Eyal Hai is an Israeli saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, and producer, born and raised in Holon, Israel. He began classical piano at five and picked up the alto saxophone at eleven, the instrument that introduced him to jazz. As a teenager he played in the Tel-Aviv Big Band and the Holon Big Band, led his own jazz sextet, Babetov, and played in the Israeli funk band Portrait. He spent a year at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, where he placed in the school's jazz saxophone competition, before winning a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston. There he studied jazz performance and was admitted to the school's selective Berklee Global Jazz Institute, graduating with distinction under the mentorship of Grammy Award-winning pianist Danilo Pérez.

During and after his studies, Hai performed alongside major jazz figures including Pérez himself -- who later invited him to sit in with his own group, a performance later described in a JazzTimes profile of Pérez, which recounts Hai trading an introductory cadenza with Pérez before the two settled into a waltz-time duet at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston -- as well as bassist Ben Street, drummer Jack DeJohnette, bassist John Patitucci, saxophonists Dave Liebman and Joe Lovano, and drummer Antonio Sanchez. He played jazz rooms and festivals including the Blue Note and Dizzy's Club (both New York), Yoshi's and Kuumbwa (California), Scullers and the Regattabar (Boston), the Beehive, and the Panama Jazz Festival.

Discogs independently documents two jazz-tagged studio credits from his subsequent New York years: alto saxophone on guitarist Gadi Caplan's Opposite Views (2010, Discogs genre "Jazz, Rock," style "Jazz-Rock, Fusion, Prog Rock"), and alto saxophone on #thispartysax (2015, Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, Discogs genre "Jazz, Pop," style "Easy Listening") by The Side Project -- the saxophone quartet Hai co-founded in New York in 2013 as its lead arranger, alongside baritone saxophonist Eden Bareket, tenor saxophonist Arnan Raz, and soprano saxophonist Hailey Niswanger. The Side Project began busking in the New York subway, built an audience through viral Facebook videos, and went on to open for the New York Philharmonic.

Outside that jazz-tagged work, Hai built a decade-long parallel career in New York as a singer-songwriter and producer, releasing the folk/indie-rock/jazz/pop/R&B-tagged EP Practicing Catharsis (2014) and the full-length Flowers On The Moon (November 2018, recorded at Dreamland Recording Studios with guitarist Ian Turner, bassist Aaron Liao, and drummer Pablo Eluchans), both through Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Records, the label he founded in 2014 that has since released material from more than ten ensembles. He has also worked as a session saxophonist, horn arranger, and producer for other artists, including Israeli pop singer Shiri Maimon.

Hai returned to Israel in 2019. He is now a lecturer at the Rimon School of Music, where he leads ensembles and gives private saxophone lessons within the school's Jazz Institute track, a program specifically for advanced jazz musicians -- continuing, alongside his own production and songwriting work, the same jazz-education thread that runs back to his own years as a Rimon and Berklee student.

Hai's own recorded catalogue splits cleanly along the line between his two musical identities. His Discogs-tagged sideman credits sit inside jazz idioms proper: Opposite Views (2010) is a jazz-rock/fusion date built around composer-guitarist Gadi Caplan's writing, and The Side Project's #thispartysax (2015) is a jazz-and-pop saxophone-quartet record, consistent with the group's own description of itself as playing horn-driven arrangements of popular material. His own leader releases, Practicing Catharsis (2014) and Flowers On The Moon (2018), move further from jazz into a folk, indie-rock, and R&B-inflected singer-songwriter sound, closer to the alternative and electronic influences he has cited than to a straight-ahead jazz record, even as his saxophone playing and the horn arrangements on both albums draw directly on his jazz training. That same training -- Berklee's Global Jazz Institute under Danilo Pérez, alongside figures such as Jack DeJohnette, John Patitucci, Dave Liebman, and Joe Lovano -- remains the foundation of his current teaching post at the Rimon School of Music's Jazz Institute, where his own students work inside the mainstream/straight-ahead jazz tradition he was trained in himself.