Roni Ben-Hur

Jazz guitarist Roni Ben-Hur is renowned for his golden tone and  improvisational brilliance; he plays straight-ahead jazz, Brazilian music, and other Latin styles with equal finesse. His talents were honed by his work with masters in each of those fields, notably bebop pianist Barry Harris, longtime Count Basie saxophonist and flutist Frank Wess, Brazilian jazz singer Leny Andrade, and composer-singer Marcos Valle. The eminent Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins called him “a limber and inventive guitarist” who “keeps the flame alive and pure, burning in every note.” The New York Times praised Roni’s “crisp, fluid style”; Time Out New York proclaimed him “a formidable and consummately lyrical guitarist.”

Born in Israel in 1962 but a longtime U.S. citizen based in the New York area, Roni has recorded nearly 20 albums as leader or co-leader. Roni’s 2023 album Love Letters (Mighty Quinn Records), featuring the renowned Canadian trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, shows off his broad scope with a repertoire that includes bebop, bossa nova, standards, and his own originals. In Hot House, George Kanzler called Love Letters “a sonically sensuous, lyrically rich quartet album.” Joseph Lang of Jersey Jazz Magazine proclaimed it “a musical love letter to those who love jazz….  Roni Ben-Hur is such a fluid player that you feel like you could keep on listening for hours.”

Aside from his hectic touring schedule, Roni is an exceptionally dedicated jazz educator who has directed international music camps for over two decades. He founded the jazz program at New York’s Kaufman Music Center in 1994 while establishing others in New York City high schools. Roni has also presented individual workshops for students of all ages in the U.S. and Europe. 

Originally from Tunisia, Roni’s family relocated to Dimona, Israel, where he was born into a large working-class family. In his teens he became enraptured by the recordings of Wes Montgomery, Grant Green, Joe Pass, Jim Hall and Kenny Burrell. He also came to love the classical Spanish repertoire via one of its performing titans, guitarist Andrés Segovia, in whose work he heard a Moorish sound that resonated with his family’s North African roots. Roni began performing in wedding bands and in Tel Aviv clubs. After moving to New York City in 1985, he discovered the music of guitarist-composer Baden Powell, a bossa nova giant; thus began Roni’s love affair with Brazilian music. 

“With my family coming from Tunisia, I felt equally at home with Brazilian and jazz rhythms because both originated in Africa. And when you consider the jazz-standard repertoire, the melodic content of songs by composers like Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin is very much rooted in Jewish music. And while North Africa has that link to Moorish sounds, those sounds are also at the root of Brazilian music. So I’ve always gravitated toward those beautiful minor-key songs and romantic melodies of the standards songbook, as well as the deep rhythms in both bebop and Brazilian music.” 

When Roni came onto the New York jazz scene, he was fortunate to be taken under the wing of the Grammy-winning pianist Barry Harris, a disciple of Thelonious Monk and an eventual NEA Jazz Master. As an up-and-coming guitarist, Roni played in Harris’s band, where he absorbed musical and life lessons. “I was so lucky to learn at the elbow of Barry Harris,” he says. “The young players at that time and all the listeners, too, we just loved his feel. You would get a shot of energy coming through you from that authentic, uplifting swing that Barry always had in his fingers.” 

In addition to leading his own bands, Roni has performed not only with the heroes and peers mentioned above but with Cecil Payne, Etta Jones, Marcus Belgrave, Charles McPherson, Jimmy Heath, Clark Terry, Slide Hampton, Chris Anderson, Earl May, Teri Thornton and Bill Doggett. Roni has also played with pianist Roger Kellaway, whose 2024 release Live at Mezzrow features Roni. 

As an educator, Roni has developed an international reach. The founding director of the jazz program at the Lucy Moses School of the Kaufman Center, he has taught a multitude of jazz enthusiasts in ensemble playing, improvisation and jazz guitar. Roni has also led jazz camps from Vermont and New York to Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Turkey, where he teaches workshops in straight-ahead, Latin and Brazilian jazz. These days he holds his Roni Ben-Hur Jazz Camp in Vermont each summer, in France every spring and fall and in Havana in the winter. The camps held near the village of Uzès in the South of France double as culinary and travel experiences; they include cooking classes and excursions to nearby sites.  

