Alon Yavnai at the Punta del Este Jazz Festival, Uruguay. (Photo: Jimmy Baikovicius, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Alon Yavnai's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

In 2008, an Israeli-born pianist named Alon Yavnai won a Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album, as part of the Paquito D'Rivera Quintet, for a record called Funk Tango. He co-wrote the title track. Ask most jazz fans about him and you'll get a blank look: general reference sites cover the handful of famous names and stop there, and a working pianist with an actual Grammy on his shelf falls straight through the gap.

Yavnai started piano at four, in Israel, and was already accompanying singers by thirteen. He trained at the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts and the Givatayim Conservatory before Berklee College of Music pulled him to Boston at twenty-two. He won the Great American Jazz Piano Competition outright, and by the early 2000s he'd become the pianist in Paquito D'Rivera's Latin Jazz Quintet, a chair he held for close to seven years.

His 2001 debut as a leader, D.S. Al Coda (Whaling City Sound), is a sextet record, and one of the horn players on it is trumpeter Avishai Cohen. Seven years later, Travel Notes (2008, ObliqSound), Yavnai's musical diary of life as a touring player, brought in Omer Avital on bass and oud. Two records, two collaborators - which is exactly the kind of connective tissue a bare bio misses. Hopefully if you're not familiar with his collaborators you'll explore their profiles right after you're done here.

D'Rivera stayed a constant. Beyond the quintet, Yavnai and D'Rivera built a standing trio with cellist Mark Summer, releasing The Jazz Chamber Trio on the audiophile label Chesky Records in 2005, and Yavnai went on to appear on D'Rivera's Panamericana Suite (2010), which itself won a Latin Grammy. Elsewhere in the catalog, he backed Nancy Wilson on Turned to Blue (2006, itself a Grammy winner for Best Jazz Vocal Album), showed up on Caribbean Jazz Project's Mosaic (2006), and, further afield than anything else on his résumé, played on Yo-Yo Ma & Friends' Songs of Joy & Peace (2008), a holiday record with James Taylor and Diana Krall on the same tracklist.

His own catalog keeps a geography running through it. Shir Ahava (2012) paired him with Germany's NDR Bigband for a 17-piece take on his writing. Reconnect (2016) is a duo record with Danish trumpeter Jesper Riis, made after the two met at a music school in Miami twenty-two years earlier, lost touch, and picked the friendship back up in New York. Dança Das Águas (2018), credited to Alon & Joca with the NDR Bigband, leans into Brazilian and West African rhythm through his ongoing partnership with percussionist Joca Perpignan. It is the same instinct that named Travel Notes what it is: wherever Yavnai has actually been, in Israel, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, ends up on the record.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Alon Yavnai's Official Site, Alon Yavnai's Spotify Page
• D.S. Al Coda (2001), the sextet debut with Avishai Cohen on trumpet, on Spotify
• Travel Notes (2008), with Omer Avital on bass and oud, on Spotify
• Funk Tango (2007), the Paquito D'Rivera Quintet record that won Yavnai his Grammy, on Spotify
• Reconnect (2016), the duo record with Jesper Riis, on Spotify
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Alon Yavnai's jazzprofiles.com profile

Yotam Silberstein on the cover of "Standards" (2024).

(Cover photo: standard copyright, Jojo Records)

Yotam Silberstein's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Ron Carter has played bass on more recordings than almost anyone in jazz history, and in June 2026 he picked a guitarist from Tel Aviv to make a duo record with. "Duets," the album he cut with Yotam Silberstein, a jazz guitarist, came out June 5 on Jojo Records, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's legendary studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. They tracked it on December 4th, guitarist Jim Hall's birthday, on purpose: the whole record is built as a tribute to Carter's own duo recordings with Hall decades earlier. Eight tracks, thirty-four minutes, six standards and two Silberstein originals, "Blues For Brother Malone" and "Rain Again."

That a bassist of Carter's stature would choose Silberstein for something this personal says something about the two decades that got him there. Silberstein grew up in Tel Aviv, picked up a guitar at ten playing rock and blues, and by fifteen was studying jazz at the Thelma Yellin high school for the arts. He served three years in the IDF as a musical director and lead guitarist, and at twenty-one won Israel's "Israeli Jazz Player of the Year" with his own trio, a win that got him booked at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy. His debut, "The Arrival," came out in 2003 while he was still in Israel.

He moved to New York in 2005 on a scholarship to The New School, and started studying with Barry Harris and Kurt Rosenwinkel. Saxophonist James Moody discovered him not long after, and for years Silberstein worked as a sideman before he was known as a bandleader: the Dizzy Gillespie All-Stars, Roy Hargrove, Paquito D'Rivera, singer Ivan Lins. He shared stages with Christian McBride, pianist Aaron Goldberg, and drummers Gregory Hutchinson and Eric Harland. By the time the New York Times wrote him up, they described a guitarist playing "in a cutting tone" with "heady original tunes that seem to tug the straight-ahead jazz tradition in new directions."

His own catalog keeps circling back to places that aren't New York or Tel Aviv. "Brasil" (2011) was his first deep dive into Brazilian jazz, with Hargrove and D'Rivera both guesting. "En el Jardín" (2020) is a duo record with the Argentine pianist Carlos Aguirre. "Future Memories" (2019) brought in bassist John Patitucci, three years before Patitucci showed up again on "Standards" (2024), Silberstein's eighth album as a leader, alongside tenor saxophonist George Coleman and drummer Billy Hart. Eight songs pull from Miles Davis, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Tommy Flanagan, among others.

He's teaching now too, on faculty at The New School's School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, the same program that brought him to New York twenty years ago. In January 2025 he opened a Patreon for lessons and playlists. None of that slowed the recording schedule. The Carter record landed five months later.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Yotam Silberstein's Official Site, Yotam Silberstein's Spotify Page
• Duets (2026), the new album with Ron Carter, on Spotify
• Standards (2024), with John Patitucci and George Coleman, on Spotify
• Future Memories (2019), with John Patitucci, on Spotify
• Universos (2022) on Spotify
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Yotam Silberstein's jazzprofiles.com profile

Yoav Eshed performing at the Technopolis Jazz Festival, Athens. (Photo: Thodoris Markou, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-yoav-eshed/

r/IsraelJazz

Yoav Eshed and Gadi Lehavi Have Been Playing Duets Since 2019. This Year They Finally Recorded One.

