Dekel Bor grew up in a house where music was the family trade. His father, Alon Bor, is principal percussionist of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra; his mother, Anat Bor, is a visual artist. He did not start guitar early. He picked it up at fifteen, while a student at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Givatayim, the school that has fed most of the modern Israeli jazz scene.

Four years after starting, he had a full scholarship to the Royal Danish Academy of Music and was living in Copenhagen. He became a regular at La Fontaine, the oldest jazz club in the city, and that is where the Danish bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen heard him play. Orsted Pedersen, who had joined the house rhythm section at Copenhagen's Jazzhus Montmartre as a teenager and whose first job there was accompanying Bud Powell, took Bor on and put him on stage in concerts with the American tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin. It is an unusual first credit for a guitarist barely out of his teens.

At twenty-one Bor moved to New York to attend The New School, again on a full scholarship. A month into his freshman year he played the school auditorium; bassist Reggie Workman, a Coltrane alumnus and then the school's artistic director, was in the audience and invited him onto a church concert tour of the East Coast. Both of his major early breaks came the same way, from a senior musician who happened to be listening rather than from a submitted recording.

The New York years produced a steady working band. Bor formed a trio with drummer Nadav Snir-Zelniker and the French bassist Francois Moutin, holding a twice-weekly slot at Cafe Creole, and recorded three albums under the name Dekel Bor Trio. Stories & Tales came first, with Dave Ruffels on bass. Emuna [Leaps of Faith] followed, cut at Systems Two Studios across two days in June 2005, with singer Odeya Nini added to the trio. (The Long Way) Home arrived in 2007, produced by Robert Sadin, whose credits include Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Sting. In the same period Bor worked with trumpeter Roy Hargrove, saxophonist Donny McCaslin, drummer Ari Hoenig and bassist Buster Williams, and turned up as a guest on Garry Dial and Terre Roche's Us An'them (2008), a set of sixteen national anthems rearranged for a large cast, playing guitar on the track called "Israel."

Then the recorded trail stops for thirteen years. In August 2015 Bor was riding his motorcycle when a car hit him. He arrived at hospital in critical condition. That summer's festival dates were cancelled, along with a US tour booked for the following November and French festival dates set for February 2016. The recovery ran for years and he had to relearn the instrument from the beginning.

Let Love Rule, released on Ropeadope Records on 5 June 2020, is the record that ended the silence, and much of it was written out of journals Bor kept while recovering: melodies, chord changes, and notes to himself. He recorded it at Bardo Studios in Israel between 5 and 8 August 2018 with Daniel Ashkenazy on upright bass, Nitzan Birnbaum on drums and Aviv Peck singing, then had Dave Darlington mix and master it at Bass Hit Studios in New York in October 2019. Robert Sadin returned as artistic advisor, thirteen years after producing the record that preceded it. Ten tracks, one of them titled "Crying In Public Since 2015."

Bor now lives in Berlin, which is where the closing track, "Like A Little Girl In Berlin," comes from. In 2020 he began two video series with JazzTimes that have run for three seasons each: Speakin' My Piece, unhurried artist-to-artist conversations with guests including the Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez, and Jazz in Europe, his trio playing live with a different guest each episode, among them bassists Hans Glawischnig and Doug Weiss, trumpeter Sebastian Studnitzky, guitarists Torsten Goods and Igor Osypov, and vibraphonist Simon Moullier.

Bor's playing sits in the warm, melody-first end of modern jazz guitar rather than the harmonically dense or high-velocity end. The early trio records are catalogued as cool jazz, bop and post-bop, and they behave that way: small forms, space around the line, a preference for a tune that can be hummed back. The same composition, "Just The Way You Are," recurs across all three of them, twice as a reprise, which says something about how he works. He returns to material rather than discarding it.

Let Love Rule widened the palette without abandoning that. Electric and acoustic guitars share the record with electronics, and Aviv Peck's voice sits inside the arrangements as another instrumental colour rather than as a front-line singer. Its origins in recovery journals show in the shape of the writing, which is closer to a set of thoughts returned to over time than to a suite built to a plan.

The two figures who most visibly shaped his path are Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, who put a teenager on a bandstand with Johnny Griffin, and Robert Sadin, who produced him before and after the accident. Neither is a stylistic model in an obvious way; both are the reason the records exist.