[Apifera, official press photo via Stones Throw Records. (Photo: courtesy of the band; no free-licensed image was found, used here as an honestly disclosed stand-in, not Creative Commons.)]

Apifera's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Apifera is a genuine full-circle moment for this sub: every one of its four members already has their own profile here. Keyboardist Nitai Hershkovits, drummer Amir Bresler, and bassist Yonatan Albalak (also the guitarist in Avishai Cohen's Big Vicious) had already been playing together for years on the Israeli jazz scene when producer Rejoicer, Yuval Havkin, started blending his electronic sound with them around 2014, releasing the results under his Time Grove imprint. About three years and a "nice collection of records" later, the four decided to formalize it as a real supergroup, recorded an album, and played a single show. The quartet never dissolved back into separate sessions; it just kept going.

The band takes its name from a variety of bee-attracting orchid, matching an intent to build organic-sounding structures and harmonies rather than tight compositions. Their influences range from Israeli folk music to Impressionist composers Ravel and Satie, traditional music from Sudan and Ghana, and Sun Ra's transcendental jazz. Their debut, Overstand, came out on Stones Throw Records (2020/2021, sources differ on the exact year), written and recorded mostly live over three days with minimal overdubbing. Two more releases followed on the label in 2024, Keep the Outside Open and Theodor Marmalade.

Where to start listening:

• Their official platforms: Apifera on Stones Throw
• Overstand (2020, Stones Throw), their debut, on Spotify
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Apifera's jazzprofiles.com profile

[Rejoicer, official press photo. (Photo: Eric Coleman, courtesy of Stones Throw Records; no free-licensed image was found, used here as an honestly disclosed stand-in, not Creative Commons.)]

Rejoicer's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Rejoicer is the recording name of Yuval "Yuvi" Havkin, a Tel Aviv producer, keyboardist, and the founder of Raw Tapes Records, the label behind a large share of this sub's own coverage: Amir Bresler and Sefi Zisling have both released on it. He cites a genuinely wide range of reference points, from Sun Ra and Aphex Twin to Steve Reich, Alchemist, Erik Satie, and Wu-Tang Clan.

His own catalog runs deep on Raw Tapes, starting with Street Hype (2009) and running through Anti Phlegmatic and I & I Rejoice (both 2011), Abstract Flight (2012, Botanika), Recollection (2013), and Help With Your Heart (2023). In 2018 he signed to the LA label Stones Throw Records for Energy Dreams, blending neo-fusion jazz, experimental beats, world music, and classical orchestration, followed by the Heavy Smoke EP (2019) and Spiritual Sleaze (2020).

He's also a first-call session presence across the Israeli scene, appearing on Amir Bresler's House of Arches, Oded Tzur's While You Are There (2023), and Daniel Dor and Nitai Hershkovits's Cinema Royal (2025), both already covered elsewhere on this sub.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Rejoicer on Stones Throw, Rejoicer's Spotify Page
• California Space Craft (2026, Circus Company), his newest release, on Spotify
• Energy Dreams (2018, Stones Throw), his label debut
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Rejoicer's jazzprofiles.com profile

[Cover art for GTO Trio's From the Road (2018), a genuine group photo. (Photo: courtesy of the artist; no free-licensed image was found, used here as an honestly disclosed stand-in, not Creative Commons.)]

GTO Trio's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

GTO Trio takes its name from the initials of its three members: pianist Gadi Lehavi, bassist Tal Mashiach, and drummer Ofri Nehemya. Nehemya co-founded the group with Lehavi and Mashiach in 2018, out of a friendship that goes back further still.

The trio has spent years as an in-demand backing unit, accompanying Chick Corea, Ravi Coltrane, and Ethio-jazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke, along with major names in Israeli jazz, and playing rooms including Birdland and the Village Vanguard in New York. Under their own name, they've toured internationally, including a return performance in Japan documented by the Jerusalem Post.

Their debut under GTO Trio's own name for Anzic Records, Within, arrived in 2025, more than a decade into the friendship behind the group. Jazz Weekly's review called it a showcase of the trio's intuitive connection, forged over years of playing together rather than assembled for the occasion.

