Albert Beger was born in Istanbul in 1959 and brought to Israel by his parents at the age of three. He grew up in Dor, on the northern coast, inside what he has described as the cultural melting pot of the young state, a mix of Eastern European, Western European and Arabic food, clothing and music.

His route into jazz was indirect. As a teenager he was immersed in the pop and rock of the sixties and then in the progressive rock wave of the early seventies. Hearing Ian Anderson play flute on a Jethro Tull record was the moment that fixed his attention on a wind instrument. He bought a flute during his army service and taught himself to play it. Only afterward did he study the instrument formally, with the Israeli classical flutist Uri Teplitz.

He came to the tenor saxophone late, at 25 or 26, having concluded that the flute could not carry the volume of energy he wanted to project. At 27 he took a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he spent three years and earned a BA in Composition and Performance. Berklee is where the free jazz tradition reached him: Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He later completed a Master's degree in Music at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem.

Beger did not release a record under his own name until 1995, when he was 36. That debut, The Primitive, appeared on NMC with pianist John Bostock, bassist Gabi Maier and a young Asaf Sirkis on drums. This Life followed in 1997, also on NMC, then the largest label in Israel, and picked up distribution through Columbia. Art Of The Moment came in 2000 with guitarist Menachem Zibziner.

The turn came in 2003, when producer Yossi Acchoti signed him to Earsay, a small Israeli label built for this kind of music, with a stated intention of following him from album to album. That relationship produced five records: Hevel Havalim (2003) with a new trio of bassist Gabriel Meyer and drummer Hagai Fershtman, Listening (2004) with a quintet augmented by Yoni Silver on alto saxophone and bass clarinet and Yiftach Kadan on guitar and dedicated to the memory of Steve Lacy, both volumes of Evolving Silence, and Big Mother (2008).

In 2005 Beger shared a Tel Aviv festival stage with two of the most sought-after rhythm players in international free jazz, bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake. The three booked a studio on the same trip and recorded a set of Beger's compositions at Submarine studios in Tel Aviv on February 27, 2005. Earsay released the material as Evolving Silence Vol. 1 (2005) and Vol. 2 (2006), with Beger on tenor saxophone and alto flute across both. These remain the recordings that placed him within the international free jazz conversation rather than adjacent to it.

Formal recognition arrived in the same period. He received the Landau Award for Performing Arts in 2005 and, in 2009, the Prime Minister's Award for Composers, Israel's highest honor for a musician.

Big Mother (2008), credited to The New Albert Beger Quartet, was written around ecology and the damage human activity does to the planet, and was the first Beger album to include a pianist, Aviran Ben Naim. In 2010 he signed with Anova Music and released Peacemaker, a six-part conceptual suite performed by his Electroacoustic Band, recorded live in the studio over two days in July 2010 with guitarist Ido Bukelman and Avi Elbaz on laptop and electronics.

His work through the 2010s moved between duo, trio and quartet settings and between Israeli and international labels. There's Nothing Better To Do (2012) is a duo with American drummer Gerry Hemingway, recorded live at the Tel Aviv club Levontin 7 on November 28, 2011. The Way To Go (2014) and Freedom Is An Option (2016) came out on Jazzis Records, both produced by Adam Baruch; the latter introduced pianist Milton Michaeli and bassist Shay Hazan, who became his most frequent collaborators. Black Mynah (2017), a largely improvised duo with Hazan, appeared on the Portuguese label Creative Sources.

Two albums, Heads (2018) and Tales (2019), both issued by the American label CIMP, come from a single pair of sessions: September 17 and 18, 2012, at CIMP's Spirit Room in Rossie, New York, in a trio with drummer Ehran Elisha and bassist Dave Phillips. Beger had travelled to New York to visit Elisha; after two rehearsals the trio drove upstate and taped enough material for two records. Heads was recorded on Rosh Hashanah, and its title plays on the Hebrew word rosh, meaning head. The tapes were held six and seven years respectively before release.

The Gate (2019), on the Lithuanian label NoBusiness Records, was pressed as a vinyl edition limited to 300 copies and recorded at Alt Studio in Afula in mid-2017. It is the one release on which Beger plays shakuhachi alongside saxophone.

In July 2023, eighteen years after the first sessions together, Hamid Drake returned to Tel Aviv to record with Beger again. The resulting quartet, with Ziv Taubenfeld on bass clarinet and Shay Hazan on guimbri and double bass, taped two sessions, one at Levontin 7 and one at Kitcha Studios. NoBusiness released it as Cosmic Waves on May 27, 2024, four extended pieces running from four to nineteen minutes.

His eighteenth album, Astral Visit, was released in 2026 on the Kame'a label by a quartet of Milton Michaeli, bassist Asaf Shchori and drummer Nitzan Birnbaum. It opens with a piece titled "October 7." Writing for The Free Jazz Collective, Eyal Hareuveni characterized that track as processing the trauma of loss and grief into a compassionate, spiritual statement, and read the album as a celebration of life rather than an apocalyptic one. Its title comes from the closing piece of Cosmic Waves two years earlier.

Beger teaches at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where his subjects include jazz saxophone, jazz flute, jazz guitar and ensemble workshops, and at Haifa University. He heads the Instrument and Performance Department at Musik, a contemporary music school in Tel Aviv. He is an endorsing artist for the Japanese saxophone manufacturer Yanagisawa.

Beger's playing sits in the free jazz and spiritual jazz tradition that reached him at Berklee: Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and the Art Ensemble of Chicago are the names he cites, and his Wikipedia entry lists Lester Young and Pharoah Sanders alongside them. The Coltrane lineage is the most audible, and reviewers have connected the spiritual reach of his later work directly to John and Alice Coltrane.

What distinguishes him from a straight free player is the width of what he draws on. His own account of his upbringing emphasizes a mix of Eastern European, Western European and Arabic music, and his formal training runs from classical flute through a Berklee composition degree to a Master's from the Rubin Academy. The Jerusalem Academy describes the result as a blend of bebop, contemporary classical, ethnic music and progressive rock resolving into a style that resists category.

His instrumental range supports that. Across the catalog he plays tenor, soprano and alto saxophone, flute and alto flute, and on The Gate, shakuhachi. The progressive rock of his teenage years is not incidental biography: the flute came to him through Ian Anderson before any jazz musician reached him.

The recorded work divides roughly into two modes. One is composed and arranged, most clearly on Big Mother and Peacemaker, both built around explicit concepts (ecology in the first case, a six-part suite in the second). The other is collective and largely improvised, as on Black Mynah, where every piece except one is improvised, and the two Hamid Drake and William Parker meetings.