Hagai Fershtman (Hebrew חגי פרשטמן) is a Tel Aviv drummer and percussionist whose recorded career runs in two directions at once: two decades inside Israel's free jazz and improvised-music circle, and a parallel, more widely noticed career as the drummer of the garage-punk trio Monotonix. Born in 1972 in Israel, he began drum lessons with David Rich in 1987 and graduated from the Thelma Yalin School of Arts in 1990. Between 1997 and 2000 he studied West African hand drumming with Issac Nahum and with the Guinean djembefola Mamady Keïta, one of the musicians most responsible for bringing Malinke drumming technique to a global audience. He then earned a BA in philosophy and musicology from Tel Aviv University in 2002, followed by three further years of graduate philosophy study at the university's Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, and taught drums at schools in Kibbutz Ga'ash and Ramat Gan from 2003 to 2005.

His earliest documented jazz credit is with the Livnat Brothers, Arik and Aviv Livnat, whose Hebrew-melody-and-jazz project he played in from 1997 to 2004; a 2002 session credited simply to Arik Livnat (Golden Peackok Records) has him on drums and percussion throughout. From 2000 he became a regular presence in the Tel Aviv free-improvisation scene built around the clarinetist Harold Rubin, the bassist Jean-Claude Jones and others, and he is one of the quartet on Rubin's Ivory Tower (2001), alongside pianist Daniel Sarid and bassist Adam Sheflan; the record carries no track-level Discogs credit block and the instrumentation is known from Rubin's own biographical materials rather than from a sleeve credit.

The two records at the center of his connection to saxophonist Albert Beger both date from this period, and between them they document a real spelling problem that this profile resolves rather than treats as two people. Hevel Havalim (Earsay ES028, 2003), a trio with Beger on tenor saxophone and alto flute and Gabriel Meyer on bass, recorded at Menny Beger's Sky Recording Studio in October 2002, credits him "Hagai Fershtman," drums and percussion, album-wide. Listening (Earsay ES033, 2004), a quintet adding alto saxophonist and bass clarinetist Yoni Silver and guitarist Yiftach Kadan, recorded at the same studio in April 2004 and dedicated to the memory of Steve Lacy (who had died two months earlier), credits him "Haggai Fershtman," drums, also album-wide. Discogs itself resolves the discrepancy: its entity for "Haggai Fershtman" (the main artist page) lists "Hagai Fershtman," "Hagai Abu Fershtman" and "Hagay Fershtman" as recorded name variations of the same person, alongside the Hebrew חגי פרשטמן, and files a separate "Hagai Fershtman" page as a formal alias of the same entity. Four years later, much of the Listening quintet reconvened on double bassist Joëlle Léandre's Live In Israel (Kadima Collective, 2008): its sextet tracks (2-1 through 2-4) credit Fershtman on drums alongside Beger, Yoni Silver is absent but Ariel Shibolet and Daniel Sarid both return, recorded live in Israel in November 2007.

The same circle produced two more duo and trio dates: Happiness For Things Unseen (Kadima Collective, 2010), a duo with soprano saxophonist Ariel Shibolet recorded live in Tel Aviv in May 2010, and Exhaust, a standing trio with bassist and vocalist Igor Krutogolov and saxophonist Assif Tsahar, whose Hot Exhaust (Auris Media, 2010, recorded live at Levontin 7) and Cold Exhaust (Auris Media, 2020) bracket a full decade of the same working group.

Fershtman's other, more visible career began when he replaced founding drummer Ran Shimoni in Monotonix, the Tel Aviv trio built around singer Ami Shalev and guitarist Yonatan Gat. Over roughly five years the band built a reputation for chaotic, audience-immersed shows, reportedly playing close to a thousand of them before splitting up after a final concert in London on March 6, 2011. Its two full-length albums for the American label Drag City were each made with a notable outside producer: Where Were You When It Happened? (2009) with Tim Green, and Not Yet (2011) recorded by Steve Albini. In the same lo-fi Tel Aviv rock scene he played in Ex Lion Tamer and, longer-term, in Katamine, singer-songwriter Assaf Tager's project with bassist Zoe Polanski and guitarist Uri Frost, appearing on Lag (2006) and on Forest of Bobo (2006), which the veteran American engineer Wharton Tiers produced with cover art by the political cartoonist Seth Tobocman. He also co-founded Mãlox with the multi-instrumentalist Eyal Talmudi, playing on its first two records, One Day (2007) and Polka For Punks (2012); by the time of the band's 2020 album Shit to Gold the drum chair had passed to Roy Chen, so this profile's Mãlox connection is limited to the period Fershtman himself documents.

His most recent major project returns to improvised music in a different configuration: Sonia (Chant Records, recorded Tel Aviv, June 2020, released 2021), a duo for harp, voice, electronics, drums and percussion with the harpist Adaya Godlevsky, dedicated to the memory of Sonia Barchilon (1976-2017), a translator who was Fershtman's partner and Godlevsky's close friend. The duo performed the music at the Moers Festival in Germany on June 5, 2022, where the German photographer Harald Krichel made the portrait used on this profile. Fershtman has continued to record through the 2020s in Tel Aviv's smaller experimental circles, including two chamber-improvisation releases on the Suppedaneum label led by saxophonist Tom Soloveitzik (2020 and 2025, the latter alongside the German percussionist Hannes Lingens), a 2023 percussion credit on pianist Maya Dunietz's Thank You Tree, and session work for the internationally successful singer-songwriter Asaf Avidan.

Fershtman's training runs in two directions that show up in every idiom he plays: a jazz-conservatory route through Tel Aviv's free-improvisation scene, and a hand-drumming apprenticeship in West African technique under the Guinean master Mamady Keïta. That combination, plus a philosophy degree completed while he was already a working musician, is unusual preparation for a player who spent much of the 2000s as the drummer of one of the most notoriously chaotic live rock bands of the decade; American press covering Monotonix's US tours called him "the hardest working drummer in Israel" and described him, accurately, as a trained jazz and African drummer. Across the free jazz dates his role is texture and pulse rather than time-keeping in a conventional sense, matching the freely structured writing of players like Beger and Krutogolov; across the rock and pop sessions the same physical, propulsive approach reads simply as a very good drummer holding down a song. Few musicians in this catalogue move as unselfconsciously between a Kadima Collective free-improv date and a Drag City garage-punk record, and Fershtman's catalogue is best understood as one drummer's technique applied without much distinction across genre lines his scene otherwise treats as separate.