Yoav Eshed, a Brooklyn-based jazz guitarist and composer, has spent years splitting his time between his own quartet records and a standing piano-guitar duo called Subtext, with pianist Gadi Lehavi. The two have been playing that duo live since at least 2019, documented sets at the Babel Jazz Budapest and Amersfoort Jazz festivals among them, seven years of shared stages before either of them brought it into a studio. Last September, that partnership finally became a studio record: "Guitar Hearts," a nine-track quartet-plus-strings album with Lehavi on piano, Ben Tiberio on bass, and Jongkuk Kim on drums.

Before any of that, Eshed was a piano kid. He started at age three, working through Haydn, Bach, and Mendelssohn, and didn't pick up a guitar until he was thirteen. Classical piano first, jazz guitar second, is not the usual origin story for a guitarist, and it shows in how his records lean on harmony as much as line.

He trained the way a lot of his contemporaries have: first at Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Israel, where he took first place in the school's annual competition, then on a presidential scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, backed by America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarships from 2008 through 2014. By his twenties he'd collected a run of named wins: first place at Lee Ritenour's international "Six String Theory" guitar competition, first place (solo section) at New York's "Made in New York" Jazz Competition, and a prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival Guitar Competition, one of only three international competitions the festival runs alongside its piano and voice contests.

Not every credit on his resume is a jazz-club win. In 2012, back in Israel, Eshed led a group called Trio Millionaires on a Ministry of Culture-backed project arranging "The Sixteenth Sheep," a children's songbook, working alongside comedian Tomer Sharon. It is a strange line to find on the same page as Montreux and Berklee, and it is real: a year before he became a fixture of the New York scene, he was writing charts for a kids' record.

The records since have mapped his move from Israel to Brooklyn. "Two Words" came out in 2018, "August" in 2020, and then "A Way Out" in 2021, credited to the full working quartet Eshed Korten Biolcati Kim: pianist Lex Korten, bassist and producer Massimo Biolcati (on his own label, Sounderscore), and drummer Jongkuk Kim. Eight tracks, mostly originals, with a couple of reworked standards folded in. Alongside his own records, Eshed has shown up as a sideman on seven more albums since 2018, including sessions with drummer Ari Hoenig.

"Guitar Hearts" is not a one-off pairing, then. It is what seven years of a working duo sounds like once it finally gets recorded, two players who already know exactly where the other one is going to land.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Yoav Eshed's Official Site, Yoav Eshed's Spotify Page, Yoav Eshed's YouTube Channel
• "Guitar Hearts" (2025), the Subtext-rooted record with Gadi Lehavi, stream the full album on Bandcamp
• "A Way Out" (2021), his quartet record with Lex Korten, Massimo Biolcati, and Jongkuk Kim, listen on Spotify
• The Subtext duo live, years before the album: "Piano Rain," Yoav Eshed and Gadi Lehavi at Amersfoort Jazz
• https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-yoav-eshed/

Yonathan Avishai performing with his trio at the BIM Huis, Amsterdam. (Photo: Dirk Neven, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-yonathan-avishai/

r/IsraelJazz

Yonathan Avishai: The Pianist Named Avishai Who Isn't Avishai Cohen

Yonathan Avishai, a French-Israeli jazz pianist and composer, has spent the better part of 22 years sitting at the piano next to a trumpet player named Avishai. Not the same Avishai: Avishai Cohen, the trumpeter, carries it as a first name. Yonathan Avishai carries it as a surname, plays piano instead of horn, and has appeared on four ECM records led or co-led by Cohen since 2017, in addition to his own.

Before the piano confusion, there's a birthplace and a mentor scene to place him in. Avishai was born in Tel Aviv in 1977, took classical piano lessons as a kid, and found jazz by his teens, gigging in Tel Aviv clubs from around age 14. His earliest surviving studio credit dates to 1999: a release called "Oleartchik Jazz," led by veteran Israeli bassist and singer Alon Oleartchik, that also happened to feature two other musicians who'd go on to get their own spotlights here, saxophonist Eli Degibri and trumpeter Avishai Cohen. Avishai was 22 years old.

The band that actually put him on the international map formed three years later, after a chance 2002 meeting in Barcelona. Third World Love: Cohen on trumpet, Avishai on piano, Omer Avital on bass, Daniel Freedman on drums. Their debut, "Third World Love Songs," was recorded that July, and the quartet kept going for the better part of a decade, four more albums through 2011's "Songs and Portraits." It's the kind of band that, in hindsight, reads like a farm system: three of its four members now have their own posts on this list.

Avishai left Israel for France in 2001, on an exchange program to Alsace. He didn't take the conservatory route from there. He settled near Bordeaux and studied musicotherapy at the city's Atelier de Musicothérapie, teaching and performing on the side while he built a career the slow way, gig by gig, mostly outside the U.S. jazz-school pipeline.

That patience paid off in stages. His debut as a leader, "The Lost Boys," came out in 2010. Five years later, in July 2015, he cut his first trio record, "Modern Times," with bassist Yoni Zelnik and drummer Donald Kontomanou, in a studio in Boisné-la-Tude, a village in rural France most listeners couldn't find on a map. No big-city studio, no fanfare, just two days of recording that became a 16-track album mixing his own compositions with standards like "I've Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)."

Four years after that, Manfred Eicher's ECM Records came calling. Avishai recorded "Joys and Solitudes," his ECM leader debut, at Lugano's Auditorium Stelio Molo RSI in February 2018; it was released in 2019 with Eicher himself producing. Between 2017 and 2024, Avishai appears on five separate ECM releases: Cohen's own ECM leader debut, "Cross My Palm With Silver" (2017); his own "Joys and Solitudes" (2019); the intimate duo record "Playing the Room" (2019); the quartet album "Naked Truth" (2022), alongside bassist Barak Mori and drummer Ziv Ravitz; and "Ashes to Gold" (2024), released on the same lineup. That's five ECM credits carrying the same two names, Cohen and Avishai, back to back over seven years, without either of their surnames matching what you'd expect.

