Ehud Asherie was born in Israel on December 20, 1979. His family left when he was three, first for Italy, where he attended the Sir James Henderson School (now the British School of Milan), then for New York when he was nine. He started piano at six without much interest in it, and it took hearing Thelonious Monk's music to change that.

At fourteen, a visit to Smalls, the basement club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, reset the direction of his musical life. "It was a live scene happening before me, and I was hooked," he has said of that first night. He made his own first appearance at the club as a high school sophomore, and it was there that he found his real teacher: pianist Frank Hewitt, a Smalls regular who mentored him directly on the bandstand rather than in a classroom, alongside drummers Jimmy Lovelace and Frank Grant. After a year of college, Asherie chose to keep playing clubs over continuing his formal studies, deciding he got more out of the bandstand than the classroom.

He began recording under his own name in 2007 with Lockout (Posi-Tone), a quintet date with Grant Stewart and Ryan Kisor. Posi-Tone became his home label for several years, releasing Swing Set (2008), Modern Life (2010), and Organic (2010) — the last built around Hammond organ rather than piano, one of two instruments he plays professionally. Several of those Posi-Tone dates paired him with tenor saxophonist Harry Allen, a partnership that grew into its own strand of the catalog: the duo albums Upper West Side (2012) and Lower East Side (2013), and a 2015 date, For George, Cole and Duke, actually led by Allen with Asherie as featured sideman.

In 2010 Asherie also cut Welcome to New York, his first entirely solo piano record, released as the twenty-first volume of the Arbors Piano Series on Arbors Records, the Florida label that became his other recurring home. Around the same period he anchored a 22-month residency at the Rainbow Room, playing six nights a week at the Rockefeller Center venue — the kind of standing gig that belongs to an earlier era of New York jazz life. His profile widened further in 2011, when he appeared as one of several pianists — alongside Mark Shane, Peter Mintun, and Rossano Sportiello — on Boardwalk Empire Volume 1: Music from the HBO Original Series, which won the 2012 Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media.

Running alongside all of it, since 2003 Asherie has co-led Bina & Ehud with Brazilian guitarist Bina Coquet, a duo devoted to real samba and choro rather than a jazz musician's outside take on it. Samba De Gringo (2005) and Samba De Gringo 2 (2007) are the recorded documents of a second serious musical language he has kept running in parallel with his jazz career for over two decades.

The catalog kept growing through the 2010s — Music Makes Me (2014), Shuffle Along (2016, a solo set drawn from the 1921 Eubie Blake/Noble Sissle Broadway musical), The Late Set (2017, a voice-and-piano duo record with Hilary Gardner) — before Wild Man Blues (2019, Capri Records) put him back in a working trio with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Rodney Green. His most recent release, Thank You, Barry Harris! (January 2025, Arbors Records), is a duo record with trumpeter Bruce Harris built as a direct tribute to bebop pianist Barry Harris, who died in 2021 after seven decades spent preserving and passing on the bebop language himself. It closes a loop that opened at Smalls: a pianist who learned the tradition at a mentor's side is, two decades later, passing it forward on record.

Twelve leader albums, two duo records as Bina & Ehud, and a Grammy-winning credit on a prestige HBO soundtrack, all built without ever passing through a conservatory — Asherie's career is the rare modern jazz resume made almost entirely on the bandstand.

Asherie's playing sits inside the New York stride and swing lineage — James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Erroll Garner — with bebop's harmonic language, principally Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, worked in alongside it. Critics have called him a "chameleon-like pianist," noting that within a single set he can move from Johnson-style stride into a Monk quote or a Bud Powell line without the shift ever sounding forced. The New Yorker has described him as "a master of swing and stride." Reviewers also hear traces of Tommy Flanagan and Jimmy Rowles in his touch, and, as a writer, the compositional influence of Hank Jones.

What distinguishes him from a straight repertory player is the description one critic reached for: not "a retrograde nostalgia peddler," but "an adventurous, unrelenting, inventive young jazz polymath." He treats the early-twentieth-century jazz piano tradition as a living vocabulary to improvise inside rather than a museum piece to reproduce, which is the throughline connecting a stride-rooted solo record like Welcome to New York to the two decades he has spent running an entirely separate Brazilian samba and choro practice alongside it in Bina & Ehud.