Kai Livermore was born in a small village in Japan to Israeli parents, in a household his interviews describe as sharing "a deep love for music." He picked up the guitar late for a professional musician — at sixteen, in high school — a fact he has described in interviews as "pretty late" in the arc of his own development. After high school he moved to Israel to study contemporary jazz, the training that would give his later, more genre-mixed work its harmonic footing.

His main creative outlet became KENS, the trio he co-founded with bassist Eli Orr and drummer Noam Arbel. KENS's Discogs entries and Livermore's own account describe a band built on collaboration: guest turns from saxophonist/trumpeter Daniel Zamir, trumpeter Sefi Zisling, and string players from the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra all appear across the group's small but real catalog, which currently stands at two studio albums — Contact 123 (self-released, 2021/2022) and Atarayo (self-released, 2024/2025) — plus a handful of advance singles drawn from those two records. Both albums put a jazz standard on the tracklist: Contact 123 includes a version of Dizzy Gillespie's "Con Alma," and Atarayo includes a version of the Miles Davis-associated "Nardis," a small but concrete marker of Livermore's jazz training showing up in the band's own material rather than only in his biography. Guitar Magazine has described him as a musician who blends modern jazz, classical, and electronica into a distinctive sound-making approach.

Livermore later enrolled in Berklee College of Music's Film Scoring program on a full-tuition scholarship — a turn that has become the dominant thread of his career since. In his own account, the scholarship reframed his ambitions: where his early goal had been simply to "play guitar better and play more shows," Berklee showed him, in his words, "just how vast the music industry is and how many different opportunities exist — jobs that I had never even imagined." He points to composition and music licensing specifically as a more stable path than performance alone, one less exposed to the kind of career risk a hand or shoulder injury poses to a touring guitarist. One Discogs-documented session from this period — guitar on four tracks of saxophonist Jonas Cho's Daydreamer 空想 (2025), recorded partly at Berklee — is his most substantial sideman jazz credit outside his own band, and a small piece of corroborating evidence for the Berklee years alongside the interviews.

That pivot is now largely complete. Livermore is based primarily in Los Angeles and composes for Japanese anime, indie films, commercials, and — per his most recent interview material — at least one video-game trailer, while splitting his touring time between Israel (with KENS) and Japan, where the band has played Blue Note Tokyo. He has described building toward a composer agency combining "40+ composers and 20+ engineers" to take on media-scoring work at scale, a considerably different professional target than a working jazz bandleader's. He frames the media-composition side of his work as inherently collaborative rather than self-promotional: "there's something deeply fulfilling about creating something together — and seeing it resonate with others," and he has called the feeling of amplifying someone else's emotional intent through music "the best feeling."

Livermore's grounding in contemporary jazz — developed studying in Israel and then formalized, in a different direction, at Berklee — gives his guitar work on the KENS records a genuinely jazz-informed harmonic and improvisational vocabulary, audible most directly in the band's choices to cover repertoire like "Con Alma" and "Nardis" rather than only writing originals. But KENS is not a straight-ahead jazz group: its own self-description leans toward pop-adjacent melody, funk and African-inflected grooves, and rock/prog rhythm underneath the jazz-trained improvisation, and Livermore's own account of his listening and working habits — moving freely between "orchestral arrangements" and "synth-heavy soundscapes" during his Berklee years — points toward a composer's genre-agnostic curiosity more than a jazz specialist's depth in any one idiom. That combination is honest to where his career has actually gone: real jazz training and real jazz repertoire in his own band's catalog, but a working identity that has moved substantially toward media composition rather than the jazz bandstand.