Dida Pelled grew up in Tel Aviv, where a teacher named Amit Golan introduced her to jazz history at 15 at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts. She went all in on bebop, spending years transcribing Grant Green and Wes Montgomery before she ever sang a note in public. She served in the Israeli Army band, then moved to New York at 20 on a scholarship to study jazz at The New School. She had started singing only two years earlier, at 18, and largely in secret; New York gave her the room to bring both instruments, guitar and voice, onto the same stage.

The break that launched her recording career came while she was still a student: trumpeter and producer Fabio Morgera heard her playing a bar gig in the West Village and helped put together her debut, Plays and Sings (Red Record, 2010), which carries trumpeter Roy Hargrove and drummer Gregory Hutchinson on its credits alongside bassist Tal Ronen and Morgera himself. AllAboutJazz named it one of its albums of the year, praising its combination of warm, emotive vocals and personal guitar work.

Her catalog since then keeps moving rather than repeating itself. Modern Love Songs (2015, self-released) pulled her toward pop songwriting and took her on extensive tours of France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine and Czechia. A Missing Shade of Blue (2016, Red Record) set her guitar inside a bluesy organ trio with drummer Rodney Green and organist Luke Carlos O'Reilly, with flutist Itai Kriss and Morgera guesting; a 2019 Italian compilation on Red Record and its parent publisher GEDI Gruppo Editoriale later gathered material from that era under the title Dida Pelled. Love of the Tiger (2022, Husky Pants Records) went furthest afield stylistically, a genre-crossing record she has described as built on her own family story, and took years of false starts with producers in New York, Berlin, Switzerland and Tel Aviv before pandemic-era home recording sessions with her touring band, later finished with producer Phil Weinrobe, unlocked the version that shipped. Her most recent album, I Wish You Would (2026), turns toward straight blues, a quartet record with bassist/guitarist Tony Scherr, drummer Kenny Wollesen and pianist Sullivan Fortner that reworks songs including material by John Lee Hooker and the Mary Lou Williams tune "Rosa Mae."

She remains a fixture of the New York club circuit, at rooms including Smalls, City Winery, Dizzy's Club, Ornithology and Rockwood Music Hall, and has played festivals in Padova, Ottawa, Atlanta and at Israel's own Red Sea Jazz Festival. Since 2022 she has also hosted "The Dida Show" on Radio Free Brooklyn, and built a touring live show, "The Lost Women of Song," that revives overlooked female songwriters such as Connie Converse.

Pelled's playing traces directly back to her teenage transcription work on Grant Green and Wes Montgomery, and she has also named Sonny Clark, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Kenny Burrell among the bebop-era records that shaped her ear. She plays a 1970s Gibson Howard Roberts guitar straight into the amp with no effects pedals, a plain, uncolored setup that reviewers and interviewers connect to the conversational, elastic phrasing that marks her playing: a preference, in her own words, for what is necessary over what is merely possible.

As a vocalist and songwriter she has moved well past a straight-jazz lane, pulling in indie, Americana and blues without dropping the jazz vocabulary underneath. Her most recent record's turn toward the blues traces to gradually discovering the music at New York venues like Sunny's and the Living Room after she moved to the city, with bassist Tony Scherr's playing cited as a particular influence on that direction.