Where to start listening:

• Their official platforms: GTO Trio on Apple Music
• Within (2025, Anzic Records), their debut under the GTO Trio name
• Gadi Lehavi's own jazzprofiles.com profile for more on his individual career
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: GTO Trio's jazzprofiles.com profile

[Gadi Stern with Shalosh, Frankfurt, 2017. (Photo: Frank C. Müller, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]

Gadi Stern's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

If you know Gadi Stern, it's as the pianist behind Shalosh, the trio that's reworked Aqua's "Barbie Girl" into something genuinely serious and played sold-out shows at Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie. That story tends to start with the band's 2014 formation, but Stern's own path runs longer.

As teenagers in Jerusalem, Stern and drummer Matan Assayag, played together in a band called Enoma Elish, which released the album Taking Bobby for a Walk in 2007. When that group ended, Stern moved to New York, where he lived for nearly a decade, absorbing the city's jazz scene directly rather than through records. That stretch is where the genre-crossing instinct Shalosh is known for actually took shape, long before the trio existed to put it on record.

He and Assayag reconnected in Tel Aviv in early 2014 to form Shalosh, with bassist David Michaeli joining in 2016 to complete the current lineup. The trio's catalog now runs six albums, the last three on the German label ACT, including Studio Konzert (2018, Neuklang), Onwards and Upwards (2019), Broken Balance (2020), and Tales of Utopia (2023). Stern's also turned up outside Shalosh, including a 2024 credit on KENS's Atarayo, another Israeli group.

Where to start listening:

• Shalosh's platforms: Shalosh's Official Site, Shalosh's Spotify Page
• The Bell Garden (2014, Shalosh), the trio's debut, on Bandcamp
• Tales of Utopia (2023, ACT Music), on Spotify
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Gadi Stern's jazzprofiles.com profile

[Haggai Cohen Milo with the Yaron Herman Quartet, INNtöne Jazzfestival, 2025. (Photo: Schorle / Bernd Scholkemper, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]

Haggai Cohen Milo's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Haggai Cohen Milo moved to the United States in his 20s and earned his B.M. from the New England Conservatory in Boston, studying with Danilo Perez, Bob Moses, Jamey Haddad, and Jerry Bergonzi. In 2006 he won the grand prize at the Fish Middleton Jazz Soloist Competition in Washington and a DownBeat Magazine Music Award.

He's been the bassist in Omer Klein's trio since 2010, and the two have worked together since even earlier: their duo album, Duet, came out on Fresh Sound New Talent in 2007. The Klein trio won an ECHO award, Germany's major music prize, in 2018. In 2023 the pair expanded into a trio with drummer Amir Bresler, also already covered here, for Life & Fire on Warner.

His own leader debut, Penguin (2014), came out on Tzadik, John Zorn's label known for experimental and avant-garde work rather than straight-ahead jazz. Beyond Klein's trio, he's recorded as leader, sideman, and co-leader on over thirty albums for labels including Warner, Fresh Sound New Talent, and Tzadik, and has spent more than a decade collaborating with dancers and choreographers on interdisciplinary sound-and-movement work, alongside scoring two films: Fernando Sariñana's Intimate Enemies (2008) and Charlie Gore's SPAM (2009).

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Haggai Cohen Milo on AllMusic
• Life & Fire (2023, Warner, with Omer Klein and Amir Bresler), on Spotify (track: "The Ravens")
• Penguin (2014, Tzadik), his leader debut
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Haggai Cohen Milo's jazzprofiles.com profile

[Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami (1951-2021), performing live — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Murakami could be located on Wikimedia Commons. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in.]

Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

The number attached to Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami's career is the kind that stops making intuitive sense once you actually sit with it: more than 14,000 recordings. Not albums — recordings, individual session credits, across roughly five decades of work as one of Japan's most in-demand drummers. Discogs alone lists 593 credits for him, and that's an incomplete catalog by any measure of Japanese session work from this era. He is, by any reasonable definition, one of the most-recorded drummers who ever lived.