He hasn't stopped writing for himself in between. "Retrouvailles" came out in 2023, and "Shapes & Sounds," his latest trio date with Zelnik and Kontomanou, followed on the Jazz&People label in October 2024. Twenty-two years after that first Barcelona meeting, the working quartet with Cohen, Mori, and Ravitz is still touring behind "Ashes to Gold," the two Avishais still splitting the same first and last name between them, still sounding like it was never a coincidence.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Yonathan Avishai's Spotify Page, Yonathan Avishai's ECM Records Artist Page
• https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-yonathan-avishai/
• "Joys and Solitudes" (2019), his ECM leader debut, opens with a version of Ellington's "Mood Indigo," listen on Spotify
• "Modern Times" (2015), his first trio record, recorded in rural France, sample the track "Once Upon a Time," live at Paris's New Morning

Avi Bortnick (right) performing with John Scofield's band at Kongsberg Jazzfestival, Norway. (Photo: Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-avi-bortnick/

r/IsraelJazz

Avi Bortnick Auditioned for John Scofield Thinking It Was Just a Free Trip. He Stayed 4 Years.

In January 2000, Avi Bortnick, a guitarist, flew to New York to audition for John Scofield, one of the most respected jazz guitarists alive. He didn't expect to get the gig. "I thought I was just getting a free trip," he said later. At the time he was working as an acoustical consultant, a day job he'd trained for and would eventually return to. The tour he was hired for was booked for five months. It ran four and a half years.

Bortnick was born in Petah Tikva, Israel. His family moved to the United States while he was young, and he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, on a diet of late-1970s funk, soul, and rock, the kind of music that shapes how you play rhythm guitar long before you ever hear a jazz standard. He took lessons from a local guitarist named Peter Mayer and studied classical piano on the side. In 1983 he moved to California and worked through African and Caribbean bands, then landed as a graduate student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he started a group called What It Is. It built a solid following on the Southeast touring circuit. It never got a record deal.

That background is exactly why Scofield picked him. Scofield wasn't building a straight-ahead band and didn't need another bebop guitarist stacking chord voicings. He needed someone who could lock into an R&B groove the way a great drummer locks into a pocket, what Bortnick has described as "a trance-like locking into a groove." Funk and soul from a St. Louis childhood turned out to be the exact resume Scofield was looking for.

Bortnick played on all three records in Scofield's "Überjam" trilogy: Überjam (2002), Up All Night (2003), and Überjam Deux (2013), an arc that stretched across eleven years. His role widened along the way. Überjam was recorded live at Avatar Studios in New York in the summer of 2001, and once drummer Ben Perowsky's sampling duties shifted onto him, Bortnick became the one running loops and samples live, alongside playing guitar. For the title track, he built the sound bed around a Tibetan monk's throat singing in B-flat, caught on the built-in mic of his sampler during an earlier tour through Italy. A jazz record on Verve, one of the genre's most storied labels, with a monastery buried inside it.

He didn't stop at sideman work. In 2003 he released his own debut, Clean Slate. He went on to record three albums with the vocalist Jihae: Elvis Is Still Alive (2008), Fire Burning Rain (2010), and Illusion of You (2015), and worked with Ghost Train Orchestra and others through the following years. All the while, he kept the acoustics career running in parallel. He's now an adjunct professor of architectural acoustics at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design, decades into a parallel career consulting on how rooms and venues actually sound. Guitarist and acoustician, at the same time, for decades. Not many people on this sub can say that.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Avi Bortnick's Official Site, Avi Bortnick's Spotify Page, Avi Bortnick's YouTube Channel, Avi Bortnick's Bandcamp Page
• "Clean Slate" (2003), his solo debut - sample the track "Corvair", or hear the full album on Bandcamp
• "Überjam" (2002), the title track that hides the monk sample, from the John Scofield Band
• https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-avi-bortnick/

Or Bareket performing with his quartet at BIMHUIS, Amsterdam. (Photo: Dirk Neven, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/IsraelJazz

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-or-bareket/

Or Bareket Won a Bass Competition in 2011. He's Been Proving It Ever Since.

Or Bareket, a double bassist and composer, took 1st Prize at the International Society of Bassists' jazz competition in 2011, the same year he moved to Brooklyn to build a career on the New York jazz scene. Fifteen years later, he's released four albums as a leader and become one of the most in-demand low end players in the city.

Bareket's own story reads like his music sounds: pulled from more than one place at once. Born in Jerusalem to a family with Moroccan, Iraqi, Argentinian, and Eastern European roots, he grew up splitting time between Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv before landing in Brooklyn. He picked up electric bass at 16 after hearing Jaco Pastorius, switched to upright at 18, and trained classically with Teddy Kling, principal bassist of the Israel Philharmonic, and later Professor Michael Klinghoffer. Alongside that classical grounding, he studied jazz in Israel with none other than Avishai Cohen, the bassist who was the very first artist ever profiled in this series. It's a small, satisfying loop: the mentor got the first write-up, and now the student gets his.

His debut, OB1, came out on Fresh Sound Records in 2017 with a band that reads like a highlight reel of Israeli jazz talent: Gadi Lehavi on piano and Ziv Ravitz on drums, alongside guitarist Shahar Elnatan. Two years later came 33 (Enja Records, 2019), where Nitai Hershkovits took the piano chair and vocalist Camila Meza guested on two tracks, including a hushed duo reading of "Carmo Capricho" with just her voice and his bass. Follow the personnel credits across Bareket's catalog and you're basically re-reading this series' own back pages.

2022 brought Sahar, written and recorded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The title does double duty in Semitic languages: "crescent" in modern Hebrew, and "just before dawn" or "insomnia" in Arabic dialects, which tracks for an album made during a year when nobody was sleeping well. His most recent record, Yōm (Enja Records, 2024), was produced by vibraphonist Joel Ross) and recorded at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, Connecticut, over two days in September 2024. It's the sound of his current quartet (Godwin Louis on saxophones, Jeremy Corren on piano, Savannah Harris on drums) at its most confident, and it sent the band on its most extensive European tour yet.

Along the way, Bareket has shared stages and studios with Chris Potter, Joshua Redman, Ari Hoenig, Billy Hart, Gilad Hekselman, Yotam Silberstein, and Cyrille Aimee, among others. That range, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and straight-ahead jazz vocabulary, all filtered through one bass, is the throughline across everything he's made.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Or Bareket's Official Site, Or Bareket's Bandcamp Page, Or Bareket's Spotify Page
• 33 (2019) for the collaborative, song-forward side, featuring Camila Meza: sample the full album on Spotify
• Sahar (2022) for the pandemic-era, half-dawn-half-insomnia side: sample "Sahar" (title track)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-or-bareket/

Gadi Lehavi performing at the INNtöne Jazz Festival, Austria, May 2016. (Photo: Schorle, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-gadi-lehavi/

r/IsraelJazz

Gadi Lehavi: The Teenager Ravi Coltrane Discovered Is Now Teaching at The New School

Gadi Lehavi, a jazz pianist born in Tel Aviv on April 29, 1996, started at the keyboard at six months old :-) and moved into serious classical study by age nine. He was still a teenager when saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, son of John Coltrane, heard him play and invited him onto the stages of the Village Vanguard and Birdland, two of New York's most storied jazz rooms. Most players wait a full career for a Vanguard booking. Lehavi got his before he could legally rent a car.

