Gilad Abro was born April 23, 1981, in Cape Town, South Africa, and immigrated to Israel with his family at age ten. He grew up in Ramat Hasharon, graduating from Alon High School before studying classical composition at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. His bass teachers have included Michael Klinghoffer, the American bassist Richard Davis, and Omer Avital; in 2003 he won first prize in the "Jazz Player of the Year" competition at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, an award that came with an invitation to perform at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy, and he has received the America-Israel Cultural Foundation's Musician of Excellence grant on more than one occasion.

By his early twenties Abro was already a fixture of the Tel Aviv jazz scene. In 2003 he played acoustic bass and sang on One, the self-released debut album of the 3 Cohens, the sibling trio of Anat Cohen, Yuval Cohen, and trumpeter Avishai Cohen, alongside guitarist/oud player Amos Hoffman. The following year he recorded The Arrival with the Yotam Silberstein Trio for the Spanish label Fresh Sound New Talent, co-writing one of its originals. Through the 2000s and 2010s he built a busy session career across jazz, pop, and world-music dates, working with musicians including Gilad Hekselman, Shai Maestro, Ilan Salem, and Itay Kriss, and became a regular at Levontin 7, Tel Aviv's best-known jazz club, leading his own trio there with pianist Nitai Hershkovits and drummer Amir Bresler, a set documented on the 2012 concert film JazzMix in Tel Aviv.

Bassist Avishai Cohen, for whom Abro's teaching lineage also runs, hand-picked him for All Original: Best Young Israeli Jazz (Razdaz Recordz, 2014), a compilation Cohen produced to showcase what he considered the leading young composers of the Israeli scene; Abro appears as the double bassist in pianist Omri Mor's trio with drummer Noam David, contributing two tracks, "Fraht a Sad" and "Atlas." That same period he was also the double bassist of choice for oud player Amos Hoffman (2010's Carving, on which he shares the bandstand with Avishai Cohen on electric bass) and for the Amit Friedman Sextet's Sunrise (2012, Origin Records). In 2015 he played on three albums by saxophonist Daniel Zamir, including Redemption Songs for John Zorn's Tzadik label, a session that also drew pianists Shai Maestro and Nitai Hershkovits, bassist Haggai Cohen Milo, and drummers Amir Bresler and Mark Guiliana.

Around 2010, Abro co-founded LayerZ with guitarist Yonatan Albalak and drummer Aviv Cohen, an electronic trio built out of the same Tel Aviv jazz scene but aimed squarely at post-rock, electronica, and groove; Abro played bass and synthesizer and sang. The band released Memory Towers in 2013, featuring singer Marina Maximilian on the track "Goodbye," which she also wrote, and Things On Top Of Each Other in 2015; Abro also played bass on Maximilian's own albums Step Into My World (2013) and ארמונות עשן (2016). He drew on that same downtown-Tel-Aviv circle of players for Leaf Boy, his debut as a leader, released on Raw Tapes on September 20, 2019. Produced and mixed by Rejoicer and recorded by Asaf Shay, the album pairs Abro's double and electric bass with Nitai Hershkovits, Amir Bresler, trumpeter Sefi Zisling, synth player Nomok, and vocalists KerenDun, Karolina, and Echo; its title refers to Abro's childhood among trees outside Cape Town. Alongside performing, he teaches bass at the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv and at the Mezamor School.

Abro's catalog reflects a bassist trained inside straight-ahead jazz who has spent most of his career moving fluidly out of it. His formative credits (the 3 Cohens, Yotam Silberstein, Amos Hoffman, the Levontin 7 trio with Nitai Hershkovits) sit in mainstream post-bop, built on the kind of acoustic bass fluency that comes from studying with Richard Davis and winning a national jazz-competition prize. Leaf Boy, by contrast, is a bass-forward record that folds contemporary R&B, house rhythms, and electronic textures around jazz vocabulary, a natural extension of the ground he had already covered a decade earlier as a founding member of LayerZ, whose sound sits closer to post-rock and electronica than to any conventional jazz idiom. Reviewers of Leaf Boy singled out exactly that range, describing an "open-minded approach" that gives the bass, not usually a lead voice, the spotlight across both its acoustic and electric registers.