He started, oddly, on French horn. He switched to classical percussion as a teenager and settled on the drum kit from there, joining the folk group Akai Tori ("Red Bird") in 1972 and moving into session work the following year. What followed was a career that ran on two tracks simultaneously: decades of J-pop session work that made him a fixture on records by artists most Western listeners have never heard of, and a real, substantial jazz career running in parallel. Through the 1970s and '80s he was the drummer of choice for Sadao Watanabe, Yosuke Yamashita, Kazumi Watanabe, Masayoshi Takanaka, Jun Fukamachi, Akira Sakata, and Takashi Kako — not one-off credits, but the kind of recurring sideman relationships that build a jazz career.

He led his own projects too. Introducing "Ponta" Murakami (1976) was his debut as a leader, and he kept releasing solo work steadily for the next four decades, up through Drum Symphony in 2019. His most fully realized band was Ponta Box, formed with bassist Masahiro Sayama and keyboardist Masatoshi Mizuno, which recorded three albums for JVC Victor and — a genuine milestone for a Japanese fusion trio — played the 1995 Montreux Jazz Festival.

He died on March 9, 2021, in Tokyo, at 70, from thalamic bleeding. A year later, a tribute concert titled "One Last Live" was held at the Tokyo International Forum, drawing an array of prominent Japanese artists who'd played on records with him — which, statistically, was most of them.

Where to start listening:

• Padang Rumput (1982), a well-regarded leader date: listen on Spotify
• Ponta Box Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival (1995): listen on Spotify
• Rhythm Monster (2012): listen on Spotify
• Introducing "Ponta" Murakami (1976), his debut as a leader
• Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

[Cover art for Hōzan Yamamoto / Shungo Sawada Quintet's Shakuhachi and Bossa Nova (1969, Union Records) — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Yamamoto could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is otherwise licensed.]

Hōzan Yamamoto's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

In 2002, the Japanese government named Hōzan Yamamoto a Living National Treasure — one of the highest honors the country gives a living artist, reserved for people who possess and actively transmit an important intangible cultural property. In his case, that property was the shakuhachi, the bamboo flute he'd been playing since he was nine years old, trained first by his father and then by master Chozan Nakanishi. It's the kind of designation that could easily freeze a musician into "keeper of tradition" for the rest of his career. It didn't. The same decades that built his reputation as a classical master also produced one of the more genuinely adventurous jazz-crossover discographies to come out of Japan.

It started early and stayed serious. In 1964, Yamamoto recorded Music for Zen Meditation (and Other Joys) with American clarinetist Tony Scott and koto player Shinichi Yuize — a record now recognized as a landmark, years ahead of the new-age and world-music movements it anticipated. By the late 1960s he was recording bossa nova sessions (Shakuhachi and Bossa Nova, 1969, with the Shungo Sawada Quintet) and jazz big-band dates with Nobuo Hara's Sharps and Flats. In 1966 he formed the "Shakuhachi Sanbon Kai" trio with Reibo Aoki and Katsuya Yokoyama, an ensemble built entirely around three shakuhachi players finding a modern voice for an instrument most people associate strictly with tradition.

The free-jazz and world-music side of his catalog is where the range gets genuinely surprising. World Music Meeting (1985) put him in a room with Charlie Mariano, Karl Berger, Peter Kowald, and tabla player Trilok Gurtu — a lineup that reads like a European free-improv festival bill, with a Living National Treasure of Japan sitting inside it. He recorded with bassist David Friesen in 1980, cut Breath (1984) with Masahiko Togashi and Yosuke Yamashita, Silky Adventure (1986) with Masahiko Satoh, and Mugenkai — Ginkai II (1996) with bassist Gary Peacock. He also recorded with violinist Isaac Stern on The Vintage Melodies of Japan (1978) — proof that his collaborators ranged from the free-jazz avant-garde to the classical-music establishment without either side treating him as a novelty guest.

He died in Tokyo on February 10, 2014, at 76. What he leaves behind is a body of work that never had to choose between the two things people usually assume are opposites: being the government-recognized guardian of a centuries-old tradition, and being a working improviser willing to sit in with whoever showed up interested in what the instrument could still do.