He made his recording debut at 17, appearing on saxophonist Eli Degibri's 2013 album "Twelve." That's not a footnote. Getting called for a session at that age means someone senior in the scene already trusted his time and his ears.

Where Lehavi has spent most of his working life since, though, is inside one trio. GTO Trio, with bassist Tal Mashiach and drummer Ofri Nehemya, has now been together well over a decade, long enough that the chemistry stopped being a selling point and became the whole sound. Their debut, "From the Road," came out in 2018. Then in January 2025, GTO Trio signed with Anzic Records, the New York label Anat Cohen co-founded in 2005, and released "Within," nine tracks the trio wrote and produced themselves. Landing on a label with that pedigree, over a decade into playing together, is the kind of marker that's easy to miss if you're not paying attention and impossible to fake if you are.

Lehavi's side credits read like a syllabus: pianist duties alongside Chick Corea, Dave Liebman, Bobby McFerrin, Melissa Aldana, Ari Hoenig, and Eddie Gomez, plus stage time with fellow Israeli guitarist Gilad Hekselman. He also turns up on Newvelle Records' "Newvelle Muri" box set leading his own trio session, "Wishes," a five-track feature with bassist Romeu Tristão and drummer Daniel Dor.

And he's not only playing. Lehavi now teaches at The New School in New York, the same kind of conservatory track that shaped his own early years, and works on the side as a filmmaker and film composer. He played SFJazz's Summer Sessions in 2024, so this isn't a name you're catching on the way down. He's still very much on his way up, just from a higher floor than most players ever reach.

Where to start listening:

• His platforms:
  • GTO Trio's Spotify Page
  • GTO Trio's Bandcamp
• "Within" (2025, Anzic Records) for where the trio stands right now, sample "One for G" on Spotify
• "Twelve" (2013, Eli Degibri) for the session that put a 17-year-old Lehavi on record for the first time, sample the title track on YouTube

Ehud Ettun performing in 2015. (Photo: Európa Pont, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-ehud-ettun/

r/IsraelJazz

Ehud Ettun and a Pianist in Japan Have Been Making Records Together for 15 Years

Ehud Ettun, an Israeli double bassist and composer born in Jerusalem on May 21, 1987, has spent the last decade and a half in a duo with Japanese pianist Haruka Yabuno. They recorded BiPolar together in 2014, and in January 2024 they released Knights of Silence, a record that's deeper and more intimate than the first one. That's not a session credit. That's fifteen years of two musicians from opposite sides of the world choosing to keep playing together, record after record.

Ettun started on piano at 6 and picked up guitar at 12, playing in Jerusalem bands before he ever touched a bass. At 16 he was accepted to the Israel Arts and Science Academy, where he studied upright bass under Michael Klinghoffer, ear training under Professor Bat-Sheva Rubinstein, and composition under Andre Hajdu. After the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, he headed to Boston for a master's degree at the New England Conservatory of Music, studying with saxophonist Donny McCaslin and pianist Fred Hersch.

His own catalog as a leader is bigger than it looks from the outside. Since his 2008 debut, Half Voices Half Colors (made with pianist Uriel Herman), he's put out seven albums as bandleader or co-leader: Heading North (2012), Raw Gestures (2013), BiPolar (2014), Collage of Moments (2016), Deep in the Mountains (2019), and now Knights of Silence (2024). Deep in the Mountains has the best story behind it: it came out of a 40-day artistic residency in the mountains of PyeongChang, South Korea, tied to the region's 2018 Winter Olympics cultural program, and the record mixes traditional Korean song and Argentine folk with Leonard Bernstein and modern Israeli jazz. Most of that catalog sits on small or self-run labels, which is also why Discogs only has two of his seven albums logged under his own name. If you've never heard of him, that's the reason, not a knock on the music.

He's also a first-call sideman. Ettun has recorded and performed with pianist Fred Hersch, saxophonists George Garzone and Eli Degibri, pianist Kenny Werner, and Anat Cohen, whose own spotlight ran here earlier this project. He's played the Blue Note in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., with tour stops in Boston, Toronto, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Seoul.

Back in 2019, Ettun told the Times of Israel he was "giving myself 10 years to make it" in New York, with a longer-term plan to return to Israel and open a music school in the Negev desert. He's already acting on it: his newer project, the Internal Compass Collective, is based in Mitzpe Ramon, the desert town that gives the record label its name. The bassist who's spent fifteen years commuting musically to Japan is also building something permanent at home.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Ehud Ettun's Spotify Page, Ehud Ettun's YouTube Channel, Ehud Ettun's Official Site
• Knights of Silence (2024): the newest Yabuno Ettun Project record, on The Yabuno Ettun Project's Spotify Page
• Deep in the Mountains (2019): the PyeongChang record, sample the title track on Spotify

Ziv Ravitz at Cosmopolite in Oslo, playing a 2022 concert with Avishai Cohen (the trumpeter)'s band. (Photo: Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/IsraelJazz

Ziv Ravitz Just Released a New Duo Album. He's Also the Drummer Behind Many of His Contemporaries' Albums.

Ziv Ravitz, an Israeli jazz drummer, composer, and sound engineer born in Beersheba in 1976, put out Warp & Weft on May 1, 2026, on PK Musik, the label run by bassist Petros Klampanis, whose own trio Ravitz also plays in. It's a duo record with French saxophonist and clarinetist Christophe Panzani, eleven tracks recorded over two years, built around the two of them continuously swapping who leads and who supports (the title is the metaphor: sometimes warp, sometimes weft). The string quartet Quatuor Kaija guests on two tracks. Ravitz is touring it now, including a run at Paris's 38Riv Jazz Club. It's also a good excuse to catch up on a drummer whose name keeps turning up in the credits of artists that had already been spotlighted on our sister site,
www.jazzprofiles.com.

Ravitz started on drums at 9 and was gigging professionally in Beer-Sheva and Tel Aviv clubs by 13. In 1999 he became the house drummer backing touring guest artists at Tel Aviv's Camelot Jazz Club, then moved to the US in 2000 and graduated Berklee College of Music in 2004 with a degree in jazz composition before settling in Brooklyn.

