Asaf Sirkis has spent thirty six years as one of the most in-demand drummers in European jazz, and he is still best known to most listeners as a name in someone else's credits. He appears on more than a hundred and thirty documented recordings. Around a dozen of them carry his own name on the cover.

He was born in Petah Tikva on March 22, 1969, and took his first drum lessons at twelve in Rehovot. His listening as a teenager was omnivorous in a way that shows up in everything he has played since: The Beatles and The Police alongside Yes and Weather Report, Allan Holdsworth alongside classical music, Arabic, Balkan, klezmer and Israeli folk. He completed national service between 1987 and 1990 and went professional immediately.

His recorded career starts in that same year, 1990, with an album by the group Biological Madness on Jazzis Records, the small Tel Aviv label that documented much of the Israeli scene at the time. Three more Jazzis titles followed by 1993: Odéon (1991), Downtown with the group Tact (1992), and Changes (1993). He moved to Tel Aviv in 1993 and formed his first trio in 1995 with keyboardist Kobi Arad and bassist Gabi Meir.

Two of the most significant credits of his Israeli years belong to tenor saxophonist Albert Beger. Sirkis played drums on The Primitive (NMC, 1995), Beger's debut, made when Beger was 36 and Sirkis was 26, and again on the Albert Beger Quartet's This Life (1997). He also appears on the oud and clarinet player Eyal Sela's Hijazz (1995). His own trio's debut, One Step Closer, came out on Stonebird in 1998.

That same year he left Israel. After periods in the Netherlands and France he settled in London in 1999, and the city has been his base ever since. In 2000 he met saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and became a founding member of the Orient House Ensemble, a band he stayed with for most of the decade. Their 2003 album Exile won Best CD of the Year at the BBC Jazz Awards. In 2004 the same group made MusiK / Re-Arranging The 20th Century with Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine's founding drummer and singer, a connection that turned out to matter a great deal later.

The project that best explains how Sirkis thinks is The Inner Noise. He formed it in Israel in 1996 and reformed it in London in 2000 with Steve Lodder on organ and Mike Outram on guitar, and its instrument was not a Hammond but a full church pipe organ. The organ parts on the first album were recorded on the instrument at St Michael's Church, Highgate, on March 20 and 21, 2002. No jazz or rock group is documented as having used that lineup before. Three albums followed: The Inner Noise (Konnex, 2003), We Are Falling (Konnex, 2005), and The Song Within (SAM Productions, 2007), the last of which All About Jazz named among the best records of its year. Sirkis wrote all of the music, and his writing there draws on the organ works of Olivier Messiaen and Maurice Duruflé as openly as it does on Allan Holdsworth and Tony Williams' Lifetime.

Alongside the Inner Noise he built a second body of work as a rhythm player at the top of the British scene. His partnership with saxophonist Tim Garland began in 2006 and has run through more than a dozen records, including the Lighthouse Trio with pianist Gwilym Simcock, whose Lighthouse (ACT, 2012) is among the most widely reviewed albums he appears on. In 2007 he formed the Asaf Sirkis Trio with Greek guitarist Tassos Spiliotopoulos and fellow Israeli bassist Yaron Stavi, which produced The Monk (2008), Letting Go (2010) and Shepherds Stories (2013). In 2011 he founded his own label, StonedBird Productions, to keep control of what he released.

Since 2014 his principal band has been the Sirkis/Bialas International Quartet, co-led with the Polish composer and vocalist Sylwia Bialas, with Frank Harrison on piano and Kevin Glasgow on electric bass. Come To Me (2014) was followed by the double album Our New Earth (MoonJune, 2019), which puts church organ, waterphone, crotales and konnakol inside a jazz quartet. Solar Flash (MoonJune, 2021), credited to Sirkis with Gary Husband and Kevin Glasgow, carries liner notes by Robert Wyatt. The Journey Is You followed on October 7, 2025.

A separate strand of his work runs through the guitarist Mark Wingfield and the touch guitarist Markus Reuter, largely on the MoonJune label: Proof Of Light (2015), TheStoneHouse (2016), Lighthouse (2017), the Truce trio with Fabio Trentini across four releases from 2020 to 2025, the Oculus project's Nothing Is Sacred (2020), and the nine-album run of Anchor And Burden between 2021 and 2025. He has also recorded well outside jazz, with Natacha Atlas, Paul Carrack, Polly Scattergood and the film composer Simon Fisher Turner.

In 2016 he began deputising in Soft Machine, the Canterbury group founded in 1966 and generally treated as the starting point of British jazz rock, when the band's long-serving drummer John Marshall could no longer travel constantly. Marshall retired in late 2022 and Sirkis took the chair permanently, appearing with the band on a run of UK dates in February 2023. Thirteen, released on March 13, 2026, is his first studio album with them, and the first Soft Machine studio record in the group's sixty year history with an Israeli drummer.

His next release moves in the opposite direction from everything above. Letters, announced for autumn 2026, is a suite of twenty four short piano compositions that Sirkis recorded alone on a restored 1915 Steinway at Ursa Major studio in Italy.

Sirkis is a composer who plays drums rather than a drummer who writes on the side, and the distinction shapes his catalogue. He writes all or nearly all of the music on his own records, and those records are organised around an instrumental idea rather than a standard format: a church organ in place of a piano, a harmonica as a fourth voice, a waterphone inside a quartet, twenty four miniatures for solo piano.

His rhythmic language comes from an unusual source for an Israeli jazz musician. Rather than reaching toward Andalusian, Ladino or Arabic material, as much of his generation did, Sirkis studied konnakol, the South Indian system of speaking rhythm aloud in syllables, at the Tamil School of Music in west London under the mridangam master Paramasamy Kirupakaran. He built a step by step teaching method from it aimed at Western musicians of any genre or level, and it underpins both his playing and his teaching. He has taught at Trinity Laban in London and, since 2017, as a principal lecturer in jazz drums at Leeds Conservatoire, and he distributes konnakol tutorials free through his YouTube channel and a play-along series on his own label.

His stated influences run from The Beatles, The Police and Yes through Weather Report, Allan Holdsworth and Tony Williams' Lifetime to Olivier Messiaen and Maurice Duruflé, plus the Arabic, Balkan, klezmer and Israeli folk music he grew up around. That range explains why his credits sit as comfortably on a progressive rock record as on a free jazz session or an ECM-adjacent European jazz album. Beyond the kit he plays udu, bendir, riqq and crotales, and on Letters the piano.