Biography
Tal Mashiach is a GRAMMY®-nominated multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer based in Brooklyn, New York, on double bass and seven-string guitar.
For more than a decade he has played with Anat Cohen’s Quartetinho and Tentet, including the GRAMMY®-nominated Triple Helix. He has toured with Mulatu Astatke and Omer Avital, and co-leads the GTO Trio.
His new album Who’s Around? (Anzic Records, 2026) brings together sixteen musicians, with Anat Cohen, Gadi Lehavi and Ofri Nehemya. It was a DownBeat Editors’ Pick, hailed as “masterfully executed world fusion.”
Born in 1993, Tal studied classical guitar from the age of ten and took up the double bass at seventeen. At eighteen he won first prize at the national guitar competition of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and he received annual scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation for classical and jazz studies.
In 2015 he moved to New York on a full scholarship to The New School. Since then he has performed and recorded with Anat Cohen, Avishai Cohen, Mulatu Astatke, Jeff Ballard, Nasheet Waits, Jason Lindner, Ravi Coltrane, Justin Brown, Shai Maestro and Omer Avital, at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, Blue Note New York, Lincoln Center, the Newport Jazz Festival, SFJAZZ, Umbria Jazz, the Montreal Jazz Festival and Pit Inn Tokyo.
As a bandleader he has built projects that reflect his wide musical world. GTO Trio, a contemporary jazz trio co-led with pianist Gadi Lehavi and drummer Ofri Nehemya, has toured Japan and Europe, played Blue Note New York and headlined the Jerusalem Jazz Festival. TM Street Band is a funky, borderless world-music party band that has toured Europe and plays regularly in New York clubs.
His debut album Tiyul (Anzic Records, 2022) is an intimate set of original compositions for classical guitar. Who’s Around? (Anzic Records, 2026) widens the circle to sixteen musicians from Israel, Greece, Georgia, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Chile, moving between jazz, Greek zeibekiko, Brazilian samba, flamenco and classical music. Released in June 2026 with an album-release show at Joe’s Pub, it was named a DownBeat Editors’ Pick and a FIP Album of the Week.
“I see music as a way of living, communicating and connecting between people at the deepest level. The power music has to empower and liberate people amazes me every time. It inspires me to keep creating and spreading this form of love.”