Yoav Eshed came to the guitar the long way around. He started on piano at three, working through Haydn, Bach, and Mendelssohn, and didn't pick up a guitar until he was thirteen. That classical-first grounding shows up later in how much his own records lean on harmony rather than just line.

He trained formally in both Israel and the United States. In Israel, he studied jazz with Amit Golan and guitar with Shai Chen, then attended Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, where he took first place in the school's annual jazz competition. From there he won a presidential scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, backed by America-Israel Cultural Foundation jazz scholarships from 2008 through 2014. By his twenties he'd collected a run of named competition wins: first place at Lee Ritenour's international "Six String Theory" guitar competition, first place (solo section) at New York's "Made in New York" Jazz Competition, and a prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival Guitar Competition, one of only three international competitions the festival runs alongside its piano and voice contests.

Not every early credit was a jazz-club win. In 2012, while still in Israel, Eshed led a group called Trio Millionaires on a Ministry of Culture-backed project arranging "The Sixteenth Sheep," a children's songbook, working alongside comedian Tomer Sharon. A year later he released his debut as a leader, "Introducing Trio Millionaires" (2013), and the records since have mapped his move from Israel to Brooklyn: "Two Words" (2018), "August" (2020), and "A Way Out" (2021), the last credited to the full working quartet Eshed Korten Biolcati Kim, with pianist Lex Korten, bassist and producer Massimo Biolcati on his own label Sounderscore, and drummer Jongkuk Kim.

Alongside his own records, Eshed has built a steady career as a sideman, with credits including Fima Chupakhin's debut "Water" (2019) and Ari Hoenig's "Golden Treasures" (2022), where he appears as a special guest alongside pianist Gadi Lehavi and bassist Ben Tiberio, the same rhythm section he'd later bring into his own band.

That connection to Lehavi runs deeper than a shared session credit. The two have played together as Subtext, a standing piano-guitar duo, since at least 2019, with documented sets at the Babel Jazz Budapest and Amersfoort Jazz festivals. Seven years of shared stages finally became a studio record in September 2025: "Guitar Hearts," a nine-track quartet-plus-strings album with Lehavi on piano, Ben Tiberio on bass, and Jongkuk Kim on drums (Ofri Nehemya sitting in on drums for one track), with string arrangements by Lucy Voin and Ceridwen McCooey. It is not a one-off pairing but the recorded outcome of a long-running musical partnership between two Israeli jazz musicians.

Eshed's playing is rooted in bebop and blues, the two idioms he started on before jazz, and layered with the musics of South America, North Africa, and the Middle East, an influence that surfaced early on 2011-era Brazilian-jazz explorations in his sideman work and has stayed a throughline in his own writing since. His classical-piano background before he ever touched a guitar shows in how his compositions foreground harmonic movement, not just single-line melody.

The Subtext duo with Gadi Lehavi represents a different, more intimate register in his output: two-instrument interplay built over years of live performance before it was ever recorded, standing apart from the fuller quartet-and-strings arrangements of "Guitar Hearts" itself and the more conventional post-bop quartet format of "A Way Out."