Where to start listening:

• Music for Zen Meditation (and Other Joys) (1964, with Tony Scott) — the landmark: listen on Spotify
• Mugenkai — Ginkai II (1996, with Gary Peacock): listen on Spotify
• World Music Meeting (1985), for the Peter Kowald/Karl Berger/Trilok Gurtu lineup
• Shakuhachi and Bossa Nova (1969), the record whose cover stands in for a photo on this post
• Hōzan Yamamoto's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

[Barak Mori, 2025. (Photo: Yossi Zwecker, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]

Barak Mori's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Barak Mori was born in Tel Aviv in 1975 and started on organ at 7. By 13 he was playing jazz on guitar and electric bass, and at 15 he began classical training on acoustic bass alongside his jazz studies. He was still a student at the Thelma Yellin School of the Arts when he first played the Red Sea Jazz Festival and toured internationally with the Young Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1996 he joined the band led by saxophonist Walter Blanding Jr., and in 1998 a New School University scholarship took him to New York.

He's been one of the city's most in-demand bassists since, described as the rhythmic anchor for two names already well established on this sub: trumpeter Avishai Cohen and saxophonist Eli Degibri. He's on Degibri's Israeli Song (2010), Twelve (2013), and Cliff Hangin' (2015), and on Cohen's Cross My Palm with Silver (2017) and Ashes to Gold (2024), the latter alongside pianist Yonathan Avishai, also already covered here. He's shown up throughout this queue too, on Jonathan Voltzok's More to Come, Amir Bresler's Tide & Time, and Tom Oren's Dorly's Song, plus international credits alongside Madeleine Peyroux, Anat Cohen, and pianist Eric Reed.

His own leader credit is comparatively rare: in 2022 he was billed alongside Avishai Cohen, Yonathan Avishai, and drummer Ziv Ravitz on Naked Truth, the same working quartet behind Cohen's ECM albums. Since returning to Israel in 2016, Mori has taken on a teaching role at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, mentoring the next generation the way he once learned from Blanding.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Barak Mori's Official Site, Barak Mori's Spotify Page
• Israeli Song (2010, Anat Cohen's Anzic Records, with Eli Degibri)
• Ashes to Gold (2024, with Avishai Cohen and Yonathan Avishai)
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Barak Mori's jazzprofiles.com profile

[Cover art for Akiko Yano's self-titled album Akiko Yano (1982) — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Yano could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is a photo of her.]

Akiko Yano's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

Most write-ups on Akiko Yano lead with Yellow Magic Orchestra, and it's not wrong — she toured the world with them in the early 1980s as support keyboardist, at the side of her then-husband Ryuichi Sakamoto. But the training underneath all of it was jazz piano, studied in high school in the years before her career started, and the part of her story that gets skipped is what she's actually been doing with that training for the last two decades: leading a working jazz trio out of New York, playing Blue Note dates as a headliner in her own right.

Born Akiko Suzuki in Tokyo on February 13, 1955, she made her recording debut in 1976 with Japanese Girl — cut in Los Angeles, of all places, with Lowell George and Little Feat backing her on a chunk of the record. It's a striking credential for a 21-year-old making her first album, and it set the tone for a career that never stayed inside one lane: pop stardom in Japan through the late '70s and '80s, the YMO years, then a relationship and musical partnership with Sakamoto that lasted through that decade. Little Feat supported her on the West Coast; she recorded with the UK band Japan, led by David Sylvian, and later worked across genres with Thomas Dolby, guitarist Pat Metheny, The Chieftains, Brazilian guitarist Toninho Horta, and Marc Ribot.

She and Sakamoto separated in the 1990s, and she moved to New York — the base she's worked from ever since. That's when the jazz side of her training stopped being a footnote. She began performing regularly with New York session and jazz players, and since 2003 has led the Akiko Yano Trio at Blue Note Tokyo with bassist Anthony Jackson and drummer Cliff Almond, a rhythm section built from two of the most respected working musicians in New York. She's also toured under the same trio banner with bassist Will Lee and drummer Chris Parker, and plays regular dates at Joe's Pub at the New York Public Theater.

