Assif Tsahar moved to New York City in 1990 and became a working part of the city's free-jazz and improvised-music scene — a different lineage from most of the post-bop and standards-rooted players elsewhere in this system, closer to the harmonically unbound, improvisation-first tradition that runs through downtown New York. He shared stages and recordings with pianist Cecil Taylor, one of free jazz's foundational figures, along with bassist William Parker, drummers Hamid Drake and Rashied Ali, bassist Peter Kowald, and violist Mat Maneri.

In 1999 he founded Hopscotch Records to release his own work on his own terms — he writes the liner notes and designs the artwork and packaging himself. Between 1996 and 2018, split across Hopscotch and a handful of other independent labels (Eremite, Silkheart, Marge, Ayler), that produced more than a dozen albums as leader or co-leader: Shekhina (Eremite, 1996, with William Parker and Susie Ibarra), Ein Sof (Silkheart, 1997, same trio), Home Cookin' (Hopscotch, 1999, a duo with percussionist Susie Ibarra built on an unusual set of non-saxophone instruments, not a trio), The Hollow World (Hopscotch, 1999, with his Brass Reeds Ensemble), Open Systems (Marge, 2001, with Hugh Ragin, Peter Kowald, and Hamid Drake), Soul Bodies, Vol. 1 (Ayler, 2001, a duo with Hamid Drake), Come Sunday (Hopscotch, 2004, a duo with drummer Tatsuya Nakatani), and Code Re(a)d (Hopscotch, 2014, a trio with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Gerry Hemingway), among others.

The most unusual record in that catalog is Digital Primitives (Hopscotch, 2007), a trio with American musicians Cooper-Moore — known for building and playing his own homemade instruments — and drummer Chad Taylor, followed by a second Digital Primitives album, Hum Crackle & Pop (2009). It's Tsahar working as an equal inside the American free-jazz scene rather than as a visiting Israeli name attached to it.

Back home, Tsahar co-founded the Tel Aviv club Levontin 7 in 2006 with pianist Daniel Sarid, and the venue is still a going concern nearly twenty years later. It also became the site of a later recording: In Between the Tumbling a Stillness (Hopscotch, 2018), a live trio session with William Parker and Hamid Drake captured at Levontin 7 itself — proof that his New York-scene collaborations kept going well past the more heavily documented 1996-2011 run, and that the club he built has doubled as a working stage for his own music.

Tsahar's style sits inside the free-jazz and free-improvisation tradition associated with Cecil Taylor and the loft-jazz-adjacent New York scene of the 1990s and 2000s: harmonically open, improvisation-first, built more around collective sound and momentum than through-composed structure or standards repertoire. His regular collaborators — William Parker, Hamid Drake, Rashied Ali, Cooper-Moore, Mat Maneri — are themselves central figures in that same lineage, and Tsahar's catalog reads as a document of two decades working alongside them as a peer rather than a student.