Nadav Remez is a jazz guitarist, composer, and arranger from Rishon LeZion, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. His training began at the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts, the same conservatory-style arts high school that has fed a long line of Israeli jazz musicians into international careers. In 2005 he won a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, and in 2008 he completed a master's degree at the New England Conservatory, studying with saxophonists Joe Lovano and George Garzone, drummer Billy Hart, alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, and guitarist Tim Miller.

While still an eighth-semester student at Berklee, Remez led his own quartet on a week-long trip to France in October 2007, representing the school at the Nancy Jazz Pulsations festival through Berklee's partnership with Nancy's Music Academy International. The band, bassist Jeremy McDonald, drummer Hamir Atwal, and tenor saxophonist Matan Chapnizki (now Program Head of the jazz program at the Israeli Conservatory of Music's Center for Jazz Studies, and already profiled on this site), played daily shows across the festival and the academy for a week, and Chapnizki later remembered the audiences there as "so positive and supportive." That same year, Remez was also a semifinalist in the Montreux Gibson Jazz Guitar Competition.

Remez released his debut album, So Far, in 2011 on Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records, a nine-track set built as a loose narrative, with different soloists functioning as recurring characters across paired songs. The band he assembled for it reads today like a preview of a decade of Israeli jazz in New York: saxophonist and clarinetist James Wylie, tenor saxophonist Steve Brickman, pianist Shai Maestro (on piano, Fender Rhodes, and Hammond B3), bassist Avri Borochov, drummer Ziv Ravitz, and trumpeter Itamar Borochov as a special guest, all four of them already profiled elsewhere on this site. The album closed with an arrangement of the traditional "Lecha Dodi" alongside Remez's own compositions.

The same year So Far came out, Remez joined bassist Omer Avital's orbit, playing in Avital's New Jerusalem Orchestra and his Band of the East. Sideman credits followed on Discogs: guitar on bassist Haggai Cohen Milo's 2014 debut leader album Penguin, released on composer John Zorn's Tzadik label, and guitar on Colombian pianist Juan Andres Ospina's 2018 big-band record Tramontana. Away from jazz's straight-ahead center, Remez also co-leads a power trio called Fishes, with keyboardist Steve Brickman and drummer Daniel Dor, formed in 2017 in Brooklyn and releasing the genre-blurring Fishes In Space in 2019.

Fourteen years after So Far, Remez released his second leader album, Summit, in August 2025 on his own HaRamaz Music imprint. The quintet behind it, saxophonist and clarinetist Gregory Tardy, pianist Guy Moskovich (already profiled on this site), bassist Ben Tiberio, and drummer David Sirkis, recorded the twelve-track album over three days at Dreamland Studios in upstate New York, drawing on material Remez had been writing for nearly two decades. Remez has said he only recognized how the songs connected after a live performance three years earlier, when he realized "they spoke the same language."

Remez's music sits at a specific intersection: the small-group modern jazz vocabulary he absorbed from Joe Lovano and George Garzone at Berklee and the New England Conservatory, the alternative rock he grew up on, and Jewish and Middle Eastern folk melody. Reviewing Summit for JazzTrail, the critic heard his "clean tone and resolute attack" as a continuation of guitarist John Abercrombie's modal, lyrical style, filtered through what the same review called a modal sense of Jewish folk melody. Remez himself has described his compositional aim in plainly non-literal terms: "I write about my ideal imagination of things. I look for beauty. I'm not trying to depict things that exist; I'm trying to depict things that could exist." That restraint carries into his playing, too. Asked about his understated style in the same interview, he put it directly: "I'm never going to shred because, A, I can't shred. I'm not that kind of musician."

His two solo albums bookend that same instinct at different scales. So Far (2011) built its restraint into a nine-track narrative structure, with recurring soloists functioning as characters across paired songs. Summit (2025), reviewed by Paris Move as a record that "refuses to stay within the confines of a single imagination," instead lets two decades of writing coexist rather than resolve, folding earthbound grooves against weightless textures and older Hebrew melody against newly written lines. Away from his own leader projects, that same range shows up as versatility: post-bop sideman work with Omer Avital and Haggai Cohen Milo on one hand, and the 1980s-inflected, prog-and-indie power trio Fishes on the other.