Oded Tzur was born January 5, 1984 in Kiryat Ono, near Tel Aviv. He trained at the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts and the Jerusalem Academy, and in 2007 enrolled at the Rotterdam Conservatory, where he became the only saxophonist to study under Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, a master of the Indian bansuri flute. That study led him to develop The Middle Path, a saxophone technique that extends the instrument's microtonal range to carry Indian classical music's pitch vocabulary into jazz.

His first two leader albums, Like a Great River (2015) and Translator's Note (2017), both on Enja's Yellowbird imprint, featured a quartet with Shai Maestro on piano, Petros Klampanis on bass, and Ziv Ravitz on drums, the pianist and drummer both already profiled on jazzprofiles.com. His ECM run began with Here Be Dragons (2020), followed by The Lion Turtle and Isabela (both 2022) and My Prophet (2024), the quartet by then built around Nitai Hershkovits on piano, Klampanis still on bass, and Johnathan Blake on drums. A further album, Make a Sound, followed in 2026.

The Guardian has described his playing as a "unique tenor sax whisper," and he has been called a torchbearer of spiritual jazz for reworking what the saxophone can do at the level of pitch itself.

Tzur's sound is built on The Middle Path, his own microtonal saxophone technique drawn from years studying Indian classical music under Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. His work sits within spiritual jazz and post-bop while treating Indian classical pitch and phrasing as a genuine structural influence rather than a surface texture.