Yaniv Taubenhouse is an Israeli jazz pianist and composer based in New York City, born in 1987 and raised in Israel, where he began piano lessons at six and went on to graduate from the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Tel Aviv, studying with Dr. Assaf Zohar, Hanna Shalgi, and Prof. Benjamin Oren. He spent his teenage and early adult years moving between classical and jazz training, taking masterclasses with Richard Goode, Brad Mehldau, Robert McDonald, and Sonia Rubinsky across the U.S. and Europe. In December 2009 he moved to New York to study with pianist Pavlina Dokovska, then in the fall of 2010 relocated to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to study piano performance under Jura Margulis at the University of Arkansas, with a summer of further study at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.

It was in Fayetteville that two threads of his career began. Robert Ginsburg, founder of what is now the Northwest Arkansas Jazz Society, heard Taubenhouse play a solo recital mixing classical and original jazz material at a fundraiser and became an early advocate, eventually securing the Walton Arts Center's performance space to record the young pianist's working trio with bassist Garrett Jones and drummer Darren Novotny over two days in January 2013. That session became Here from There (2014, Fresh Sound New Talent), Taubenhouse's debut as a leader. Separately, at a reception in Fayetteville arranged so that fellow Israeli musician Anat Cohen could meet him, Taubenhouse sat down at a piano in the room and played; it was his first meeting with Cohen, though no joint recording or performance between them has been found and this profile treats it as a documented meeting rather than a musical collaboration.

In August 2013 Taubenhouse moved to New York City on a scholarship to the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, earning his BFA. There he crossed paths with tenor saxophonist David Schnitter, the Newark-born veteran of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (1974-1979) who has taught at the New School since 1994; Taubenhouse later appeared as the pianist on Schnitter's Two for the Road (2023, Fresh Sound Records), alongside drummer/vibraphonist Jorge Rossy and bassist Masa Kamaguchi, and dedicated a composition, "The Kookoo (For Dave Schnitter)," to him on his own 2022 album Hope.

Taubenhouse's main vehicle since 2014 has been the Yaniv Taubenhouse Trio, with bassist Rick Rosato and drummer Jerad Lippi, which has released an ongoing Moments in Trio series on Fresh Sound New Talent: Volume One (2015), Perpetuation: Volume Two (2018), and Roads: Volume Three (2021), reviewed in JazzTimes by Thomas Conrad, who closed with, "Yaniv Taubenhouse: Remember his name." A fourth volume, Circles, is announced for November 13, 2026, with the single "Above the Sky" preceding it. In between trio records he made Hope (2022), a solo piano album recorded in February 2020 at the start of the pandemic on a Yamaha C7 at Knob Hill Studios in Northwest Arkansas, mixing originals with pieces by Kenny Wheeler, Cole Porter, Henry Mancini, and Thelonious Monk. He has performed at venues and festivals including the Salle Cortot in Paris, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Tel Aviv Museum, the Bern Jazz Festival, and the Vicenza Jazz Festival, and has been broadcast on Arkansas public radio station KUAF. His own artist biography also credits him as having performed with bassist Ronald McClure, trombonist Roswell Rudd, guitarist Peter Bernstein, drummer Ari Hoenig, saxophonist George Coleman, bassist Orlando Le Fleming, and saxophonist Will Vinson, among others; these are carried here as his own stated biography rather than credits independently confirmed release-by-release (see notes.md).

Critics consistently frame Taubenhouse's playing as classical discipline in service of jazz feeling. Reviewing Here from There for All About Jazz, Edward Blanco called him "a classically-trained pianist" delivering "one of the finest trio performances found on today's jazz landscape," while JazzTimes' Thomas Conrad described his "formalism and discipline" as a direct reflection of that classical training, wrapped around a "thoroughly contemporary" trio conception that gives Rosato and Lippi real weight rather than treating them as accompanists. His touch draws comparisons to the jazz piano lineage he cites through repertoire choices alone, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans-descended trio writing, and the standards tradition, reinterpreted with what All About Jazz's review of Hope called "simple elegance and eloquence." A Jazz da Gama review of the Moments in Trio series noted his "intelligently parsed dynamics and long singing lines," and pedaling and touch sensitive enough that the piano becomes, in the reviewer's words, "an extension of his body." That same sensitivity extends to his interpretive choices on standards: Conrad singled out a reharmonized Cole Porter reading and a Monk cover that places "hits in all the 'wrong' places," a deliberate nod to Monk's own harmonic disruption rather than a straight-ahead cover.