Itamar Doari grew up in the Galilee, in northern Israel, inside earshot of Arabic, Bedouin, Turkish, Persian and Sephardic musical traditions rather than any one of them. By his own account he played his first drum at six, at the Wadi Farran oasis in the Israeli desert. His teachers form an unusually direct line into the frame-drum world: Zohar Fresco, the Israeli tof miriam player who did more than anyone to establish the instrument's contemporary vocabulary, and the American frame-drum specialist Glen Velez, along with Sallem Darwish and Ahmed Taher. At sixteen he began traveling to study the rarer percussion instruments and the regional techniques attached to them, and he has since settled in Tel Aviv.

His entry into jazz came through the New York and Tel Aviv circuit built around Israeli musicians of the Smalls generation. SmallsLIVE, the archive of the Greenwich Village club, lists him as a member of the Omer Avital group. His first significant record in that world was pianist Omer Klein's Introducing Omer Klein (Smalls Records, 2007), where Doari's percussion sat alongside Avital on bass and oud and Ziv Ravitz on drums.

The partnership that made his name in jazz was with bassist Avishai Cohen. Doari joined Cohen's band and stayed roughly three years, and across three albums he was credited as more than a percussionist. On Aurora (Blue Note, 2009), recorded December 8 to 12, 2008 at Studio de Meudon in France, he holds a production credit shared with Cohen, Joe Ferla and Nicolas Pflug. On Seven Seas (Blue Note, 2011) he is percussionist, producer, arranger on two tracks and a vocalist on a third. On 1970 (Sony, 2017), Cohen's vocal-driven record, he plays on eleven of the twelve tracks and arranges one. In the same period he turned up on Cohen's Razdaz Recordz roster dates, including guitarist and oud player Amos Hoffman's Carving (2010) and flutist Ilan Salem's Wild (2011), both with Shai Maestro, Gilad Abro and Amir Bresler in the bands.

Doari was in the founding lineup of Yemen Blues, the band singer Ravid Kahalani built with Omer Avital and premiered in Marseille in 2010. He is on the debut Yemen Blues (2011) as percussionist, alongside trumpeter Itamar Borochov, trombonist Avi Lebovich and second percussionist Rony Iwryn, and on the self-released Live. (2013). His role widened on Insaniya (2015), produced by Bill Laswell, where he arranged eight of the record's nine tracks. Discogs lists him as a member of the band rather than a hired hand.

Alongside that, Doari became a fixture on Deutsche Grammophon's crossover roster through mandolinist Avi Avital. He plays on Avital's Between Worlds (2014) and on Avital Meets Avital (2017), the quintet record Avital made with Omer Avital, pianist Yonathan Avishai and accordionist Uri Sharlin, where Spotify lists Doari as a credited artist on individual tracks rather than a sideman buried in the booklet. He is a standing member of Avital's Between Worlds ensemble, whose Song Of The Birds appeared on Deutsche Grammophon in August 2025. In 2015 he founded his own project, WadiAtma, pairing Spanish flamenco players (guitarist José Quevedo "Bolita", singer Rafael de Utrera, percussionist Paquito Gonzalez) with Israeli musicians including Shai Maestro and Aviv Bahar. The name splices the Sanskrit atma, meaning souls, with wadi, the Arabic word that reached Spain through Andalusia. His one billed leader credit on record is O Pequeno Milagre De Cada Dia (2016), a trio album co-led with Brazilian pianist Benjamim Taubkin and bassist João Taubkin.

Outside jazz his credit list is long and varied: percussion on four Idan Raichel Project releases between 2005 and 2013, on Yasmin Levy's Libertad (2012) and Mor Karbasi's La Tsadika (2013), on Fatma Said's El Nour (2020) and Ksenija Sidorova's Carmen (2016) for the classical labels, on Dudu Tassa and Jonny Greenwood's Jarak Qaribak (2023), and across a large run of Israeli rock albums by Berry Sakharof, Eviatar Banai and others.

Doari plays a wide, deliberately hybrid kit: Middle Eastern hand drums (darbuka, dohola) and frame drums (bendir, tar, riq) built into a setup with cajon, udu, cymbals, bells and shakers, so a single seated position can cover Arabic and Andalusian rhythmic cycles, Latin patterns and drum-kit color without switching players. That range is what put him in three unrelated professional worlds at once. The frame-drum technique traces to Zohar Fresco and Glen Velez, the two figures who turned the tar and riq into concert-solo instruments. What separates him from most percussionists working at that level is the paperwork behind the playing: on Avishai Cohen's Seven Seas and Yemen Blues' Insaniya he is credited as arranger and, in Cohen's case, producer, which places him among the people shaping the records rather than coloring them. Deutsche Grammophon, Blue Note and Sony have all carried his work.