She's kept releasing records at a steady clip well into her seventies — her Discogs catalog runs through a 2026 release, To the Living Creatures. Whatever else Akiko Yano is — pop innovator, YMO's touring keyboardist, Sakamoto's former partner — she's also, quietly and for a very long time now, a jazz musician who never stopped being one.

Where to start listening:

• Japanese Girl (1976), her debut, cut in LA with Lowell George and Little Feat: listen on Spotify
• Welcome to Jupiter (2015), a later-career record from her New York period: listen on Spotify
• Akiko Yano Trio at Blue Note Tokyo — her ongoing jazz-trio work with Anthony Jackson and Cliff Almond
• Akiko Yano's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

[Oded Tzur with his quartet, BIM Huis, Amsterdam, 2018. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.)]

Oded Tzur's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Oded Tzur was born January 5, 1984 in Kiryat Ono, trained at the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts and the Jerusalem Academy, and in 2007 enrolled at the Rotterdam Conservatory, where he became the only saxophonist to study under Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, a master of the Indian bansuri flute. Out of that training came what Tzur calls The Middle Path, a saxophone technique that extends the instrument's microtonal range to bring Indian classical music's pitch vocabulary into jazz.

His first two leader albums, Like a Great River (2015) and Translator's Note (2017), both on Enja's Yellowbird imprint, featured a quartet with Shai Maestro on piano, Petros Klampanis on bass, and Ziv Ravitz on drums, both pianist and drummer already covered elsewhere on this site. His ECM run began with Here Be Dragons (2020), followed by The Lion Turtle and Isabela (both 2022), and My Prophet (2024), the quartet now built around Nitai Hershkovits on piano, Klampanis still on bass, and Johnathan Blake on drums. A newer album, Make a Sound, followed in 2026.

The Guardian has described his playing as a "unique tenor sax whisper," and he's been called a torchbearer of spiritual jazz for reimagining what the saxophone can do at the level of pitch itself, not just phrasing.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Oded Tzur's Spotify Page, ECM Records artist page
• My Prophet (2024, ECM), on Spotify
• Like a Great River (2015, Enja/Yellowbird), his debut, with Shai Maestro and Ziv Ravitz
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Oded Tzur's jazzprofiles.com profile

[Ravid Kahalani, 2014. (Photo: Bill Gordon, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]

Ravid Kahalani's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Ravid Kahalani is not a jazz musician in the conventional sense, though the line is blurrier than it looks. Born in 1978 to a Yemenite Jewish family in Elon Moreh, he grew up in a Yemenite synagogue, dropped out of school at 15, and spent five years finding his own direction before landing on music.

In 2010 he founded Yemen Blues with bassist Omer Avital, already profiled on this sub, assembling a supergroup of musicians from New York, Israel, and Uruguay. The band fuses Yemenite, North African, and Middle Eastern music with American funk and R&B, built around Kahalani's vocals in Hebrew, Arabic, French, and English, and his playing on the gimbri, a North African guitar-like instrument. He also turned up as a featured performer on Amir Bresler's House of Arches (2022), another Israeli artist covered on this sub.

Yemen Blues released their self-titled debut in 2011, followed by a live album in 2013, Insaniya in 2015, Shabazi: A Tribute to the Poet in 2023, and Only Love Remains in 2024. It's a catalog that keeps circling back to jazz musicians even though the sound itself sits closer to world music and funk.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Yemen Blues's Official Site, Ravid Kahalani's Spotify Page, Yemen Blues's Spotify Page
• Yemen Blues https://youtu.be/rbJgTml8UaE (2011), the band's self-titled debut, co-founded with Omer Avital
• Shabazi: A Tribute to the Poet (2023), on Spotify
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Ravid Kahalani's jazzprofiles.com profile

