Ehud Asherie: “A Jazz Polymath”

Ehud Asherie has definitely taken a circuitous route to becoming a professional musician. The 39-year-old pianist was born in Israel, lived in Italy for six years before the family moved to the United States, and learned his trade as a teenager hanging out at a Greenwich Village jazz club where he was “old schooled” by older musicians and where he made his professional debut when he was only a sophomore in high school. A master of swing and stride, he is now known as a jazz pianist who integrates the venerable New York tradition into his inventive style. “It’s an in-the-moment thing where you take a lot of chances, are more melodically creative, and can present new rhythmic ideas,” he declares. One critic called him “a chameleon-like pianist” where one minute you may be hearing James P. Johnson or Fats Waller, followed by Monk or Bud Powell or a subtle Dick Hyman. Another wrote, “Asherie is no retrograde nostalgia peddler, but an adventurous, unrelenting, inventive young jazz polymath, playing everything from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker, and making it all his own. Ehud is named for a character in the Old Testament of the Bible. His father, now retired, was in sales for the American President Lines, the world’s largest container transportation and shipping company. Ehud describes his mother as “a traditional Jewish mother” who has always been involved