David Broza is one of the best known musicians Israel has produced, and almost none of what made him famous is jazz. He is a singer-songwriter and an acoustic guitarist with a flamenco technique, the man who wrote "Yihye Tov," and the owner of a catalog of roughly forty albums in Hebrew, Spanish and English that Discogs files under Rock, Pop and Folk. This profile says that up front and scopes itself accordingly. What it covers is the jazz work, which is real and recent and mostly built around one partnership: BROZAJAZZ: Paris Alhambra (2025), the live album cut with the bassist Omer Avital's quartet; Tefila (2022), for which Avital wrote the orchestrations and hired Israeli jazz players to record them; en Casa Limón (2020), his only all-instrumental guitar album, which runs through swing and Gypsy jazz on its way past flamenco; Broza 5 Live, the January 2006 Tel Aviv concert Discogs files under Jazz, with Jay Beckenstein of Spyro Gyra in the band; and The Golden Ring (2018), which is where this site's hub connection to him runs. His Hebrew, Spanish and English pop and folk catalog, the larger and more famous part of his career by a wide margin, is deliberately left out of the discography rather than half-covered, and the notes file sets out why.

Broza was born in Haifa on September 4, 1955. His father, Arthur Broza, was a British businessman; his mother, Sharona Aron, was a singer. His grandfather, Wellesley (Pinchas) Aron, co-founded the Habonim youth movement and the joint Jewish-Arab village of Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam, a piece of family history that runs through most of what Broza later did in public. The father's work moved the family to Spain when Broza was twelve, and the Spanish years did the rest: he went to Runnymede College in Madrid, then to Carmel College in England, played guitar in a schoolboy band, and by seventeen was selling his own paintings at the Rastro, Madrid's Sunday flea market, with a plan to become a graphic artist rather than a musician. He was drafted into the Israeli army in 1974, spent eighteen months guarding a base, then transferred to the air force entertainment troupe and played Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan covers alongside his sister Talia.

"Yihye Tov" ("Things Will Be Better") came out of a 1977 salon show with the poet Yonatan Geffen, written around Anwar Sadat's visit to Israel, and it turned him into a national figure at twenty-two. It has stayed the song he is asked for, and he has rewritten its verses repeatedly over five decades to track whatever the country was going through. The albums followed fast: Sikhot Salon (1977), The Sixteenth Sheep with Geffen in 1978, David Broza (1979), Klaf (1981), and then Ha'Isha Sheiti (The Woman by My Side, 1983), which remains among the best selling Israeli albums ever made and won him Kol Israel's Singer of the Year that year. He began recording in English at the end of the 1980s with Away From Home (1989), then Time of Trains (1993) and Second Street (1994), and in Spanish across Isla Mujeres (2000), Spanish Heart (2001) and Todo O Nada (2002); Spain gave him the Order of Civil Merit in 2009. Two later records carry his name furthest outside Israel. Night Dawn: The Unpublished Poetry of Townes Van Zandt (2010) sets ten unreleased Van Zandt lyrics, left to Broza in a shoebox after the single night the two played together at a Houston writers' round in 1994, and was produced by Broza with G. E. Smith. East Jerusalem / West Jerusalem (2014, Broza Records / S-Curve) was cut over eight days and nights at the Palestinian Sabreen studio in East Jerusalem with Israeli and Palestinian musicians, produced by Steve Earle on eleven of its thirteen tracks and Steve Greenberg on the other two, with Yonatan Levy on electric guitar. In 2019 he launched One Million Guitars, a nonprofit that gives schoolchildren a hand-built guitar and two years of lessons.