[Dizzy Gillespie in New York, around May 1947 — three years before the Prestige sextet date whose tenor chair is still argued over. No freely licensed photograph of Jimmy Oliver is known to exist. (Photo: William P. Gottlieb, Public Domain — Gottlieb donated the rights to his 1938–1948 jazz photographs to the public — via the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons)]

On September 16, 1950, Dizzy Gillespie took a sextet into a New York studio for Prestige — a label not yet two years old, the session logged at matrix numbers 108 through 111 — with Jimmy Heath on alto, Milt Jackson doubling vibes and piano, Percy Heath on bass and Joe Harris on drums. The tenor chair went to Jimmy Oliver, a Philadelphian who spent his career declining the road; by his own account, his family and a clear-eyed fear of the drugs killing his contemporaries kept him home. The standard account has him deputising for an ill John Coltrane, then in Gillespie’s band and mid-way through his own switch from alto to tenor. Four titles were cut. “She’s Gone Again” carries Oliver’s solo — one of the very few recordings he is known to have made, and one some discographers still refuse to credit him with, filing “Jimmy Oliver” as a pseudonym for Seldon Powell.

Sources: Dizzy Gillespie Discography — Jazz Discography Project (September 16, 1950 sextet session: Jimmy Oliver on tenor, full personnel, four titles) , Prestige Records Discography: 1950 — Jazz Discography Project (matrix 108–111; “She’s Gone Again” issued on Prestige 736) , Jimmy Oliver (musician) — Wikipedia (Philadelphia career; sitting in for an ill Coltrane on September 16, 1950; the solo on “She’s Gone Again”) , “Jimmy Oliver has passed away” — organissimo forums (Philadelphia Inquirer obituary; discographer Michael Fitzgerald on sources listing “Jimmy Oliver” as a pseudonym for Seldon Powell) , Jimmy Oliver — Philadelphia Jazz (phillyjazz.us) (his bands, the Zanzibar Café, and his decision to stay in Philadelphia) , John Coltrane Discography, session index — Jazz Discography Project (no Coltrane session on September 16, 1950; alto with the Gillespie sextet in mid-1950, tenor by the January 1951 Birdland broadcasts)

Cover art for the Eden Bareket Trio's Night, used as an editorial stand-in for a portrait. (No free-licensed photo of Bareket was found; not Creative Commons, used here honestly disclosed as a fallback.)

Eden Bareket's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Eden Bareket was born in Argentina and raised in Israel, starting on alto sax at 9 before deciding at 15 to specialize in baritone, a less common lead voice in jazz. He trained at the Israeli Conservatory for Music in Tel Aviv on scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Fund and the Ran Baron Memorial, studying with Erez Bar-Noy, Yuval Cohen, Amit Golan, and Avishai Cohen. In 2010, he was selected to perform an original composition at Carnegie Hall as part of a Weill Institute Young Artists Workshop directed by Dave Douglas.

He moved to New York in 2013 and quickly became an in-demand sideman, with a range that runs from the traditionalist Eyal Vilner Big Band to drummer Ari Hoenig's adventurous nonet to the Anbessa Orchestra's Ethiopian jazz grooves. He's performed at Carnegie Hall and Jazz at Lincoln Center, and recorded with Ari Hoenig and saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown.

As a leader, he's released three albums on Fresh Sound New Talent, all with his own trio: Choice (2016), Night (2019), and Day Dream (2021).

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Eden Bareket's Spotify Page
• Day Dream (2021, Fresh Sound New Talent), his most recent trio album
• Choice (2016, Fresh Sound New Talent), his trio debut
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Eden Bareket's jazzprofiles.com profile

Daniel Dor, official portrait via Newvelle Records. (Photo: courtesy of the artist; no free-licensed image was found, used here as an honestly disclosed stand-in, not Creative Commons.)

Daniel Dor's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Daniel Dor was born in 1986 in Tel Aviv to a family of musicians and artists, and built his first drum set out of pots and pans at 10. He trained at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts and the Rimon School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in Israel, then graduated with honors from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York.

