Assaf Talmudi is an Israeli composer, pianist, accordionist, record producer and musicologist who has spent close to thirty years in the middle of the Tel Aviv music scene without ever settling into one job description. This profile is honest about the shape of that career: the largest part of it is record production for Israeli rock and pop singers, music for the Cameri and Yiddishpiel theatres, and scores for film and television, and none of that is jazz. The jazz thread is real but narrower, and it runs through three places. He was trained in the jazz stream at Thelma Yellin, he plays accordion in the klezmer band Oy Division and keyboards on avant-garde jazz records that sit next to it, and since 2025 he has led his own piano trio, whose music he calls freak-jazz. The trio played the Jerusalem Jazz Festival on June 11, 2026.

He was born on June 18, 1976. No source gives his birthplace with any authority: Discogs says Givatayim, IMDb says Petah Tikva, and neither the Hebrew Wikipedia article nor his Wikidata record names a city at all, so this profile does not pick one. He studied in the jazz stream at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Givatayim, then served his army term at Galei Tzahal, the IDF radio station, as a music editor. He left for the Netherlands afterwards and took a degree in composition and electronic music at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. Back in Israel he began doctoral work in musicology at Bar-Ilan University, on music evolution, artificial intelligence and complex systems, but never finished the dissertation. He lectured at Shenkar College and now teaches in the music department at the University of Haifa and in the music department at the Musrara school of art in Jerusalem. His younger brother is the saxophonist and clarinetist Eyal Talmudi, and the two have shared bandstands and session credits for most of their careers.

His recording career starts in a rock band. He plays piano, Hammond organ, Juno 60, Farfisa, Korg and samples on Kerach Tesha's self-titled 1999 album for NMC, and wrote its string, woodwind and backing-vocal arrangements, with Eyal Talmudi on woodwinds. A year later he produced and arranged Shlomi Shaban's debut for the same label, and that record set the pattern for the next two decades. He has since produced albums for Berry Sakharof, Rona Kenan, Efrat Ben Zur, Noam Rothem, Shuli Rand, Shai Tsabari and Yuval Mendelson, and he still plays live in the bands of Sakharof, Itamar Rothschild, Tsabari, Kenan, Rand, Amir Lev and Mendelson. Nana Disc, the Tel Aviv label, carries most of it.

Oy Division is where the improvising side of him is best documented. The band, whose name is a Yiddish joke at Joy Division's expense, was assembled in Tel Aviv to play pre-war Eastern European Jewish music without modernising it, singing in Yiddish and Russian, and Talmudi is its accordionist alongside Eyal Talmudi on clarinet, Noam Inbar on vocals, Avichai Tuchman on bass and Gershon Leizersohn on violin. Their self-titled album came out on Levontin 7 in May 2008. That same year they backed Daniel Kahn and the Russian singer Psoy Korolenko on The Unternationale: The First Unternational for the Swiss label Auris Media, with Talmudi on accordion and in the producer's chair, and the same three parties made Dicunt for Auris Media in 2013, where he produced, arranged, and played accordion, grand piano, keyboards, percussion and backing vocals. The Yiddish repertoire has taken him abroad: he taught at KlezKanada in 2011, and in Warsaw in 2016 he recorded with the Polish singer Maniucha Bikont for the compilation Źwierściadło / Slavic Mirror, released on In Crudo and Requiem Records in September 2017. He came back to Bikont as producer, accordionist and synthesist on her album Porządki, issued by Requiem Records on October 30, 2024, a record its own label files under tradition, electronica and jazz.

Two other credits pull him further toward the improvised and experimental end. In 2015 he produced, arranged, recorded and played keyboards on Shacharit, Shai Tsabari's album for Nana Disc, and led the band on it, the Middle East Groove Selection, with Eyal Talmudi on clarinet and saxophone, Itamar Ziegler on guitars, Gershon Waiserfirer on organ and trombone and Nir Mansour on drums. In 2020 he played keyboards and electric organ on Shit to Gold, the Nana Disc and Alchemia LP by Mãlox, his brother's band with drummer Roy Chen, a record Discogs files simultaneously under klezmer, punk, polka and avant-garde jazz, with Sefi Zisling on trumpet and Noam Inbar singing. Earlier, in 2012, he played accordion on Live In Israel, the Edition Modern document of the Romanian spectralists Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram performing in Israel.