“The people who come to my jazz camps are serious amateurs,” he says. “I give them the opportunity to learn a lot—repertoire, rhythms, techniques—but I also give them the space to enjoy themselves in a relaxed, vacation-friendly environment, with a lot of hanging out and jam sessions. The goal is to have fun learning, so that the experience is rewarding and refreshing. Most of the students are accomplished professionals beyond music. I’m a believer in practice, of course, but I aim to teach students at their own pace. And I want the jazz-camp participants to learn music through a love of the experience, not only through theory. As Barry did, I emphasize aural learning so that students can absorb music through their ears and fingers. Assimilating it that way means the lessons really stick with you.” 

His instructional releases include the DVD Chordability (Motéma, 2011), which offers 20 lessons in chord voicings and jazz harmony for intermediate and advanced guitarists. Roni also translated “the Barry Harris method” to guitar with the publication Talk Jazz: Guitar (Bohobza Music 2003), which has appeared in English and Japanese editions. Online, he offers tutorials through mymusicmasterclass.com.

Stories, Samba and Introspection… 

With the songs and instrumentals of his 2021 album Stories (Dot Time Records), Roni traced influences and emotions across his journey as a musician and a man. “The tunes on Stories are all connected to my life in one way or another,” he explains. “As a child in Israel, I would hear ‘Ha’omnam,’ a moving song about never giving up hope sung by the popular folk singer Chava Alberstein. The lyrics, written during the dark days of the Holocaust, are by the Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg, and those words never go out of date, sadly. They’re sung with such a lovely, bell-like tone on the record by Tamuz Nissim, who’s originally from Israel. We also play ‘After the Morning’ by the great jazz pianist John Hicks, who was another important figure for me when I first came to New York. I wrote the instrumental ‘Ma’of’—which means ‘taking flight’—for my daughters as they were going off on their own. There’s also the song ‘A Redoblar,’ which means ‘let’s roll’ and reflects the fight against oppression in 1970s Latin America. Latin music and culture have come to mean a lot to me in my musical journey. Magos Herrera, who grew up in Mexico, sings that one with such depth of feeling, as she also does with ‘La Serena,” a folk song in Ladino [a derivation of Castilian old Spanish]. The album also includes my original instrumental ballad ‘But I Had to Say Goodbye,’ about lost love.” 

For Stories, Roni fronted an all-star quintet featuring his frequent bass partner Harvie S, drummer Victor Lewis, pianist George Cables and, in a first studio meeting for Roni, the award-winning Canadian trumpeter Ingrid Jensen. Along with the aforementioned pieces, the album includes the Cables instrumental “Melodious Funk” and a vintage piece by bebop pianist Elmo Hope, “Something for Kenny.” Jazziz magazine noted how Stories showcases “some of the world’s finest contemporary jazz musicians,” while All About Jazz marveled over Roni’s interpretive and storytelling skills on an album that’s “glowing with wisdom.” As for the vocalists on Stories, Roni says: “I love working with singers. It was artists like Billie Holiday who attracted me to jazz in the first place. For an instrumentalist, working with a singer requires a special, subtle discipline. You always have to leave space in the arrangement, to really listen, concentrate on the melody and help convey the message of a song.”   

His partnership with Leny Andrade, the First Lady of Brazilian jazz, who died in 2023, was particularly precious to him. They had met in 2012 when she guest-lectured at his Brazilian music camp in Maine; from there they toured the world as a duo and released a lauded album, Alegria de Viver (Motéma Music, 2014).

“To work with Leny was such a pleasure and an inspiration,” Roni says. “It didn’t matter if you couldn’t understand a word of Portuguese; you could feel in your heart what she was expressing. Working with her was like having a window into the wide world of Brazilian music, as she knew all the greatest composers of bossa nova from Jobim on down.”  

On Alegria de Viver, recorded in Rio, the two artists delved deep into the bossa nova catalog for rare gems. JazzTimes offered a glowing report: “Eschewing her long-favored trio format, Leny Andrade has found an ideal duet partner in Israeli-American guitarist Roni Ben-HurEnd-to-end, this is a flawlessly beautiful alliance.” Jazz Weekly joined in the praise, describing the album as “charming, intimate… like a cozy late night after all the guests have left.” 

Leny joined Roni and drummer-producer Percio Sapia on Samba do Arraial (Tratore Records, 2020), a collection of Brazilian classics. The album explores the intricacies of Brazil’s various regional rhythms, with Sapia, bassist Marinho Andreotti and percussionist Vinicius Barros providing deep grooves underneath Roni’s six-string lyricism. Along with praise from various outlets for the album’s authenticity (“not the Hollywood version of samba… totally hot”), New York City Jazz Record extolled Roni’s “virtuosic and creatively limber fretwork.”

