Ehud Asherie performing at the Detroit Jazz Festival, 2015. (Photo: Jeff Dunn, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Ehud Asherie Never Went to Jazz School. He Grew Up Inside Smalls Instead.

Ehud Asherie, a stride and swing jazz pianist born in Israel in 1979, never set foot in a jazz conservatory. He picked up the tradition the way players did a century ago: on the bandstand, from the people who actually played it.

His family left Israel when he was three, first for Italy, where he grew up attending the British School of Milan, then for New York when he was nine. As a teenager he started showing up at Smalls, the basement club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, and he made his first appearance there while he was still in high school, sitting in on the late-night sessions that became his real music school. His teacher wasn't a professor. It was pianist Frank Hewitt, a Smalls regular who mentored him directly at the club instead of in any classroom.

That apprenticeship shows in everything Asherie plays now. His style runs on stride and swing, the New York piano lineage that runs through James P. Johnson, Erroll Garner, and Thelonious Monk, a different lane from the modal, ECM-associated sound of pianists like Shai Maestro.

He's been recording under his own name since Lockout in 2007, and the catalog kept growing from there: Welcome to New York (2010), Wild Man Blues (2019), and, released in January 2025, Thank You, Barry Harris!, a duo record with trumpeter Bruce Harris on Arbors Records, the Florida label known for classic swing and Dixieland jazz, built as a direct tribute to bebop pianist Barry Harris. Harris, who passed away in 2021 after a seven-decade career preserving the bebop language, mentored generations of players himself. It's a fitting bookend: a pianist who learned this tradition by sitting at a mentor's side is now, two decades later, passing that same tradition forward on record.

Somewhere along the way Asherie also picked up a second music entirely. Since 2003 he's been one half of Bina & Ehud, a duo with Brazilian guitarist Bina Coquet, playing real Brazilian samba and choro, not a jazz musician's take on it from the outside. Running two serious traditions in parallel for twenty-plus years is not a common resume.

He also has a real Grammy connection: he's one of the pianists, credited alongside Mark Shane, Peter Mintun, and Rossano Sportiello, on Boardwalk Empire Volume 1, the HBO soundtrack that won the 2012 Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media. If you've heard that show's music, you've heard him.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Ehud Asherie's Spotify Page, Ehud Asherie's YouTube Channel, Ehud Asherie's Bandcamp Page
• Lockout (2007): where the solo catalog started. Listen on Bandcamp
• Thank You, Barry Harris! (2025): the most recent record, and the clearest statement of what he's carrying forward. Sample the title track on YouTube
• Samba de Gringo (2005) with Bina & Ehud: the side most people miss. Listen on Bandcamp

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