Itai Kriss grew up in Tel Aviv in a city where Moroccan, Yemeni, Balkan and Turkish records were ordinary household listening, and he came to the flute through classical radio rather than through jazz. He played recorder from the age of six and asked for a flute at nine, was told his fingers were too short, and got one a year later. His father, a self-taught musician, taught him to play by ear before anyone taught him to read. At thirteen he entered the jazz department of the School for the Arts in Tel Aviv, where the flutist Ilan Salem ran the program, and where Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker records did the rest of the work. He continued at the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts in Givatayim, studying with the saxophonist Walter Blanding, later of Jazz at Lincoln Center. The same school, a few years apart, produced the guitarist Yotam Silberstein, with whom Kriss would record twice two decades later.

He arrived in New York in 2002, at twenty-two, on a peace tour organised by the late saxophonist Arnie Lawrence, who had moved from New York to Jerusalem to teach. Kriss sat in at Smalls, decided not to go home, and stayed. He had already made a record in New York on an earlier visit: the pianist Jon Regen's live album Tel Aviv (HiTone, 2001). Early on he studied and played with the pianist Harry Whitaker, and worked the Latin circuit almost immediately, first with the Ray Santiago Afro-Cuban band, then in a run of Cuban and Puerto Rican dance bands that shaped everything he did afterwards. Rather than treating salsa and son as a day job separate from jazz, he took the Caribbean rhythmic language as a permanent part of his own.

The Latin work compounded. In 2008 he became a founding member of Los Hacheros, the Bronx-and-Brooklyn band that plays 1960s New York son and boogaloo on acoustic instruments, and he stayed through their albums Pilón (2012) and Bambulaye (2016) on Chulo Records. He recorded with the Cuban-born drummer and composer Dafnis Prieto on Taking the Soul for a Walk (2008), with the Colombian harpist Edmar Castañeda's world ensemble, and with the Havana-recorded mambo orchestra Orquesta Akokán, whose self-titled Daptone debut, cut at Estudios Areito in Havana with 1950s studio methods, was nominated for Best Tropical Latin Album at the 61st Grammy Awards in February 2019. That nomination is the source of the "Grammy-nominated" line that follows Kriss around: he plays flute in the band on the nominated record rather than holding a nomination in his own name. He has also worked outside Latin music entirely, with the Yemenite-Israeli group Yemen Blues, with the Jamaican roots singer Burning Spear on No Destroyer (2015), and with the organist Brian Charette on two SteepleChase sextet records, The Question That Drives Us (2014) and Power from the Air (2021), where the flute sits in a front line with alto, tenor and bass clarinet.

His own leader catalogue started late and deliberately. The Shark (Avenue K Records, 2011) was cut over two days at MPI Studios in New York in August 2009 with a band drawn almost entirely from the Israeli diaspora in New York: Omer Avital on bass, Aaron Goldberg on piano, Eric McPherson on drums, with Avishai Cohen adding trumpet to two tracks and John Ellis tenor saxophone to one. Seven years later came Telavana (Avenue K, 2018), which named the band that has carried his writing ever since. The name is his own compression of Tel Aviv and Havana, and he has described the group in exactly those terms: the city he is from and the city his ear went to. That first Telavana record, taped in a single day at Big Orange Sheep in Brooklyn in January 2017, put Michael Rodriguez's trumpet and César Orozco's piano against Or Bareket's bass and Dan Aran's drums, with Marcos López on percussion, Yosvany Terry's chekere on "Hong Kong Overture" and Tamer Pinarbasi's qanun on "Shabazi."

Telavana has since produced three more records, each built on a conceit, and each held back a long time after the tape ran. Supermoon was cut at Big Orange Sheep on February 1 and 2, 2020, weeks before New York shut down, and did not appear until October 8, 2021: thirteen tracks through the zodiac, one per sign plus interludes, with Wayne Tucker on trumpet, Tamir Shmerling on bass, Shai Maestro on keyboards and synthesizers and guest vocals from Keisel Jimenez and Jonathan Hoard. All Aboard, Vol. 1: Departures (June 5, 2024) and All Aboard, Vol. 2: Arrivals (January 28, 2025) are not two records but one, fourteen tracks taped over two days at the Bunker Studio in January 2023 and split down the middle for release eighteen months apart, with Amos Hoffman guesting on oud and electric guitar across both halves. The song titles read like an itinerary: "Agadir," "Dakar," "Flânerie Brumeuse," "Har Va'emek," "L'origine de l'aubergine."

Daybreak (Jojo Records, June 27, 2025) is the odd one out and the most straightforwardly jazz record he has made. Recorded across three days at Sound on Sound Studios in New York, April 29 and 30 and May 1, 2022, it drops the percussion section entirely for a piano quartet: Adam Birnbaum on piano, Luke Sellick on bass and Anthony Pinciotti on drums. Birnbaum and Sellick were not new to him: the same pair had backed him on Dan Aran's New York Family four years earlier. Twelve Kriss compositions sequence a single day from first light to night, and the two guests are used sparingly, Benny Benack III's trumpet on "Drivin" and "Sunday Lemonade," Yotam Silberstein's guitar on "Beleza," "O Jardim" and "Coisinha." Pinciotti passed away suddenly on December 24, 2024, at forty-nine, two and a half years after the session and six months before the record came out; Daybreak is dedicated to him. The album's stated purpose is a narrow and unfashionable one, to make the flute carry a jazz record as a lead horn rather than as decoration, and reviewers have generally granted that it does.

Kriss plays the flute the way a tenor player attacks a horn, with a hard, forward, percussive articulation rather than the airy tone the instrument usually invites, and that choice is the whole argument of his career. His stated models are the jazz flutists who treated the instrument as a primary voice, Yusef Lateef and Hubert Laws, and alongside them two non-Western traditions that never used the flute as a secondary color at all, the Indian bansuri and the Middle Eastern ney. Underneath that sits a straight-ahead bebop education from Tel Aviv, and on top of it two decades of playing Cuban dance music in New York, which is why a Kriss line can turn from a bop phrase into a montuno figure without a visible seam and why his charts are so often built on clave rather than on swing. As a composer he works in concept albums, the zodiac, a journey, the arc of a single day, and the concept usually does real structural work rather than sitting on the cover. Marc Myers, writing at JazzWax, called him one of the most exciting new flutist-composers on the scene, a line his label has used ever since; DownBeat has described the Telavana records as having a tangy, exotic flavor. The Israeli half of his identity surfaces less in scales than in repertoire choices, a Yemenite Shabazi melody here, a Hebrew title there, and he has been explicit that Telavana exists to put Middle Eastern and Caribbean music in one room rather than to alternate between them.