Assaf Kehati started on piano and guitar at age 10, adding classical violin later. The signal that he'd end up a professional came early: as a teenager he took third place in Israel's national "Jazz Player" competition. At 19 he enrolled at the Rimon School in Ramat HaSharon, where he played in the school's Honors Ensemble "Hot Jazz" alongside guest artist Frank Gambale, the fusion guitarist best known for his years in Chick Corea's Elektric Band.

In 2007, Kehati moved to Boston for a Master's in Jazz Performance at the New England Conservatory, graduating in 2009. He stayed on afterward as an assistant professor before relocating to New York, where he's based today. That same year, 2009, he joined drummer Billy Hart's trio, a seat artist bio materials describe him as still holding.

As a leader, Kehati has released three independent albums. His debut, "A View From My Window" (2010), assembled some of Israel's best jazz musicians, saxophonist Alon Farber, bassist Daniel Sapir, and drummer Udi Shlomo, around compositions inspired by ordinary moments: a snow-covered view of Fenway Park from his apartment porch, a story of exodus threaded with freedom and fear. His second, "Flowers and Other Stories" (2011), continued as the Assaf Kehati Quartet with seven original, folk-inflected themes. His third, "Naked" (2014), marked a change in direction: no saxophonist this time, a new rhythm section of bassist Ehud Ettun and drummer Ronen Itzik, and an introspective set of originals plus three standards. Funded through a Kickstarter campaign, "Naked" carried the trio onto the Blue Note's stage and into festival bills across three continents, including the Toronto Jazz Festival, the Atlanta Jazz Festival, the DC Jazz Festival, the Barranquilla Jazz Festival in Colombia, the Lima Jazz Festival in Peru, the Nisville Jazz Festival in Serbia, and the Brno Jazz Festival in the Czech Republic.

Kehati has also worked as a session guitarist. In 2021, he appeared on "New York Nerve," the Daniel Bennett Group's quartet record made with bassist Kevin Hailey and drummer Koko Bermejo, the first jazz group to record in a reopened Manhattan studio after the 2020 shutdowns.

He splits his time today between performing and teaching, now on faculty at the Jazz Guitar Society, and continues to write and record. His current project, Velour Dreams, reworks 1980s pop songs by Paul Simon, Sting, Sinead O'Connor, and Styx as jazz-fusion video arrangements, a departure from the straight-ahead trio and quartet records that built his name.

Critic Dan Bilawsky, writing for All About Jazz, paired Kehati's playing with two guitarists who rarely share a sentence: Pat Metheny, for lyricism and atmosphere, and Pat Martino, for bebop precision and drive. That dual comparison captures the range across his catalog, from the folk-like melodicism of "Flowers and Other Stories" to the tighter, standards-referencing interplay of "Naked." His compositions consistently draw on everyday, personal material rather than abstraction, a throughline from his 2010 debut to his current pop-reworking project.