e canzone yiddish (Stampa Alternativa, 2009) with Isotta Toso and contributed a chapter on jazz and Jewish music in Europe to Francesco Martinelli's The History of European Jazz (Equinox, 2017). Italian Wikipedia adds that from the 2011 Jazzit Awards onward he has placed near the top of the poll for both soprano saxophone and clarinet in Italian jazz.

Coen's own description, as repeated on his Casa del Jazz page, is thirty years devoted to the encounter between jazz and ethnic music, particularly Mediterranean and Eastern European. The evidence on his records supports that framing. His own-name records are tagged Jazz on Discogs, with Klezmer or Fusion as a second style where the folk material dominates, and the way he uses source material differs by project: Awakening is mostly original material with two traditional pieces, Yiddish Melodies in Jazz builds a repertoire around what American jazz musicians did with Yiddish songs, Sephirot is an electric-band suite around a mystical structure, and the Bernstein tribute treats Broadway and concert-hall repertoire as jazz material. In a review of Dialoghi, Blogfoolk quotes Coen on moving from the ancient to the contemporary to avoid doing only folklore.

The identity is not purely a jazz one. KlezRoym is a klezmer group in Discogs' classification, most of his side work with Saletti is filed under Folk, World and Country, and his film and theatre scores and Teardo collaborations sit in soundtrack and art-rock territory. What holds the catalog together as jazz is the improvisational and arranging framework of his leader records, his conservatory and Siena Jazz training, and his consistent placing in Jazzit's polls. His reed voices are soprano saxophone and clarinet first, with bass clarinet and tenor as the colors Discogs credits most often after those.