Tal Cohen grew up in Israel before his family relocated to Perth, Western Australia, in his mid-teens. In Perth he trained at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and it was there that he began a working relationship with tenor saxophonist Jamie Oehlers that has lasted more than two decades: the two would go on to co-lead 2016's Innocent Dreamer and record together again on 2017's Gentle Giants.

Cohen recorded his debut as a leader, Yellow Sticker, in Australia in 2011, with Oehlers, bassist Pete Jeavons, and drummer Chris Tarr. He then moved to the United States to pursue a master's degree in jazz piano at the University of Miami's Frost School of Music, studying under pianist Martin Bejerano and serving as a Henry Mancini Institute fellow under artistic director Terence Blanchard during the 2014-2015 academic year.

His American career opened fast. In August 2014, while still a Frost master's student, Cohen won the Barry Harris National Jazz Piano Competition in Detroit, a competition named for the bebop pianist widely credited with keeping Charlie Parker's harmonic vocabulary alive for later generations. The prize put him on stage at the Detroit International Jazz Festival in a trio with veteran bassist Robert Hurst. Less than a year later, on July 20, 2015, Cohen won the Freedman Jazz Fellowship at a ceremony inside The Studio at the Sydney Opera House, a $15,000 award that came with three days of studio time at ABC's New York recording facilities. He earned his M.M. from Frost that same year.

Cohen released his second album as a leader, Gentle Giants, in 2017 on Inner Circle Music, pulling in alto and soprano saxophonist Greg Osby alongside Oehlers, Hurst, and drummer Nate Winn. DownBeat gave the record four stars. The same year he also recorded Luma with the Alex Weitz Quartet and a duo record, Intertwined, with vocalist Danielle Wertz.

Cohen's most significant credit, in terms of pure institutional recognition, came the following year: he played piano on trumpeter John Daversa's American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom (2018, BFM Jazz), a big-band album built around 53 young undocumented immigrants from 17 countries. At the 61st Annual Grammy Awards in 2019, the album won in all three categories it was nominated for: Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, Best Improvised Jazz Solo, and Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella. Cohen's own label and the University of Miami have both since described him as a Grammy Award-winning pianist on the strength of that credit.

Cohen is now on the piano faculty at the Frost School of Music, the same program where he earned his own degree. His most recent major project is a duo with Daversa, The Art of Duo, built specifically around the two-instrument format; the studio album The Art of Duo, Vol. 1 was recorded in spring 2022, and a live companion recording followed via the Timucua Arts Foundation.

Reviewers and Cohen's own label consistently describe his sound the same way: Jewish folk melody and Middle Eastern melodic material worked into a harmonic language that is otherwise straight-ahead bebop and post-bop, colored further by an early, extensive immersion in classical composers including Chopin and Scriabin. It is the sound of a musician who left Israel young enough to absorb a second musical world in Australia, under Jamie Oehlers and the Perth jazz scene, and a third one in Miami, without ever losing the first. His two most visible duo and small-group partners, Oehlers and John Daversa, both work in a comparably harmonically dense, tradition-rooted post-bop idiom, which suits Cohen's own reputation for two-handed harmonic density balanced against open space and restraint.