Uriel Ze'ev Herman was born in Jerusalem on April 13, 1987 and grew up in Katamon, on the city's south-western side. He started piano at seven and went through the Israeli Arts and Science Academy, graduating in 2005, then the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where he took his degree in 2010. His piano teachers there were Ilana Vered and Assaf Zohar; he studied composition with Andre Hajdu and Michael Wolpe. It was a classical education and he has said he was an awkward fit inside it, because he wanted to improvise. Hajdu, the Hungarian-born composer who taught him longest, encouraged exactly that, and Herman has since described him as the teacher who changed him: the man who taught him to use improvisation as a tool of composition, and then to write music difficult enough that improvising over it stayed a genuine problem.

His first record came out in the autumn of 2008, while he was still a student. Half Colors, Half Voices was a collaboration with the double bassist Ehud Ettun, setting original music to the poems of Rachel Bluwstein, and it drew in a large cast of Israeli singers and players: Eli Degibri on saxophone and voice, Zohar Fresco on percussion, Eli Magen on upright bass, Avi Singolda and Eran Weitz on guitars, with Adi Rennert producing and playing piano, keyboards and trumpet. Haaretz named it one of the fifteen best Israeli albums of the year, and Yedioth Ahronoth's reviewer compared the meeting of the two young musicians to the celebrated Israeli pairings of the 1970s. The Jerusalem Film Festival then commissioned Herman and Ettun to build an audiovisual piece around the same material, with Israeli video artists supplying images from Bluwstein's life.

Awake, released on April 17, 2014, was his first record under his own name alone, written after a journey through the jungles of Costa Rica. It mixed his own compositions with reworkings of Nirvana and Radiohead and with new melodies set to poems by Yehuda Amichai and Tirza Atar, and it pulled together most of the Israeli players he would keep working with: Ettun and Avri Borochov sharing the bass chair, Amos Hoffman on oud, Matan Assayag and Haim Peskoff on drums, Uriel Weinberger on flutes and saxophones, the singer Sivan Talmor. NRG's critic put it among the five best Israeli jazz albums of the year. Its real consequence was structural: the group he assembled to play the record live stayed together as The Uriel Herman Quartet, and that band, rather than any single album, is what carried him out of Israel. An appearance at the Red Sea Jazz Festival was followed by an invitation to play the opening of the National Taichung Theater in Taiwan, and from there the quartet worked its way through the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, Jazz sous les Pommiers, Amersfoort Jazz, Eclats d'Email in Limoges, Jarasum in South Korea and dates in more than twenty countries.

Two commissions in the second half of the decade pushed him toward the orchestra. White Night, written in 2017, is a rhapsody in eight movements for jazz quartet and orchestra, premiered and recorded with the Israel Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra and issued as a live EP in March 2018; it takes its narrative from an all-night ceremony in a jungle village, the same stretch of his life that produced Awake. In 2019 the Jenaer Philharmonie commissioned three further pieces for orchestra and quartet. He also wrote the score for Standby Painter, a 2018 Polish documentary about a man who stole a museum painting by hanging a replica in its place.

Face to Face, his second album as sole leader, came out on the French label Laborie Jazz on January 25, 2019, the year he signed to them. The record is built on the idea of an encounter that alters the person who has it, and its material follows from that: settings of Mordechai Zeira's Hebrew songs, a reading of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World," a piece written for his partner, the actress Yael Shtolman, and a dedication to Hajdu, who had died in 2016. By then the quartet had settled into the line-up it has kept since: Herman at the piano, Avri Borochov on double bass and oud, Uriel Weinberger on woodwinds and Haim Peskoff on drums, with Arthur Krasnobaev's trumpet, Maayan Doari's cajón and several guest singers filling out the studio version.

Different Eyes followed on the British label Ubuntu Music on June 30, 2023, a sextet record made at the Jerusalem Music Center that turned out to be the one that travelled. It opens with "Jerusalem," a duet with the trumpeter Itamar Borochov about the city both Herman and his wife grew up in and neither could live in again, and it closes with "Yakinton," an old melody arranged for the son born to him three years earlier. In between sit Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Luiza," Eden Ahbez's "Nature Boy," a homage to Chopin's E minor prelude, Nirvana's "Polly," and "MJ," a tribute to Michael Jordan written in 23/8 for the number on the jersey. John Fordham placed it fifth in The Guardian's ten best jazz albums of 2023 and Jazzwise made it an Editor's Choice. The quartet made its British debut at Ronnie Scott's on September 19, 2023 with the Cuban trumpeter Yelfris Valdés as guest, a night Jazzwise reviewed by reaching for Cecil Taylor's left hand and McCoy Tyner's right. His most recent record, Pauses in Shades (Ubuntu Music, September 27, 2024), is something quieter: ten wholly improvised pieces for piano, cello, voice and electronics made with the cellist Maya Belsitzman, whom he had known since childhood in the Israeli classical world without ever having played with her until the pandemic cleared the calendar. He lives at Kibbutz Kaslon, west of Jerusalem, and has two children.

Herman plays like a classical pianist who refused the terms of the training. The melodic writing is the first thing anyone notices: long, singable lines delivered with what Jazzwise called Chopin-esque intensity, and a sound that reviewers in three languages keep describing as lyrical before they describe it as anything else. What sits underneath is less polite. Tom Sparo, reviewing the Ronnie Scott's debut, heard the heavy rhythmic left hand of Cecil Taylor working against the harmonically adventurous right hand of McCoy Tyner, which is an unusual pair of names to invoke about a player whose records open with lullabies. The Middle Eastern element is structural rather than decorative and comes through the band as much as the writing: an oud in the bass chair, complex additive metres, and a rhythm section that has played this repertoire together for a decade.

The repertoire itself is the argument. Herman has built four leader records out of material that is not supposed to sit together: Hebrew art song, Nirvana, Radiohead, David Bowie, Chopin, Brazilian song, poems by Yehuda Amichai and Rachel Bluwstein, and his own compositions, all treated as one body of song rather than as a novelty programme. He is explicit that the covers are not tributes; the version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on Awake is a full reimagining, and he credits it with the touring offers that followed. The other consistent feature is how little of the live performance is fixed. He has said that in a good show ninety per cent is improvised, and that by the third night of a tour a piece can be entirely so, which is a working method inherited directly from Hajdu's insistence that a player should become part of the piece. Fordham's summary in The Guardian, writing about Different Eyes, put the whole project as a rebuttal to the complaint that jazz prizes technique over feeling.