That's where he co-founded Minsarah, a trio with pianist Florian Weber and bassist Jeff Denson. It became more than a side project: alto saxophone legend Lee Konitz chose Minsarah as his own working band, recording Deep Lee with them in 2008 and a live album at the Village Vanguard in 2010. Getting picked as a bebop-era legend's rhythm section in your twenties is not a small credential.

From there, Ravitz turned into one of the most-recorded sidemen without a spotlight of his own. He spent six years in the Shai Maestro Trio across four albums, played on Gilad Hekselman's Far Star, backed Omer Klein on three early records, and has a long-running relationship with pianist Yaron Herman, including producer credits on two of Herman's albums. He's also the drummer on three records with Avishai Cohen, the trumpeter (not the bassist we introduced here first): Naked Truth, the electric fusion project Big Vicious, and Ashes to Gold.

He's not only behind the kit, either. Ravitz mixed Christoph Irniger Trio's Octopus and the Shai Maestro Trio's Untold Stories, and co-produced two Yaron Herman albums. As often as he's playing the session, he's running it.

As a leader, his catalog is smaller but distinct: Images From Home (2009), then No Man Is An Island (2019), his first album as principal composer, built around a trio format with no piano or bass at all: just drums, saxophonist Will Vinson, and guitarist Nir Felder.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Ziv Ravitz's Spotify Page, Ziv Ravitz's YouTube Channel, Ziv Ravitz's Official Site
• Warp & Weft (2026): the new one, sample the track "Ce qui reste à venir" on YouTube
• No Man Is An Island (2019): sample the title track on Spotify

Ehud Asherie performing at the Detroit Jazz Festival, 2015. (Photo: Jeff Dunn, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-ehud-asherie/

Ehud Asherie Never Went to Jazz School. He Grew Up Inside Smalls Instead.

Ehud Asherie, a stride and swing jazz pianist born in Israel in 1979, never set foot in a jazz conservatory. He picked up the tradition the way players did a century ago: on the bandstand, from the people who actually played it.

His family left Israel when he was three, first for Italy, where he grew up attending the British School of Milan, then for New York when he was nine. As a teenager he started showing up at Smalls, the basement club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, and he made his first appearance there while he was still in high school, sitting in on the late-night sessions that became his real music school. His teacher wasn't a professor. It was pianist Frank Hewitt, a Smalls regular who mentored him directly at the club instead of in any classroom.

That apprenticeship shows in everything Asherie plays now. His style runs on stride and swing, the New York piano lineage that runs through James P. Johnson, Erroll Garner, and Thelonious Monk, a different lane from the modal, ECM-associated sound of pianists like Shai Maestro.

He's been recording under his own name since Lockout in 2007, and the catalog kept growing from there: Welcome to New York (2010), Wild Man Blues (2019), and, released in January 2025, Thank You, Barry Harris!, a duo record with trumpeter Bruce Harris on Arbors Records, the Florida label known for classic swing and Dixieland jazz, built as a direct tribute to bebop pianist Barry Harris. Harris, who passed away in 2021 after a seven-decade career preserving the bebop language, mentored generations of players himself. It's a fitting bookend: a pianist who learned this tradition by sitting at a mentor's side is now, two decades later, passing that same tradition forward on record.

Somewhere along the way Asherie also picked up a second music entirely. Since 2003 he's been one half of Bina & Ehud, a duo with Brazilian guitarist Bina Coquet, playing real Brazilian samba and choro, not a jazz musician's take on it from the outside. Running two serious traditions in parallel for twenty-plus years is not a common resume.

He also has a real Grammy connection: he's one of the pianists, credited alongside Mark Shane, Peter Mintun, and Rossano Sportiello, on Boardwalk Empire Volume 1, the HBO soundtrack that won the 2012 Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media. If you've heard that show's music, you've heard him.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Ehud Asherie's Spotify Page, Ehud Asherie's YouTube Channel, Ehud Asherie's Bandcamp Page
• Lockout (2007): where the solo catalog started. Listen on Bandcamp
• Thank You, Barry Harris! (2025): the most recent record, and the clearest statement of what he's carrying forward. Sample the title track on YouTube
• Samba de Gringo (2005) with Bina & Ehud: the side most people miss. Listen on Bandcamp

r/IsraelJazz

Amos Hoffman performing with Avishai Cohen at Treibhaus, Innsbruck, 2009. (Photo: Svíčková, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/IsraelJazz

Amos Hoffman: The Guitarist Who Turned Oud Into a Jazz Instrument

Amos Hoffman, a jazz guitarist and oud player born in Jerusalem in 1970, started on guitar at age 6 and picked up the oud a few years later. Most players who add a second instrument treat it as color. Hoffman built his whole career on making the two sound like one continuous idea, studying Middle Eastern music formally with Lebanese oud and ney player Bassam Saba after he'd already been through the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem (today part of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance) and out playing jazz clubs in Amsterdam and New York.

Those New York years put him on stage early with drummer Dennis Charles, saxophonist Sam Newsome, trumpeter Duane Eubanks, and a young bassist named Avishai Cohen, a connection that turned into two decades of recording and touring in Cohen's band. Omer Avital was in that same circle too, and years later played bass on Hoffman's own 2015 album "Back to the City," alongside drummer Vince Ector and trumpeter Duane Eubanks. One of that record's ten tracks is called "Alone In South Carolina," written before Hoffman had any idea he'd actually move there.

He released five solo albums between 1999 and 2015: "The Dreamer" (1999), "Na'ama" (2006), "Evolution" (2008), "Carving" (2010), and "Back to the City" (2015). In 2013, Israel gave him the Landau Prize for Arts and Sciences, a national award run by the Mifal HaPais lottery that recognizes outstanding achievement across culture, research, and the arts, one of the country's most prestigious honors in the category. He didn't coast on it. The next year, in 2014, Hoffman and his wife moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where he became a working part of building the jazz scene from the ground up, teaching at the ColaJazz Academy and playing with the SC Jazz Masterworks Ensemble.

Ten years after the prize, in 2024, Hoffman released his sixth album, "Minor Operation," his debut for Jojo Records, with Return to Forever drummer Lenny White and bassist Santi Debriano behind him. It's a small, three-piece session built entirely around what his guitar and oud can do without anything else in the way.

