Steve Peskoff is a New York-born guitarist who has spent close to four decades in Jerusalem, where he teaches jazz guitar at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and has become one of the fixtures of the city's improvised-music scene. His recorded output is small: four confirmed album credits across thirty-six years, none of them under his own name. His influence runs through teaching and through the Jerusalem bandstand rather than through a leader catalog, and this profile says that plainly rather than padding the gap. No birth date, no dedicated biography, and no Wikipedia article exist for him in any language. What follows comes from session credits, Israeli press coverage, venue programme notes, and the biographies of musicians he taught or played with.

The earliest credit that can be documented is Lovely (1985, ITM Records 0011), an LP by Loved By Millions, the band saxophonist Keshavan Maslak led under his Kenny Millions alias. Peskoff is credited there as Steve "The Claw" Peskoff on guitar, alongside Alex Ponomarenko on Steinberger bass, Cody Moffett on drums, and Pamela Millions on vocals, on a record Discogs files under free jazz, synth-pop, and contemporary jazz at once. That places him inside Maslak's downtown New York orbit in the mid-1980s, at the point where the loft-jazz generation was colliding with new wave. The nickname stuck: Israeli releases still credited him as "The Claw" thirty-six years later.

He emigrated to Israel during the 1980s, according to the biography the Jerusalem venue Mazkeka runs for him, and was recording in Jerusalem by 1988. That year the trio Kedma cut Facing East for Jazzis Records, catalogue 1003, with Peskoff on guitar, Jean-Claude Jones on bass, and Jerry Garval on drums. Jazzis was the label the critic and producer Adam Baruch founded in 1987 as Israel's first imprint dedicated to original local jazz, and Baruch produced Facing East and wrote its liner notes himself. Four pieces fill the record: "Ahmed & Francis," "Ahmed Under The Fig Tree," "Vicious Circle," and "Jerusalem: East And West." Jones, a Tunisian-born bassist who had studied jazz guitar at Berklee before switching instruments, went on to chair the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance's jazz department from 1996 to 2000, so the Kedma trio put Peskoff next to the person who would later run the department he teaches in.

From the late 1990s his name turns up across the Jerusalem scene in roles that left no recordings behind. The Jerusalem Institute of Contemporary Music lists him as a guest artist on the New Music Ensemble's annual site-specific works in Ein Karem between 2000 and 2002. In 2003 he played guitar on seven of the thirteen tracks of Gospel Jazz Live, a two-night live album by the vocalists Iris and Ofer Portugaly with a gospel choir, recorded July 31 and August 21, 2003 at Tel Aviv's Enav Cultural Center; Yotam Silberstein took the guitar chair on three other tracks and Eli Degibri guested on tenor saxophone. Around the same period he co-founded the Julia Feldman Jazz Quartet with the Jerusalem vocalist Julia Feldman, a group that worked Israeli stages and festivals for several years on a book of Feldman originals and standards arrangements shaped by rock, funk, Brazilian music, and free improvisation. In February 2008 Feldman and Peskoff went to New York and recorded the quartet's first album with Ferenc Nemeth on drums, Massimo Biolcati on bass, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb on second voice, and Loren Stillman on saxophone. No release of that session has been confirmed, and it appears on no participant's Discogs page. Peskoff also led his own project, Radical Shlomo, built on arrangements of Shlomo Carlebach's songs, with Feldman singing.

Two later sessions put him back on record. In Jerusalem (Zoho Music, released June 9, 2015) is the American flutist Mark Weinstein's programme of Hasidic melodies and originals, played by a quintet of Weinstein on concert, alto, and bass flutes, Peskoff on guitar, Gilad Abro on bass, Haim Peskoff on drums, and Gilad Dobrecky on percussion. Six years later he turned up on Elegant Geezer, subtitled The Jerusalem Sessions, released April 5, 2021: the first solo album by Harvey Brooks, the bassist from Highway 61 Revisited who had moved to Israel in 2009. Peskoff plays on half of its eight tracks, taking the rhythm-guitar solos on "Wrong" and "The Plum," electric guitar on "FayG," guitar on "Free Man," and the lead on "Can't Smoke No More," in a band that also carried Jamie Saft on Hammond B3 and guest turns from Ehud Banai and Danny Sanderson. Brooks has said he had been playing with Peskoff for about eight years by that point.

He remains a working improviser in Jerusalem into the 2020s. In February 2023 he played a duo at the Hamifletzet pub in Kiryat Hayovel with the composer and saxophonist Stephen Horenstein, marking Horenstein's 75th birthday. Horenstein called the two of them longtime sparring partners, put the length of their collaboration at twenty years, and said they intended to record the material; no such album has appeared. Mazkeka has billed Peskoff both in a rare solo guitar set, advertising him as one of the pillars of free jazz in Israel with more than forty years of playing behind him, and in a duo with his eldest son, the drummer Haim Peskoff, who has built his own career with the Shay Hazan Quintet, Yoni Kretzmer, and Michaël Attias. A second Peskoff, the drummer Adin Peskoff of the Jerusalem post-rock band Hynom, also records in Israel. Neither son's credits belong to Steve, and the Discogs entries are easy to confuse on this point.

Peskoff's playing sits on the free and avant-garde end of the Israeli scene rather than in its bebop mainstream, which is what Israeli writers mean when they call him one of the pillars of free jazz in the country. The route he took to that position is unusual. He came out of Keshavan Maslak's mid-1980s New York band, where free playing was already being run through funk rhythm and synthesizers, and he carried that hybrid into Jerusalem, where the Kedma trio's Facing East set improvisation against Middle Eastern material in 1988, years before the "east meets west" framing became a marketing category for Israeli jazz. His later credits show the same width: Hasidic melody with Mark Weinstein, gospel and standards with the Portugalys, blues-rock lead guitar with Harvey Brooks, Carlebach arrangements in his own Radical Shlomo project, and a twenty-year free-improvisation duo with Stephen Horenstein. No sustained critical assessment of his individual style exists in English or Hebrew, a gap this profile does not fill with guesses. What the sources do agree on is the teaching. The Jerusalem Post calls him a much-respected veteran of the Israeli jazz scene, and Mazkeka's programme notes credit him with training generations of students. His own stated method is chronological and repertoire-first. Building a first-year student sextet's semester around Miles Davis in 2021, he put it simply: "You start with jazz, and right away you come across Miles Davis. How can you miss him?"