Shauli Einav was born on July 1, 1982 and grew up in the Israeli countryside. He started on violin at four and switched to saxophone at 13, which put him about three years into the horn when the American saxophonist Arnie Lawrence found him in 1998.

Lawrence is a significant figure in this story and in Israeli jazz generally. Born in Brooklyn on July 10, 1938, he co-founded the jazz program at the New School in New York, then moved to Jerusalem in 1997 and opened the International Center for Creative Music, a school that took Jewish and Arab students together. He lived and taught there until he passed away on April 22, 2005, of lung and liver cancer, at 66. Omri Mor, profiled separately in this system, also studied jazz with him.

Einav took a BA at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, then a master's at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he worked as a graduate teaching assistant leading the ensemble for non-jazz majors. His first album, Home Seek, came out in 2008 while he was still there. Nine tracks, self-released, and largely absent from his own published discography ever since. Two of its tunes outlived it: "Shavu'ot" reappeared on Opus One and "Thermo Blues" opened Generations five years later.

He then spent roughly seven years in New York, working the West Village rooms, Smalls and Fat Cat among them. Opus One came out of that period on the French label Plus Loin Music, with Shai Maestro on piano, Johnathan Blake on drums, Joseph Lepore on bass and Andy Hunter on trombone. Its opening track is "Jerusalem Theme."

In 2013 he released two albums inside one month, from two countries, with two different bands. Generations arrived on Posi-Tone on October 8, a New York record built mostly on other writers' material, including Coltrane's "Crescent" alongside tunes by Harold Land and Don Byas. Its band is the reason the title is not a metaphor: Don Friedman on piano, born in San Francisco on May 4, 1935, who worked in Booker Little's and Jimmy Giuffre's bands in the 1960s; Eliot Zigmund on drums, who held the chair in the trio Bill Evans ran with Eddie Gomez through the second half of the 1970s and recorded You Must Believe in Spring with them in August 1977; and two young Israelis in New York, Or Bareket on bass and Itai Kriss on flute. Friedman and Zigmund were not strangers to each other either: both appear on bassist Phil Palombi's Re: Person I Knew: A Tribute To Scott LaFaro (Le Goat Records, 2011). Friedman passed away on June 30, 2016.

A Truth About Me followed on Cristal Records less than three weeks after Generations, and it is the opposite record in almost every respect: all his own writing, made in Paris with Paul Lay on piano, Florent Nisse on bass, Louis Moutin on drums and Antonin-Tri Hoang on alto saxophone and bass clarinet. That Paris band became the working group. Beam Me Up arrived on Berthold Records in January 2016 with Lay and Nisse again, Gautier Garrigue on drums and Pierre Durand on guitar.

Animi, released March 8, 2019 on Berthold Records and Outside In Music, widened the palette: Andy Hunter on trombone for the third Einav record running, Tim Collins on vibraphone, the Algerian musician Fayçal Salhi on oud, Yoni Zelnik on bass, Guilhem Flouzat on drums. One of its eleven tracks is "Hasela Ha'adom," the 1958 song written by Haim Hefer with music by Yohanan Zarai and recorded by Arik Lavie, about a young Israeli killed crossing into Jordan to reach Petra. The song became popular enough with Israeli teenagers who were making that hike that the government banned it for years. Einav scored it for a band with an oud in it, sixty-one years later.

He now lives in Luxembourg, where he is Artistic Director of Jazz Forum Luxembourg. Living Organs came out on Outside In Music on November 17, 2023, billed to the Shauli Einav Quartet and further from hard bop than anything before it: Laurent Coulondre on piano, organ and synthesizer, Eran Har Even on guitar and bass guitar, Paul Wiltgen on drums, with Einav adding alto saxophone and flute to his tenor and soprano. A single, "Saint Leger," followed on March 7, 2025.

Seven albums, three countries, and one consistent working method. Every time he relocates, he finds out who is in the room and writes for them.

Einav is a hard bop player by training and instinct, with a clean, projecting tone on both tenor and soprano that reviewers have repeatedly singled out. JazzTimes described his "agility and clean, clarion, powerful sound." All About Jazz called him "a remarkably complete musician, a virtuosic soloist with a lush sound on both soprano and tenor whose compositions are daring and deep."

The composing is where the range shows. A Truth About Me and Beam Me Up are through-composed European post-bop with a pianist, Paul Lay, who pushes toward texture rather than comping. Animi opens the harmony outward with vibraphone and oud, and treats Israeli song material as repertoire on equal footing with his own writing. Living Organs trades the acoustic quartet for organ, electric guitar and rock and pop rhythmic shapes.

The unifying instinct is casting. His records are organized around who is playing them, and the writing changes to fit the band rather than the other way round.