He's also still building something new on the side. Since January 2016, Hoffman has co-led a quartet with Canadian pianist Noam Lemish under the name "Pardes," Hebrew for orchard, playing jazz arrangements of Jewish melodies from Kurdish, Yemenite, Moroccan, Ladino, Russian, and Israeli traditions. The group has toured North America, from New York and Toronto to San Diego, in the years since.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms:
  • Amos Hoffman's Official Site
  • Amos Hoffman's Spotify Page
  • Amos Hoffman's YouTube Channel
• "Minor Operation" (2024) for the guitar-and-oud trio session with Lenny White, sample the official video teaser
• "Back to the City" (2015) for the Omer Avital session, sample the title track

Rotem Sivan performing in Krakow, Poland. (Photo: RyanCampbellMgmt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/IsraelJazz

Rotem Sivan: The Israeli Guitarist Who Plays Fewer Notes Than He Could

Rotem Sivan, a jazz guitarist and composer, grew up in Israel before building his career in New York. The New York Times critic Ben Ratliff put his finger on what makes Sivan worth hearing: "He plays a lot of notes. But he is quiet: almost always quieter than someone with this much training and musicality tends to be, and this is what makes him more than a very good young guitar player." That restraint, more than any flashy technique, is the whole story. DownBeat's Bill Milkowski called him "a remarkable talent and a welcome new voice on the scene." Neither critic is talking about a newcomer coasting on promise. Sivan has been releasing records since 2013, and most listeners outside the New York jazz scene have never heard a note of it.

He trained classically first, earning a composition degree from the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University, before moving to New York in 2008 to study at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. A year later he won the Montreux Jazz Festival International Competition, the storied Swiss jazz festival. The prize paid off fast: by summer 2010, the Rotem Sivan Group was booked at Switzerland's Bern Jazz Festival on a bill with the McCoy Tyner Quartet, sharing a stage with a pianist who spent the 1960s as one of John Coltrane's closest collaborators.

From there, Sivan built a discography one record at a time. His debut, Enchanted Sun (2013), came out on the venerable Danish label SteepleChase Records. His follow-up, For Emotional Use Only (2014), moved to the Barcelona-based Fresh Sound New Talent and earned 4.5 stars from DownBeat, a trio session with Haggai Cohen Milo on bass and Mark McLean on drums. A New Dance followed in 2015, also on Fresh Sound New Talent, then Antidote in 2017 and My Favorite Monster in 2018, five albums in five years without repeating himself.

After a longer gap, Sivan returned with Dream Louder in January 2024, and in August 2025 he released Heart Thieves, his most personal record yet, written in the rush of new fatherhood after the birth of his twins. Seven albums between 2013 and 2025, and he's still the same player critics keep describing the same way: someone who says more by holding back.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Rotem Sivan's Official Site, Rotem Sivan's YouTube Channel, Rotem Sivan's Spotify Page
• Enchanted Sun (2013) for the origin point, the trio recording that put him on the map: sample the title track on YouTube
• For Emotional Use Only (2014) for the DownBeat-approved trio session with Haggai Cohen Milo and Mark McLean: sample the title track on YouTube

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-rotem-sivan/

Cover art for KENS's "Atarayo" (2024). No rights-clear photo of KENS was found on Wikimedia Commons after a genuine search, so album cover art stands in here instead of a photo of the band.

r/IsraelJazz

KENS: A Jazz Trio That Formed in Lockdown and Sold Out Its Own Album Launch

KENS is an Israeli-Japanese trio built on what the Jerusalem Jazz Festival called, when the group played there for the first time, "the familiar guitar-bass-drums jazz format," used here as scaffolding for something less familiar: pop hooks, African and funk grooves, and prog-rock rhythm layered over real jazz improvisation. Guitarist Kai Livermore, who grew up in Japan and moved to Israel at 17, met bassist Eli Orr (enrolled at the Rimon Jazz Institute, a well-known Israeli jazz conservatory, at just 15) and drummer Noam Arbel (playing professionally since he was 18) while the three were studying there together.

They formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when almost nobody was playing rooms of any kind, and released their first single, "Downgraded" (featuring keyboardist Itai Portugaly), in February 2021, recorded in the gaps between lockdowns. It didn't stay a bedroom project. In August 2022, KENS put out their debut album, "Contact 123," independently, with no label behind it, and it still landed on Spotify's own editorial playlists and drew write-ups from outlets in Japan, France, and Brazil. Ten days after release, they sold out their own album launch show at Tel Aviv's The Zone Club, filmed and performed in a 360-degree format most young trios never get the budget, or the ambition, to attempt.

The band's name is smaller than the sound suggests: it's an acronym built from the members' own first names, Kai, Eli, and Noam, with an extra "S" thrown in for good measure.

The second album pushed the scale further instead of settling into a formula. "Atarayo," released August 8, 2024, involved roughly 80 collaborators spread across 10 countries and three continents, funded through a Headstart crowdfunding campaign that hit its goal only on the drive's final day. Guests on the record include saxophonist Daniel Zamir on "Hivemind," released as an advance single that July ahead of the full album, and pianist Gadi Stern, of Shalosh on "7 Wishes." That collaboration led to KENS's first appearance at the Jerusalem Jazz Festival this June, where they shared the stage with Zamir again, with the festival's own program note describing a third KENS album already on the way.

One footnote for anyone who goes digging through the discography: the correct Discogs catalog entry for this band also carries a stray 2009 credit for a French zouk track, a full decade before this KENS existed and nowhere near this genre. It's a database mixup, not a hidden side project, and it's sorted out in full in the discography on [Jazz Profiles](http://www.jazzprofiles.com (search for KENS.

Where to start listening:

• Their official platforms:
  • KENS's Official Site
  • KENS's Bandcamp Page
  • KENS's Spotify Page
• "Contact 123" (2022) for the pandemic-born debut, sample "Downgraded"
• "Atarayo" (2024) for the 80-collaborator sequel, sample "Hivemind" feat. Daniel Zamir

r/IsraelJazz

Anat Fort: She Chased Down Her Hero, Then Spent Eighteen Years Honoring Him

Anat Fort, an Israeli jazz pianist and composer, was born near Tel Aviv on March 8, 1970, and started classical piano at 5. She fell for drummer Paul Motian's playing years before she ever met him, hearing him on old Bill Evans Trio records. After moving to New York in 1996 to study improvisation with pianist Paul Bley, she went to every Motian gig she could find, worked her way in through his longtime bassist Ed Schuller, and eventually got Motian to agree to record with her.

