Adam Ben Ezra started on violin at five and guitar at nine, then spent a short spell on electric bass before finding the double bass at sixteen. That last one stuck. He grew up in Tel Aviv in a family of Iraqi heritage, with Arabic and Jewish music in the house, and he taught himself most of what he now plays alongside the bass: piano, clarinet, oud, flute, cajon. He turned full-time musician at twenty-two, working as a bassist across the Israeli jazz and pop scenes.

The turn came in 2008. On September 4 of that year he uploaded a solo double bass version of the theme from Seinfeld. A cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" followed. Those two videos reached an audience that three years of club work had not, and they set the shape of everything after: one man, one upright bass, and a technique that treats the instrument as bass and drum kit at the same time. He walks a line with the left hand while striking the body of the bass with the right, then layers the result through a loop pedal until a solo performance carries a full band's worth of parts.

He began performing solo the same year, and then did something unusual with the momentum. Rather than rushing a record out, he spent seven years releasing covers, singles and videos, building the audience first. "Come Together," a solo double bass reading of the Lennon-McCartney song, went out in December 2010 for the thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon's death. Two singles, "Openland" and "Flamenco," followed in 2012 through CandyRat Records, the Wisconsin independent built around solo acoustic string players. A Solo EP arrived in April 2013 with seven tracks, the first real document of the percussive-bass approach. Only in November 2015 did a full album appear, and Can't Stop Running was crowd-funded through PledgeMusic rather than paid for by a label, because by then there was already an audience willing to fund it.

Between the videos and the first album he was busy as a sideman. He plays contrabass across Achinoam Nini's 2014 album Love Medicine and toured North America and Europe with her, including a night at the Acropolis in Athens alongside George Dalaras and Dulce Pontes. In 2012 he played upright bass on Oren Lavie's "4th Time Around" for Chimes of Freedom, Amnesty International's fiftieth-anniversary Bob Dylan tribute. In 2013 he performed at the International Society of Bassists convention in Rochester, New York, and in 2014 he joined the classical comedy duo Igudesman & Joo for their League of X-traordinary Musicians showpiece at the Vienna Konzerthaus, and formed the Adam Ben Ezra Trio.

Pin Drop, released May 19, 2017, remains his only record on an established label: Ropeadope, the Philadelphia independent. He recorded it in Liechtenstein with Little Konzett engineering, and its ten tracks run from "Silk Road" and "India Time" through a cover of the Beatles' "Dear Prudence." Hide and Seek followed, issued as a self-released Israeli CD in 2019 and given a wide release on March 6, 2020, made with New York producer Isaac DaBom and drawing hip hop, R&B and electronica into the mix. He played nearly every instrument on it himself, including a five-string upright.

Then he put the bass down. Intermission, released March 26, 2021, is ten pieces for solo piano, composed, arranged and played entirely by him, with a companion songbook of transcriptions published alongside it. From a musician whose entire public identity rested on the double bass, it was a deliberate step off the thing that made him known.

Heavy Drops, out February 28, 2025, moved in the opposite direction and added a second person. It is billed as a bass-and-drums duo with Michael Olivera, the Cuban drummer based in Madrid who leads the Cuban Jazz Syndicate. The two cut the foundation live across three days at Camaleon Music Studio in Madrid with Frank Lozano engineering, after which Ben Ezra added double bass, keyboards, voice and flute at his own studio in São Luís, Portugal. Omer Mor, who mixed the record at DaBom Studios in New York, plays the one guest instrument on it, electric guitar.

Eighteen years after the Seinfeld video, his YouTube channel carries 421,000 subscribers and his Spotify page carries 63,300 monthly listeners, an audience most artists with his level of reference-book coverage do not have. He has shared stages with Snarky Puppy, Pat Metheny, Victor Wooten and Richard Bona. The route was never the conservatory-and-Manhattan path that most of his Israeli contemporaries took, and the catalogue is the better for it.

Ben Ezra names Bach, Sting, Debussy, Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez and Jaco Pastorius among his influences, together with flamenco and Arabic music. Bobby McFerrin belongs on that list too, and the connection is structural rather than stylistic: McFerrin's one-body-as-whole-band approach is the closest existing model for what Ben Ezra does with an upright.

His core technique is percussive double bass. He plays the instrument as a pitched instrument and a drum simultaneously, striking the body and strings for rhythm while fingering a bass line or melody, and then builds the arrangement outward with a looper and effects pedals until a single performer produces a full ensemble texture. Not every piece uses looping: "Can't Stop Running," the performance that best demonstrates the method, is played straight through with no loops at all.

The writing sits on Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ground and spreads out from there. "Flamenco" and "Bolero" on the debut, "Silk Road" and "India Time" on Pin Drop, "Daldaya" on Hide and Seek: the catalogue reads as a map of the traditions he grew up inside and the ones he went looking for. Jazz, funk, Latin and classical writing sit alongside each other on the same records without any one of them being treated as the home key.

The other consistent trait is refusal to settle. A percussive-bass specialist made an all-piano album; a solo performer made a duo record; a self-releasing artist put one album out on a label and then went back to self-releasing. The through line is the search rather than any single sound.