The screen work brought the prizes. In August 2018 he won the Van Leer Prize for music at the Jerusalem Film Festival for his score to Geula, the feature by Yossi Madmoni and Boaz Yehonatan Yaakov, with the jury citing a score that works as another character in the film. He scored the Kan series Matir Agunot in 2019 and released its theme as a single in April 2020 with Sefi Zisling and the actress Avigail Kovari, followed by One on One (2019) and the documentaries Heroines, Raymond El Bidawi and At a Distance of a Hundred Metres in 2020. Then came Legend of Destruction, Gidi Dar's animated feature built from roughly 1,500 paintings, which Talmudi scored with Yonatan Albalak over seven months. Talmudi wrote the songs, Albalak did the orchestration, and the two of them assembled a band of Israeli players around the Musiversal orchestra, including Avri Borochov on double bass, Eyal Talmudi on clarinet and Itamar Doari on percussion, with Shai Tsabari, Ravid Kahalani, Miri Masika, Shuli Rand and Noam Inbar among the singers. The 29-track soundtrack came out on Nana Disc on August 29, 2021. The film took seven Ophir Award nominations and won four, music among them, giving Talmudi and Albalak the 2021 Ophir for Best Original Score. Talking to Calcalist that September, Talmudi said the job felt like writing music for Game of Thrones, and that the static frames of an animated feature let the score do more work than a live-action film would allow, because when the picture moves less, the ear works more. His theatre credits sit alongside this: Stempenyu and The New Criminals and Fish Informant at the Cameri, and Mirele Efros at Yiddishpiel, between 2012 and 2014.

The trio is the newest thing and the most straightforwardly jazz thing he has done. The smoke detector's lullaby was released on October 31, 2025, twelve tracks of piano and keyboards over Uri Kutner's bass and Guy Ben Ami's drums, written by Talmudi with additional composition from Kutner, Ben Ami, Roy Chen and Eyal Talmudi, produced, recorded and mixed by Kutner and issued on the Tel Aviv label Raw Tapes. The titles run to things like "vodka elevator" and "just the tail and whiskers (without the boring part in the middle)," and the record asks in its own sleeve note whether beauty can still be found in a world torn by war and cruelty. At the Israel Museum's sculpture garden on June 11, 2026, the trio played it at the Jerusalem Jazz Festival under the title "paper boats on scissor ocean," with Avri Borochov in the bass chair, video art by Dani Meir, and Rona Kenan guesting on voice, electronics and guitar. Talmudi's own line for the programme was that talking about beauty now is naive and necessary at the same time.

Freak-jazz is Talmudi's own word, and it is a fair description of what the trio actually does: jazz piano harmony run through grunge dynamics, twentieth-century classical writing, and the sound world of television and video-game soundtracks, all of it played straight rather than as pastiche. He is a keyboard player who thinks like a producer, which shows up as an unusual tolerance for broken and cheap electronic timbres sitting next to a well-voiced acoustic piano; the sleeve note for The smoke detector's lullaby describes a universe of malfunctioning electrical appliances holding a conversation, which is close to literal. The accordion is his other identity, and it is the one that connects him to the Yiddish and Eastern European repertoire he has spent twenty years in, with Oy Division, with Psoy Korolenko, and with Maniucha Bikont in Poland. What holds the two halves together is a stated interest in Jewish music as an argument rather than a heritage exhibit. Writing for the Nigunim BeTzedek festival in 2021 around a piece marking Spinoza's birthday, he argued that Jewish music has mostly been used to transmit theological and political messages, and that it needs room for doubt and provocation as well as for institutional comfort, putting Yona Wollach, Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed in the same lineage as the liturgical material. No sustained critical study of his playing exists in English, and this profile does not invent one. What is documented is the range: an Ophir-winning orchestral and choral score, a klezmer-punk accordion book, a Romanian spectralist's live album, and a piano trio.