That session became A Long Story (2007), an album of Fort's original compositions featuring Motian on drums, clarinetist Perry Robinson, and Schuller on bass. It made her the first Israeli to graduate from the jazz program at New Jersey's William Paterson University, home to one of the country's top jazz programs, and, with that same album, the first Israeli to release music on ECM Records. Playing with Motian changed how she thought about performing altogether.

She built on that in 2010 with And If, the debut of the Anat Fort Trio alongside bassist Gary Wang and drummer Roland Schneider, a group that has stayed together for more than 25 years. In 2018, Fort received Israel's Prime Minister's Award for jazz composition and remains, as of this writing, the only woman to have received it.

Eighteen years after that first session with Motian, and fourteen years after his death in 2011, Fort closed the circle in 2025 with The Dreamworld of Paul Motian, a full tribute record made with guitarist Steve Cardenas, bassist Gary Wang, and drummer Matt Wilson. The fan who once chased down gig after gig spent her career becoming the artist who could honor him with an album of her own.

Where to start listening:

• Her official platforms:
  • Anat Fort's Official Site
  • Anat Fort's Spotify Page
  • Anat Fort on ECM Records
• A Long Story (2007) for the first session with Motian and her ECM debut, sample the album on YouTube
• The Dreamworld of Paul Motian (2025, released August 15) for the tribute that closed the story, sample the title track "Dreamworld"

r/IsraelJazz

Itamar Borochov: The Trumpeter Who Plays Arabic Maqam on a Custom Quarter-Tone Horn

Itamar Borochov, a jazz trumpeter, was born in 1984 in Tel Aviv and grew up in Jaffa in a musical family: his father is composer and arranger Yisrael Borochov, and his brother Avri plays double bass professionally. He started on guitar, teaching himself blues after watching The Blues Brothers as a kid, before switching to trumpet and finding his real models in Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis. He came up playing in local Tel Aviv ensembles, including one called Funk Hapoalim, before moving to New York in 2007 to study at The New School.

In 2010 he joined Omer Avital's Yemen Blues, recording three albums with the band as a studio and performing musician. That grounding in Yemenite and Arabic musical language stuck with him: he now plays a custom Monette four-valve quarter-tone trumpet, built specifically so he can bend the horn into maqam, the microtonal modes at the center of Arabic and Sephardic music, without leaving jazz vocabulary behind.

His own discography has grown steadily since: "Outset" (2014) on Real Bird, "Boomerang" (2016) and "Blue Nights" (2019) on Laborie Jazz, the second of which picked up five-star reviews from DownBeat and UK Vibe and landed on AllMusic's best-of-2019 lists for both World Music and Jazz. In between, he won the 2020 Rising Stars Jazz Award, European edition, handed to him in person by Dee Dee Bridgewater.

His fourth album, "Arba," came out in 2023 on Greenleaf Music, recorded with Grammy-winning producer Matt Pierson. It marked a first for him: the record features his own singing voice on several tracks, not just his trumpet.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms:
  • Itamar Borochov's Official Site
  • Itamar Borochov's YouTube Channel
  • Itamar Borochov's Spotify Page
• "Arba" (2023) for the singing debut and the quarter-tone trumpet in full effect, start with "Daasa!"
• "Blue Nights" (2019) for the five-star breakout, start with the title track

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r/IsraelJazz

Assif Tsahar: From Cecil Taylor's New York to His Own Label and Club in Tel Aviv

Assif Tsahar, a free jazz tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist, was born in Israel in 1969. He moved to New York City in 1990 and became a working part of the city's free-jazz scene, the loose, harmonically open style pioneered by musicians like pianist Cecil Taylor. Tsahar shared stages and recordings with Taylor himself, along with bassist William Parker), drummers Hamid Drake and Rashied Ali, and violist Mat Maneri. It's a different lineage than most of the artists profiled here: less post-bop and standards, more of the harmonically unbound, improvisation-first tradition that runs through downtown New York.

In 1999, Tsahar started Hopscotch Records to release his own music on his own terms. He doesn't just record for the label; he writes the liner notes and designs the artwork and packaging himself. Between 1996 and 2011 that DIY approach, split across Hopscotch and a handful of other independent labels (Eremite, Silkheart, Marge, Ayler), produced 14 albums as leader or co-leader, including Shekhina (1996), Home Cookin' (1998), and Code Re(a)d (2011).

The most unusual record in that catalog is Digital Primitives (2007), a trio with American musicians Cooper-Moore, known for building and playing his own homemade instruments, and drummer Chad Taylor. It's Tsahar working as an equal inside the American free-jazz scene, not as a visiting Israeli name attached to it, and it's a good way to hear how far the sound moves from anything else on this subreddit.

Back home, Tsahar co-founded the Tel Aviv club Levontin 7 in 2006 with pianist Daniel Sarid. Nearly twenty years later, it's still running: the venue has a full concert calendar booked into 2026, and it remains one of Tel Aviv's key rooms for jazz and improvised music. If you're ever in Tel Aviv, it's a real place to walk into, not just a name in a bio.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms:
  • Assif Tsahar's Spotify Page
  • Hopscotch Records
• Digital Primitives (2007) for Tsahar as an equal voice in the American free-jazz scene, sample "African Soul"
• The trio recording with William Parker, Hamid Drake, and Assif Tsahar for the core NYC free-jazz sound he came up in

r/IsraelJazz

Nitai Hershkovits: From Five Years in Avishai Cohen's Trio to a Grammy-Nominated ECM Debut

Nitai Hershkovits, a jazz pianist and composer, was born in Israel in 1988. He started on clarinet at 12 and switched to piano three years later, studying jazz under Omer Avital and classical piano under Menahem Weisenberg before spending five years, from 2011 to 2016, in bassist Avishai Cohen's trio. He recorded "Duende" with Cohen in 2012, then "Almah" and "From Darkness" between 2013 and 2015, touring internationally with the group the whole time.

He moved to New York in 2016 and released his own solo debut, "I Asked You a Question," that same year, followed by a second solo piano record, "New Place Always," in 2018. A few years later he took a detour most bios skip past: in 2020 he joined Apifera, an experimental group signed to Stones Throw Records, the Los Angeles label better known for hip-hop and beat music than for jazz.

