Yonatan Tagger is an Israeli jazz drummer and composer based in Jerusalem, and a member of the younger generation of the Banai family, the dynasty that has supplied Israeli music with performers for three generations. He is a graduate of the Berklee College of Music. Both facts come from the Yellow Submarine in Jerusalem, which opened its new jazz series with his band in January 2026 and described him in its own programme copy as "the drummer and composer Yonatan Tagger."

He was working the Israeli jazz-club circuit as a bandleader well before he made a record. Saxophonist Yuval Drabkin's performance log places the Yonatan Tagger Quartet at three separate dates in the autumn of 2022: Sarigim on September 3, the Guitar Loft in Tel Aviv on October 21, and Lehavim on November 19. The same log is a straight inventory of the Israeli jazz scene of those years, with Beit Ha'amudim, Shablul, Mirage and Jonz filling most of its rows, and Tagger's quartet sits inside it as one working band among many. He also plays drums as a sideman in pianist Eden Giat's trio, which brought him to AMAMA in Tel Aviv on March 6, 2025 alongside bassist Nadav Lavi.

His debut album, Look Above, was released on August 22, 2025 by the Israeli label Toot Records. All eight pieces are his own compositions, and the working band is a core of Israeli jazz players: Eden Giat on piano, David Michaeli on double bass, with Yuval Drabkin on saxophone and Onn Yosef Kadosh on oud added on specific tracks. Kadosh is co-billed with Tagger on the opening two pieces, "Introduction" and "Leha Eli," the second of which was issued as the album's first single on August 1, 2025. The record was engineered by Yaron Mohar, mixed by Gonn Shani and mastered by the bassist Avri Borochov, with cover art by Yoni Levy.

The album's one vocal track brought the family connection into the music. "Haneshama Lach" sets a Jewish prayer to a melody by Shlomo Carlebach, arranged and produced by Tagger, and is sung by Eviatar Banai; it was released as the album's second single on August 8, 2025. When the record was launched at the Gray Club in Tel Aviv on September 29, 2025, Ehud Banai came on as guest vocalist for the piyyut "Ya Shema Evyonecha," with the quintet of Tagger, Drabkin, Kadosh, Giat and Michaeli behind him. The Israeli news channel i24NEWS ran a feature on Tagger on October 25, 2025 under the headline "The new Banai," framing his sound as piyyutim from a Jerusalem synagogue set against jazz.

A winter tour followed through the first months of 2026: the Yellow Submarine in Jerusalem on January 7, the Studio Theatre in Haifa on January 22, and The Zone in Tel Aviv in mid-February. The Jerusalem date opened "Ktzat Jazz," a new weekly jazz series at the Yellow Submarine underwritten by the Judy Shustak family and the Jerusalem Foundation, with Tagger's quintet as the series' first booking.

Tagger writes for a piano trio and then colours it from the edges. The core of Look Above is drums, piano and double bass playing his own tunes, and the two instruments that change the record's character, Drabkin's saxophone and Kadosh's oud, are added deliberately rather than carried through: the oud opens the album across the first two tracks and then withdraws, and the saxophone appears only on the vocal piece. The Yellow Submarine's own description of the material breaks it into three kinds of writing, instrumental pieces built for virtuoso playing, intimate ballads, and new arrangements of piyyutim, and locates the whole project between New York jazz and the synagogue his family sings in. As a drummer he is an accompanist first on this evidence, holding a groove under long-form original tunes rather than soloing across them, and the two longest pieces on the album, "When They Have to Say Goodbye" at 7:43 and "In My Dreams We Meet Again" at 6:42, are both built on that patience. The liturgical material is the part that distinguishes him from his peers on the same circuit: setting Carlebach and traditional piyyut texts for a jazz quintet places him closer to the ethno-jazz and spiritual-jazz current in Israeli music than to the American post-bop mainstream his rhythm section otherwise works in.