The jazz thread starts earlier than the records do. Broza toured with the guitarist Al Di Meola in 1991, during the Gulf War, and the two have played together on and off since. In January 2006 he booked a one-off night at the Zappa club in Tel Aviv and filled the stage with visiting jazz and session players: Jay Beckenstein, the saxophonist who founded Spyro Gyra, Spyro Gyra's guitarist Julio Fernandez, the Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, and a bassist whose name appears in the release copy as Francesco Santano. The resulting Broza 5 Live, eighteen songs from his own catalog rearranged for that band, is the first release in his discography that Discogs files under Jazz, and the set list still keeps a track called "Cyro's Story." Fourteen years later he made en Casa Limón (2020) in Madrid with the producer Javier Limón, the first all-instrumental album of a career then forty-three years old: twelve pieces for nylon-string guitar, mostly solo, with Antonio Serrano on harmonica for "Too Old to Die Young." Flamenco is the spine of it, but "I'll Never Ride a Horse Again" is a straight Hot Club swing tune and "Too Old to Die Young" sits between European jazz and pop.

The partnership that produced the actual jazz records began with a chance meeting on a New York sidewalk. Broza knew Omer Avital's playing; Avital, an Israeli bassist and composer who had spent decades in the New York jazz scene, knew who Broza was. Their first project was not a jazz one. Temple Emanu-El's Streicker Center in Manhattan commissioned Broza during the pandemic to rewrite the Kabbalat Shabbat Friday night service, and he composed fourteen melodies in fourteen days, one prayer per day. Avital wrote all the orchestrations, a job that took him about a year and a half, and assembled a band of Israeli jazz musicians living around New York to play them. Tefila was released April 20, 2022 with Broza on vocals and guitar, Avital on bass, a string quartet, a horn quartet, a rhythm section with no synthesizers anywhere on the record, the twenty-five-voice Moran Choir from Israel under Naomi Faran, and a gospel choir recruited in New York. The full work was performed at Temple Emanu-El in 2023, and on November 12 of that year Broza appeared at City Winery in New York with Avital's all-Israeli Wilson Live Experience ensemble at a benefit for the trauma organization NATAL.

Jazz proper arrived when Broza was booked for the Red Sea Jazz Festival's winter edition in February 2024 and asked Avital to build him a band and rewrite his own songs as jazz. Avital brought in pianist Eden Ladin, trumpeter Itamar Borochov and drummer Itay Morchi, and worked up arrangements of "Ramito de Violetas (Sigaliyot)," "Thunder and Lightning," "Erev Shel Shoshanim" and "Be'libech," among others. Eleven months later, on November 14, 2024, the same five played the Alhambra in Paris as part of the Jazz'n'Klezmer festival, and the concert was recorded. BROZAJAZZ: Paris Alhambra was released November 6, 2025 on Broza Records: fourteen tracks running close to two hours, opening with a "Prelude" and a bass introduction to "Thunder and Lightning," closing on an eleven-minute "Yihye Tov" and a jam. All About Jazz reviewed it under the joint billing "David Broza and Omer Avital." He turned seventy the September before it came out.

Broza's instrument is a nylon-string guitar played with flamenco mechanics, palmas and rapid hammer-ons, nut-side and nail-sizzle percussion off the body and strings, and enough independence between the hands that reviewers of en Casa Limón reached for the word orchestra. The vocabulary comes from the Madrid years rather than from any conservatory, and it sits underneath everything he does, including the jazz records; what changes on those is the company, not the technique. He is not an improviser in the sense this site usually means, and no source consulted for this profile describes him soloing over changes. On BROZAJAZZ the division of labor is explicit and was arranged that way from the start: Broza supplied the songs and sang them, Avital wrote the charts, and the improvising is done by Eden Ladin, Itamar Borochov and Avital himself around a singer holding the melody. What he brings to a jazz bandstand is the material, a set of Hebrew and Spanish songs with enough harmonic room in them to be reopened, and a rhythmic guitar part that functions the way a flamenco player's does rather than the way a jazz comper's does. The Jewish News piece marking his seventieth birthday reports that he had been sitting in on Avital's jam sessions for two years before the Red Sea booking, which is the closest thing to a documented apprenticeship in the record. Critics have compared him to Leonard Cohen for the writing and to flamenco players for the hands, and both comparisons keep landing because he never resolved into either one.