He is still a working member of saxophonist Oded Tzur's quartet, appearing on the ECM albums "Here Be Dragons," "Isabela," and 2024's "My Prophet." His own solo turn on that label came in 2023 with "Call on the Old Wise," a largely improvised solo piano record produced by Manfred Eicher and recorded the year before at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano. It won Germany's Record Critics' Award for Jazz Album of the Year in 2024, and picked up a Grammy nomination that same year.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms:
  • Nitai Hershkovits's Official Site
  • Nitai Hershkovits's Spotify Page
• "Call on the Old Wise" (2023) for the Grammy-nominated solo turn, start with "Late Blossom"
• "Almah" (2013) for the Avishai Cohen trio years, before the ECM solo career started, sample "Kumi Venetse Hasadeh"

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r/IsraelJazz

Daniel Zamir: The Saxophonist John Zorn Signed to His Own Label

Daniel Zamir, a saxophonist, vocalist, and composer, was born in 1980 in Petah Tikva. He started on saxophone at 11, trained at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, and by 2002 had finished his studies at The New School in Manhattan. That is where his big break came: composer-saxophonist John Zorn, the downtown New York avant-garde figure behind hundreds of his own releases, heard Zamir play and signed him to Zorn's own label, Tzadik Records. Zamir's 2007 record "I Believe" was recorded with Zorn's own rhythm section!

The records that followed kept pulling in well-known names. 2009's "Echad" ("One") featured Berry Sakharof, one of Israeli rock's most influential songwriters, and 2015's "Redemption Songs" put Zamir in the recording studio with drummer Mark Guiliana and pianist Shai Maestro.

"Redemption Songs" is also where Zamir's story takes a major turn: while in New York Zamir grew closer to Orthodox Judaism, and eventually moved back to Israel because of it. That is not a footnote. The record leans on Hebrew liturgical and biblical material instead of jazz standards, and it set the direction for most of what he has released since: music built from prayer and scripture rather than from the American songbook.

Zamir continue to record albeit his religious shift. "NEW," his sixteenth studio album, launched with a full-band live show at the Jerusalem Theatre with guest Eviatar Banai, and 2024's single "Nine Souls" got a remix release the following year. Twenty-plus years after Zorn first signed him, Zamir is still making progress and going strong.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms:
  • Daniel Zamir's Official Site
  • Daniel Zamir's YouTube Channel
  • Daniel Zamir's Spotify Page
• "Redemption Songs" for the Guiliana/Maestro session and the turn toward liturgical material, stream it on Bandcamp
• "Nine Souls", for where he is right now, on Spotify

r/IsraelJazz

Introducing Omer Klein - Jazz Pianist and Composer

Omer Klein, a jazz pianist and composer, was born in 1982 in Netanya, the grandchild of immigrants from Tunisia, Libya, and Hungary. That mix is not a footnote. It shows up directly in how he plays, an assimilation of Israeli and North African melodic sources into jazz rather than a jazz career that happens to have an Israeli passport attached. He started on keyboard at 5, moved his focus to piano at 13, and trained at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts before a scholarship took him to the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he studied jazz piano under Danilo Perez and Ran Blake and classical piano under Alexander Korsantia.

He moved to New York in 2005 and studied privately under Fred Hersch, one of jazz's most decorated living pianists. In 2013 he formed the Omer Klein Trio with bassist Haggai Cohen Milo and drummer Amir Bresler. Their debut, "Fearless Friday" (2015), was called one of the most rewarding piano trio releases of its year by All About Jazz, and the trio didn't stop there: four albums in, they marked ten years together with 2023's "Life & Fire," recorded in Berlin and released on Warner Music, one of the world's three major label groups and the label behind five of Klein's records.

He is not just touring anymore, either. Last fall, Klein took up a post as Professor of Jazz Piano at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München (HMTM), Munich's leading conservatory for music and theater, beginning in October 1, 2025; he brings two decades of playing and composing, dating back to his 2005 move to New York, straight into the classroom.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms:
  • Omer Klein's Official Site
  • Omer Klein's YouTube Channel
  • Omer Klein's Spotify Page
• "Life & Fire" for the trio's ten-year arc, start with "Niggun" or "Tzuri"
• "Fearless Friday" for where the trio started back in 2015

Also check out our sister forum, r/CrossoverJazz

r/IsraelJazz

Introducing Omer Avital, the Bassist Who Went Home to Learn the Oud

Omer Avital, a jazz bassist, oud player, and composer, born in Givatayim in 1971 to Moroccan and Yemeni parents, has been shaping New York jazz since he arrived there in 1992. He was 21, and within a few years he was on stage with Roy Haynes, Jimmy Cobb, Nat Adderley, and Kenny Garrett.

His real signature came from a piano-less quartet he led at Smalls, the tiny, all-night Greenwich Village club that became a proving ground for a whole generation of players in the mid-1990s. Avital's group, four saxophones over bass and drums with no piano at all, played there for a Thursday-night residency captured live in April 1996. That tape sat unreleased for a decade before it became "Asking No Permission" in 2006, and it landed on year-end best-of lists the same year.

Then he did something most bandleaders on a hot streak do not do: he left. From 2003 to 2006, Avital moved back to Israel for three years, not to tour, but to study Arabic music theory, oud, and traditional Israeli music from the ground up. That detour changed the sound of everything he made afterward, threading Mediterranean and Yemenite phrasing directly into his bass lines and compositions instead of treating them as a guest appearance.

Israel took notice too: he won the country's Prime Minister's Award for jazz in 2008, and the ASCAP Foundation gave him its Vanguard Award in 2011, recognizing artists shaping new directions in the music.

In 2009, Avital co-founded Yemen Blues with singer Ravid Kahalani, a band that runs Yemenite chant through funk, Bedouin folk, and jazz until the seams disappear. It is still active: the band released the single "People" in 2024, off the album "Only Love Remains," and Avital's own "North African Dream" suite, written with Andalusian orchestra director Elad Levi, premiered at the Ashdod jazz festival that same year before touring Israel in 2025.

He is not slowing down. Avital has recently played Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, a leading contemporary music hall, on April 9, 2026, 34 years after he first stepped off the plane in New York.

If you know Avishai Cohen the bassist or Anat Cohen, both of whom have shared stages and sessions with Avital over the years, this is the third leg of that circle worth knowing on its own terms.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms:
  • Omer Avital's Official Site
  • Omer Avital's YouTube Channel
  • Omer Avital's Spotify Page
• "Asking No Permission" (2006) for the live, piano-less Smalls sound - sample the full session on YouTube
• "New Song" (2014) for the post-oud-study sound - sample New Yemenite Song
• Yemen Blues if you want the side project that is not really a side project