He's since performed at festivals and halls worldwide alongside Avishai Cohen, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Noa, Daniel Zamir, Billy Harper, Matisyahu, and others. On record, he's a recurring drummer for pianist Nitai Hershkovits, appearing on Hershkovits's 2016 album I Asked You a Question and then co-billed on two more recent projects, The Garden Suite (2024) and Found & Found (2026). He's also recorded with Yotam Silberstein and Or Bareket, plus Spanish saxophonist Marta Sánchez's quintet across two albums.

In 2020 he relocated to the American Southwest, a move that produced Four Petals (2023, Raw Tapes Records), a solo piano album built around a rhythmic method of his own devising that he calls The Flower. He now teaches that method as a lecturer at the Jerusalem Academy of Dance and Music alongside masterclasses elsewhere.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Daniel Dor's Spotify Page
• Four Petals (2023, Raw Tapes), his solo piano album
• The Garden Suite (2024, with Nitai Hershkovits)
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Daniel Dor's jazzprofiles.com profile

Cover art for the Takeru Muraoka Quartet's Takeru (1970), Philips — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Muraoka could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is a photo of him.

Takeru Muraoka's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

On November 1, 1965, the Hideo Shiraki Quintet played the Berlin Jazz Festival with three koto players added to the lineup — a deliberate collision of a straight-ahead jazz group with a traditional Japanese instrument nobody in that room expected to hear on a jazz stage. The recording came out as Sakura Sakura, and the quintet's saxophonist and flutist was Takeru Muraoka, playing alongside a young Terumasa Hino on trumpet. It's the kind of credit that would anchor most careers by itself. For Muraoka, born January 12, 1941, it was one stop on a résumé that runs through nearly every corner of Japanese jazz's most interesting decade.

He spent the rest of the 1960s and into the '70s as one of the connective threads of the Tokyo scene rather than a leader chasing his own catalog. He was in the Hino=Kikuchi Quintet, played on Terumasa Hino's Hi-Nology (1969) and Into the Heaven (1970), and turns up on the 1968 All Japan Jazz Festival recording alongside Masabumi Kikuchi, Hiroshi Suzuki, and Motohiko Hino — one document that captures most of a generation in the same room. In 1971, Hiromasa Suzuki arranged his single "It Don't Come Easy," and the same year found him on the Jam in Yokota session with Hidehiko Matsumoto, Ryo Kawasaki, and Motohiko Hino.

Then there's the turn most write-ups on him skip entirely: from 1969 to 1972, Muraoka was a recurring presence in Akira Ishikawa's Count Buffalos, a jazz-funk and Afro-rock outfit that had almost nothing to do with the straight post-bop circles he ran in with the Hino crowd. Electrum, Bakishinba: Memories of Africa, African Rock — records built for a dancefloor, not a listening room, and Muraoka's horn is on several of them. It's a genuine stylistic range that a bio built only from his sparse leader catalog would miss entirely.

That leader catalog is real, if thin: the Takeru Muraoka Quartet's Takeru (1970) on Philips, Rock Joy in Sax (1971), and — the one the reissue market actually cares about — Soft Landing (1978), credited to Takeru Muraoka & His New Group. Soft Landing has shown up repeatedly on Wax Poetics Japan's crate-digging compilations since 2011 and again on 2022's Japanese Jazz Spectacle and 2025's Crossover City, the kind of steady rediscovery that suggests it's aged into a small classic among people looking past the obvious names. He shifted register again in 1985 with Stardust: Takeru Muraoka Plays Standards, a straight-ahead ballads record that reads like a deliberate landing point after two decades of moving between scenes.

Where to start listening:

• Sakura Sakura (1965, Hideo Shiraki Quintet + 3 Koto Girls) for the Berlin Jazz Festival session: listen on Spotify
• Soft Landing (1978) for the record the reissue crowd keeps coming back to: listen on Spotify
• Takeru (1970, Takeru Muraoka Quartet), his debut as a leader: listen on Spotify
• Rock Joy in Sax (1971) for the jazz-funk side: listen on Spotify
• Takeru Muraoka's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

Guy Kark, official portrait. (Photo: courtesy of the artist; no free-licensed image was found, used here as an honestly disclosed stand-in, not Creative Commons.)

