Dan Mayo was born in Tel Aviv on July 1, 1990. He started drums at three, was performing at school events by six, and also learned piano, saxophone and marimba as a child before dropping out of high school to focus on music. He is the founding drummer of Tatran, a Tel Aviv instrumental power trio with guitarist Tamuz Dekel and bassist Offir Benjaminov, active since 2014 and blending jazz, avant-garde, post-rock and experimental material across four albums: Shvat (2014), No Sides (2017), Foresee (2018) and Evermore (2024).

His signature technique is running his acoustic drum kit's signal live through guitar effects pedals — distortion, modulation and other processing — to reshape the instrument's sound in real time, a method profiled at length by Modern Drummer magazine. He was named Best New Drummer of 2017 by the UK's Rhythm Magazine. As a sideman he has toured with singer Ester Rada and played on Mike Shinoda's Post Traumatic solo tour; Tatran and its members have performed at Montreux, Rotterdam and Atlanta's jazz festivals as well as Glastonbury, Reading & Leeds and Germany's Fusion Festival, and he was billed hosting trumpeter Avishai Cohen at the Jerusalem Jazz Festival. His solo work includes the album Big Brown Eyes (2019) and the EP Woodhouse (2020), plus a 2020 single, "Before," with Yehezkel Raz.

Mayo sits closer to the avant-garde, post-rock and fusion end of the spectrum than to straight-ahead jazz — nearly every independent profile of him (Modern Drummer, Audeze, his own Bandcamp framing) describes Tatran as a genre-crossing instrumental band rather than a jazz group specifically, and his touring credits span jazz festivals (Montreux, Rotterdam, Atlanta) alongside decidedly non-jazz ones (Glastonbury, Reading & Leeds, a Linkin Park member's solo tour). He is nonetheless listed in Wikipedia's own "Israeli jazz musicians" category, and his pedalboard-processed drum technique — treating the kit as a live-electronics instrument rather than a purely acoustic one — is a genuine, well-documented innovation regardless of genre label.