In between Alegria de Viver and Samba do Arraial, Roni released the trio album Introspection (Jazzheads, 2018). He co-produced the record with Harvie S. The two players, in league with drummer Tim Horner, explored classics by Billy Strayhorn, Thelonious Monk, Tadd Dameron, Kenny Dorham, George Shearing and Joe Henderson, along with Brazilian songs by Baden Powell and Ary Barroso. “The tunes on Introspection are ones that I had always wanted to play, feeling drawn to them whether for the melody, the harmonic possibilities, the rhythmic feel, or all of the above,” Roni explains. “Many of the pieces are rarely heard – and almost all had never been recorded before in the setting of a guitar trio. That allowed us to put a fresh, personal spin on them. Harvie and I created the arrangements organically, over about a year of working together. The way we perform this repertoire features both the guitar and bass as equal parts of the ensemble, with the melodies played by both of us.” 

From Mojave to Manhattan Style and more…  

Prior to his collaboration with Leny Andrade, Roni had paired with São Paulo-born bassist Nilson Matta to make the album Mojave, released by Motéma in 2011. Mojave saw the two musicians meld their worlds with “ease and naturalness,” according to JazzTimes. The pair were joined by New York jazz drummer Victor Lewis and Brazilian percussionist Café. The program ranged from Brazilian pieces by Jobim, Baden Powell and choro pioneer Pixinguinha to Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love” and deftly rhythmic originals by all four players. One of Roni’s is his signature number “Eretz.” (Hebrew for “land”). All Music Guide called the blend of Roni’s guitar and Matta’s double-bass “magic,” while Rochester City Newspaper offered a similar judgment: “Mojave is magical from start to finish.... The combination of Motta’s samba and Ben-Hur’s swing is a marriage made in heaven.” 

Mojave was the second in Motéma’s Jazz Therapy series. The series was co-founded by Roni and the label to raise money and awareness for the Dizzy Gillespie Memorial Fund of New Jersey’s Englewood Hospital and Medical Center Foundation, which has provided care for uninsured jazz musicians. The first album in the series was Smile, Roni’s 2008 duo set with veteran guitarist Gene Bertoncini. The New York Times lauded the album’s “sophisticated and lyrical” musicianship; Down Beat called it “stunning.” The repertoire ranged from Charlie Chaplin’s title track to the Roberta Flack hit “Killing Me Softly” to two Roni originals: “Anna’s Dance,” written for one of his daughters; and “Sofia’s Butterfly,” penned for the other. In the Wall Street Journal, Nat Hentoff praised Roni and Gene’s “lyrically meditative dialogue”; the Washington Post praised “the dazzling dexterity and tasteful elegance of these duets.” 

Roni formed the trio Our Thing with Panamanian-born bassist Santi Debriano and Brazilian drummer Duduka Da Fonseca. The band released its eponymous first album through Motéma in 2012. The repertoire ranges from swinging interpretations of Thelonious Monk’s “Green Chimneys” and Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” to a pair of tunes by Antônio Carlos Jobim and several originals that channel the players’ Middle Eastern, Latin and Brazilian heritages through a post-bop prism. One of Roni’s contributions was a fresh rendition of a longtime favorite in his songbook: “Anna’s Dance,” written for one of his two daughters. Down Beat called Our Thing “mesmerizing” and the New York Times praised it as “engaging,” while the New York City Jazz Record captured the disc’s virtues colorfully: “Ben-Hur, Debriano and Da Fonseca sway with the grace of palm trees, exuding a laidback introspection.” 

Roni reunited with Debriano and Da Fonseca to release Manhattan Style in 2016 via Jazzheads. Marked by the group’s soulful grooves, telepathic interplay and organic ensemble sound, the album presents originals by all three members alongside tunes by Duke Ellington (“African Flower”), Ornette Coleman (“The Blessing”) and Tom Jobim (“Polo Pony”). Roni’s compositions include the grooving, Middle East-evoking opener “Home,” the lyrical “Amy” and the playful, highly rhythmic “Ma’hof.” New York City Jazz Record noted the album’s “amazing cohesiveness,” adding that Roni’s “fluidity shines whether playing chords or single-note lines in double time.”

About the Our Thing trio, Roni says: “We’re each of us leaders in our own right, with our own ideas and approaches. Our backgrounds are from different parts of the world, with deep ethnic roots, which is a very New York thing. We produced Manhattan Style on our own, creating arrangements on the spot. It was a labor of love by musicians who are passionate about playing well together and learning from each other.” 