Guy Kark's jazzprofiles.com profile

r/IsraelJazz

Guy Kark is not a jazz musician. He's a composer and the founder and artistic director of cross-cultural world music ensembles that bring Jewish and Arab musical traditions together, a graduate of the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem's classical Arab music department under Taisir Elias and Dahlia Cohen, and a former visiting artist at Paris's Cité des Arts.

His main project, Guy Kark & Between Times, is one of Israel's leading world music groups, with Kark writing most of the material and playing guitar, oud, and percussion. Their 1999 album Canaan, thirteen tracks reflecting what press coverage called the texture and color of the biblical region, drew praise from Ma'ariv, Haaretz, and the Jerusalem Post.

The jazz connection is a real, dated credit: bassist Ehud Ettun, already profiled on this sub, played double bass on Between Times' 2010 self-released album 4 Quarters. It's a small footprint but a genuine one, a working jazz bassist inside a world-music ensemble's rhythm section rather than a loose stylistic comparison.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Guy Kark's Official Site
• Canaan (1999, Sufa), his best-known album with Between Times, on Amazon
• Full bio, discography, and sourcing: Guy Kark's jazzprofiles.com profile

[The original Regent MG 6056 cover for "Jazz Eyes," the album made at this session — a stock portrait of an anonymous model, with Jenkins, Byrd, Fuller, Flanagan, Watkins and Taylor listed in small type at lower left. Used as a stand-in because no free-licensed photograph of John Jenkins could be found on Wikimedia Commons or elsewhere. Album cover art, copyright the rights holder (Regent/Savoy), all rights reserved — this is not a Creative Commons or public-domain image.]

On September 10, 1957, John Jenkins brought a sextet into Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack — Donald Byrd, Curtis Fuller, Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins, Art Taylor — and cut five titles for Regent, Savoy's budget subsidiary, issued as Jazz Eyes. He was 26, and it was the last session he ever led. The Chicago altoist had reached New York that spring and recorded almost without pause from May to November: four albums under his own name or shared, then two sideman dates with Wilbur Ware. Then nothing, for thirty-three years. Jenkins worked as a messenger, dabbled in jewelry, and sold brass objects at street fairs; after 1983 he practiced again and played on street corners. His one return to a studio was a chair in Clifford Jordan's big band in December 1990, with no solos. Savoy later reissued the record as Star Eyes under Byrd's more saleable name.

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Sources: John Jenkins (jazz musician) — Wikipedia , Jazz Eyes — Wikipedia , John Jenkins Discography — Jazz Discography Project (jazzdisco.org) , "The Altosax of John Jenkins" — solography by Jan Evensmo, Jazz Archeology (PDF) , John Jenkins: Jazz Eyes (1957) Regent — LondonJazzCollector

[Miles Davis, photographed by Tom Palumbo around 1956, two years before his sextet played Columbia's party at the Plaza. (Photo: Tom Palumbo, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]

On September 9, 1958, Columbia Records threw itself a party in the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel to toast the health of its jazz division, and booked the entertainment off its own roster: Duke Ellington's orchestra, the Buck Clayton Quartet, Jimmy Rushing, Billie Holiday — ten months from her death — and the Miles Davis Sextet, with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, six months before they made Kind of Blue. A remote crew taped all of it anyway; producer Irving Townsend's liner note later explained they did so “in case it never happened again.” Most of the musicians had no idea. Columbia then sat on the tapes for fifteen years, issued them in 1973 as Jazz at the Plaza Vols. I and II, and, by Bill Evans's account, paid the surviving players at 1958 scale. Townsend's notes put the party in the wrong room and credited the wrong drummer.

Sources: Jazz at the Plaza Vol. I — Wikipedia , Jazz at the Plaza Vol. II — Wikipedia (Ellington, Rushing, Holiday) , “A Great Night in Manhattan: Jazz at the Plaza 1958” — JazzBuffalo , The Miles Davis Sextet — Jazz At The Plaza Vol. 1, Discogs (1973 Columbia release)