Eli Preminger is a Tel Aviv trumpeter, singer, and bandleader who has spent well over a decade building Israel's leading traditional New Orleans jazz outfit, Eli and the Chocolate Factory. The band grew out of street performances and small swing dance parties into what The Syncopated Times has repeatedly described as a cornerstone of the Israeli jazz scene, playing the country's major stages and festivals. Preminger fronts the group on trumpet and vocals, singing in English, Yiddish, and Polish, a multilingual touch that gives the band's hot-jazz repertoire a distinctly local flavor. His longest-serving bandmate is trombonist Amnon Ben Artsi, alongside saxophonist Jess Koren, who joined around 2017; the working lineup for the band's 2019 album also included bassist Tal Kuhn, drummer Rani Birenbaum, and banjoist Ilan Smilan.

Eli and the Chocolate Factory has appeared at the Red Sea Jazz Festival, the Israel Festival, the Jewish Music Festival in Krakow, and the Montreal Jazz Festival, in addition to a recurring home stage at the annual Tel Aviv New Orleans Jazz Festival. In July 2019 that festival brought Preminger together with the visiting New Orleans clarinet legend Dr. Michael White, who invited Preminger's trumpet to augment his quartet for a "Duke Ellington in New Orleans" set; The Syncopated Times singled Preminger out that year as "one of the most active local trad musicians." The same festival's closing session had Preminger and visiting UK trumpeter Enrico Tomasso trumpeting their way down to the stage playing "Bourbon Street Parade" to call the full company back for the grand finale. The band returned to live performance after the COVID shutdown with an April 2021 date at Shablul Jazz Club, by then featuring Ben Artsi's "many years" of tenure and Koren's four-years-and-counting run in the horn section. By June 2023 Preminger's role had grown beyond bandleader: he assisted festival co-founder Ziv Benn as Artistic Director of the 5th annual Tel Aviv New Orleans Jazz Fest, coordinating a grand-finale jam session of more than 60 musicians while his own band played three separate sets across the weekend. A lunchtime gig that July at Shablul Jazz Club paired the band with visiting Canadian pianist Jason Rosenblatt, adding piano to their usual brass-forward arrangements.

In May 2019, Eli and the Chocolate Factory released Comes Love, a twelve-track album built around New York "song stylist" Tamar Korn, a veteran of the Cangelosi Cards, The Brain Cloud, and the Grand St. Stompers, who guests on eight of the record's tracks. The Syncopated Times' review praised Korn's ability to make each standard - "Your Mother Should Know," "Some of These Days," "Creole Love Call," the title track - into her own personal interpretation, while the album's European-tinged material ("Anniversary Song," "Bei Mir Bistu Shein," "Anniversary Waltz") leaned into the band's stated mission of bringing creole and Latin grooves back into the traditional-jazz vocabulary.

Beyond his own bandleading, Discogs-verified session credits place Preminger's trumpet (and occasionally baritone horn or tuba) in two other notable Israeli/international ensembles. He appears as a trumpeter in the large Tel Aviv Balkan-and-klezmer brass band Marsh Dondurma, on their 2005 self-titled album, the 2010 record Shchuna, and the track "Tosha Baritosha (Edit)" on the 2011 compilation Mediterranean Grooves And Raw Sounds. He also played trumpet and baritone horn for the Yiddish-cabaret duo Daniel Kahn & Psoy Korolenko (recording at times as Psoy Korolenko & The Israelifts), appearing on the singles "Equine Canine Soldier Whore" and "Raven / Ворон" (both 2017, Auris Media) and on both 2020 volumes of their "Unternationale" series. A further trumpet credit appears on a 2012 tribute album to Israeli songwriter Shalom Chanoch's children's songs, on the track "Ruach Ruach" ("Wind Wind").

Preminger's core musical identity is New Orleans-style traditional jazz - what he and his band describe as bringing "creole and Latin grooves back to traditional jazz" - built on the group-improvisation, polyphonic horn-section language of early jazz and its 1920s-30s hot-jazz and swing descendants. His multilingual singing (English, Yiddish, Polish) and his parallel sideman career in Tel Aviv's klezmer and Balkan-brass scenes, with Marsh Dondurma and with Daniel Kahn & Psoy Korolenko's Yiddish-cabaret project, place him at a genuine crossing point between American trad jazz and the Ashkenazi/Balkan brass-band tradition that also runs through Israel's street-music scene. His invitations to sit in with visiting American and British trad-jazz royalty - clarinetist Dr. Michael White and trumpeter Enrico Tomasso among them - and his elevation to co-Artistic Director of the Tel Aviv New Orleans Jazz Festival reflect his standing as a connector figure for the international trad-jazz circuit as it touches Israel.