Tal Yahalom is an Israeli jazz guitarist, composer, and bandleader based in Brooklyn, New York since 2014. He started guitar at twelve, inspired by two classmates he thought "seemed super cool," and by his own account his first teacher was his school's janitor, a metal guitarist who led group classes; he went on to practice four to five hours a day through high school, transcribing solos and composing. He completed mandatory Israeli military service while enrolled in the Israeli Conservatory of Music's jazz program in Tel Aviv, part of a joint degree track with the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York founded by pianist Amit Golan. He began his bachelor's degree in Tel Aviv and transferred to the New School in New York in 2014, where he has been based ever since. His teachers and mentors have included Richard Boukas, Shai Chen, Hal Galper, Tony Malaby, Bill McHenry, Andy Milne, Miles Okazaki, saxophonist Gilad Ronen, Robert Sadin, and Dan Weiss.

Yahalom built an early competition record while still finishing school: first place at the 2015 Detroit Jazz Festival National Guitar Competition, where he met Pat Metheny; third prize at the 2016 Montreux Jazz Festival International Guitar Competition; and semifinalist at the 2019 Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz International Guitar Competition. He also holds scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation (2014-2015) and the Siena Jazz Foundation.

Since 2014 he has co-led KADAWA, a Brooklyn-based collective trio with bassist Almog Sharvit and drummer Ben Silashi, playing all-original music the band itself bills as a "post-rock power trio." KADAWA's self-titled 2017 debut, praised by The New York Times for "joy and force in equal measure, full of hummable melodies," featured guest keyboardist Micha Gilad alongside trumpeter Adam O'Farrill and trombonist Matt Bumgardner. The trio's second release, Downward Jewel (June 2023), is a live-recorded collaboration with New York singer-songwriter Grey Mcmurray; its cover photo was taken by Yahalom himself. Its third, Post Graduation Fees (February 28, 2025), was a DownBeat Editors' Pick in March 2025. That album includes a re-recording of "Sophianic Mess," a Yahalom composition that first appeared on his own 2019 solo EP Strange Protagonists and that Micha Gilad separately recorded as a synthesizer arrangement on his own CAT TV EP (2020). KADAWA has toured internationally across Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, France, Belgium, and Israel.

Alongside KADAWA, Yahalom leads a growing catalogue of solo and small-group work. His solo guitar releases include Strange Protagonists (2019, recorded in Tel Aviv), Lights Out (September 2020, four original pieces written in response to the early pandemic and dedicated to the spirit of Marc Ribot's Silent Movies), January (April 2021, a month-long series of daily improvisations dedicated to Cuban composer and guitarist Leo Brouwer), and Solo Standards (June 2023, unaccompanied acoustic arrangements of the jazz standard repertoire, also recorded in Tel Aviv). In March 2025 he released Mirror Image, the debut album of his own chamber-jazz quintet -- guitar alongside violin (Ledah Finck), cello (Irene Han), alto saxophone and flute (David Leon), and percussion (Rogerio Boccato) -- on Adhyâropa Records. DownBeat's Brian Morton wrote that "it's the shape and the trajectory of the guitarist's work that always impresses... music that has emerged out of a highly personal vision," praise echoed by guitarist Mary Halvorson, who called it "a refreshing, expansive and gorgeous record."

Yahalom also maintains a standing duo with Jerusalem-based bassist Yosef Gutman Levitt: Tal Yasis (2021) and Tsuf Harim (March 2023), the latter reviewed by Jazzwise, both built from nigunim (wordless Hasidic melodies) transcribed by Eli Rivkin in the Russian village of Lubavitch and recorded together in Jerusalem. His other sideman work in New York includes recurring credits with singer-songwriter Lisa Hoppe's band Third Reality, bassist/composer Nick Dunston, and vocalist-composer Gaya Feldheim Schorr, alongside a one-off credit on composer Gabriel Zucker's Leftover Beats From The Edges Of Time (2021, ESP-Disk'). He curates a weekly concert series at Threes Brewing in Gowanus, Brooklyn, running since May 2022, teaches through his own "Creative Guitar Circle" online platform, and has performed at the Jerusalem Jazz Festival, London's Vortex Jazz Club, and the 2016 Bern Jazz Festival, among other venues.

Yahalom describes his own music as weaving together post-bop, alternative rock, impressionistic classical music, and various South American guitar traditions into "a distinct musical language," and his catalogue bears that out: Solo Standards works squarely inside the jazz-standard tradition, Mirror Image pulls a string ensemble and chamber-music sensibility into a jazz quintet format, and KADAWA leans toward the harder-edged, riff-driven, and semi-improvised territory its own billing calls "post-rock." He names Pat Metheny and Wes Montgomery as foundational guitar influences, along with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (particularly Wayne Shorter's writing for that band) and guitarist-composer Kurt Rosenwinkel for compositional voice and harmonic vocabulary. For Mirror Image's string writing specifically, he has cited saxophonist Miguel Zenón's album Yo Soy la Tradición and guitarist Brandon Seabrook's string-trio work as direct models. He describes being "drawn into things that feel meditative, in a way -- or cyclical," aiming, in his own words, "to create spaces for the musicians to hold and fill together, not merely as a vehicle for solos" -- a description that applies as much to the quintet writing on Mirror Image as to the shared, transcribed nigunim he and Yosef Gutman Levitt arrange together.