Early Strides, Sharing Music… 

Two other key albums in Roni’s discography are Fortuna (Motéma, 2009) and Keepin’ It Open (Motéma, 2007), both with two celebrated jazz veterans, pianist Ronnie Matthews and drummer Lewis Nash, plus percussionist Steve Kroon. Keepin’ It Open, which also features bassist Santi Debriano and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, has a wide purview, from Monk’s rollicking “Think of One” to Roni’s arrangement of a dark-hued old Sephardic melody, “Eshkolit.” Granados’s “Andaluza” taps into his family’s Sephardic Jewish roots and his love of the Spanish classical guitar repertoire. The guitarist’s originals include the finger-snapping “My Man, Harris,” a tribute to Barry Harris. JazzTimes called the album “a delight from start to finish”; All Music Guide avowed that Roni “can swing as hard as anyone.”

Fortuna, which featured Rufus Reid on double-bass, saw Roni recast another totemic Spanish classical piece, Albéniz’s “Granada,” with an ear for how Moorish sounds influenced early Israeli popular music. Along with two Jobim numbers, the disc also includes the Irving Berlin ballad “I Got Lost in his Arms” and Roni’s funky original “Guess Who.” Jazz scholar Dan Morgenstern listed Fortuna as one of his top 10 discs of 2009, and JazzTimes described Roni’s performance this way: “A keen story teller, Ben-Hur’s dexterous, melodic and emotive playing is supported by a tight-knit cast of stellar musicians… his skill and warm tone underscoring the band’s chemistry.” All About Jazz called Fortuna “a sparkling ode to the brightness of life.” 

Roni’s album Signature (Reservoir, 2005) puts the guitarist in the company of Reid, pianist John Hicks and drummer Leroy Williams, plus Kroon. The tracks include two pieces by the Brazilian classical composer Villa-Lobos and tunes by Jobim and Cole Porter. Down Beat said: “Signature is a collection of consummately played music that matches the six-stringer’s consistently creative melody reading, soloing and comping with the supportive work of superb sidemen. Ben-Hur’s originals are similarly impressive, from opening burner ‘Mama Bee,’ which dazzles with a brilliantly constructed guitar solo, to ‘Eretz,’ a gorgeous ballad intended as a tribute to the guitarist’s native Israel that feels like an instant standard.”  

For Anna’s Dance (Reservoir, 2001), Roni convened a combo of elders: Barry Harris on piano, Charles Davis on saxophone, Walter Booker on double-bass, Leroy Williams on drums. The highlights include the debut of Roni’s title composition and a performance of Billy Strayhorn’s ethereal “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.” Wrote Garry Giddins in the Village Voice: “This understated exercise in bebop equilibrium goes down so easy that you might underestimate the magic. Ben-Hur and Charles Davis, who trades in his Sun Ra baritone for suave tenor, speak Harris’s lingo like natives.” 

In the late ’90s, Roni had kick-started his discography with two bebop showcases. First came Backyard (TCB, 1996), presenting him alongside the Barry Harris Trio. Then there was Sofia’s Butterfly (TCB, 1998), which saw the guitarist offering much promise (with Leroy Williams and bassist Lisle Atkinson in tow); the album includes the ultra-fluid virtuosity of his take on Monk’s “Four in One,” not to mention the first appearances of his original title tune and “Fortuna.”  

In 2022, Dot Time Records released Wondering. On it Roni is joined by Harvie S, and drummer Sylvia Cuenca, known for her work with Clark Terry and Joe Henderson. Similar to Roni’s album Introspection, Wondering spotlights songs by such classic jazz composers as Herbie Nichols and Bobby Hutcherson. 

Roni has formed a close collaboration with Sheila Jordan, the iconic jazz singer whose career took wing in the 1940s thanks to the friendship and encouragement of her mentor Charlie Parker. In 2025, Dot Time Records released a new Jordan album, Portrait Now, produced by Harvie S; he and Roni are her sole accompanists. 

“When I was first imagining a life in music,” Roni says, “my mother pointed out to me—perceptively—that music isn’t a profession as much as it’s an obsession. You keep learning and growing and sharing in music not because you want to climb the career ladder but because you need to learn and grow and share as an artist. As many records as I’ve made, shows I’ve played and workshops I’ve taught, music always feels fresh to me. I’m always wanting to share it with colleagues, students and listeners. After all, that’s what music was really made for, to share with other people.”