About Yoav

Yoav Erez was born a healthy 3.8 kilogram baby on July 22, 1982 at ASUTA hostpital, his parents were Ilan Erez (formally Dobski) and Pnina Erez (Formaly Halpern). He grew up at Sderot Chen 25 Tel Aviv with his brother Eyal (6 years older), attended Gavrieli Grade school and then Ironi-Alef Highschool, served for 2 years and 10 months at the Kiria base in Tel Aviv as a Network Administrator and Logistic officer (even though he wasn’t really an officer), Then worked at HANDY (a store that specialized in handheld devices like Palm Pilots and Pocket PC’s, as well as some earlier models of smartphones before the iPhone was invented, for about a year to save money and move to New York. Yoav played Piano since he was about 5 years old and studied with Tzipora Arnon at the Tel-Aviv Conservatory until he was 13 when he decided to sell his piano and purchase a Yamaha 2 story organ, He then began studying under a Japanese teacher at the Yamaha school for about 2 years before realizing this is probably a waste of time and selling the Yamaha organ to buy another Yamaha Upright Piano and return to Tzipora for more private lessons until he was about 17. He then took some Jazz piano lessons from a couple of different teachers until he decided school time was over. He then began playing publicly first at places like Mike’s Place bar on the beach in Tel Aviv, first at the open-mic nights and then playing full nights on his own. He was also part of a Queen Cover band with singer Ofir Livneh (Olive) but left for NY before the band started performing live.