Ehud Ettun started on piano at six and picked up guitar at twelve, working through Jerusalem bands before he ever touched a bass. The switch came at sixteen, when he was accepted to the Israel Arts and Science Academy and began studying upright bass under Michael Klinghoffer, ear training under Professor Bat-Sheva Rubinstein, and composition under Andre Hajdu, a rigorous three-front education that shows up later in how deliberately his own records are put together. After the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, he crossed the Atlantic for a master's degree at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, studying with saxophonist Donny McCaslin and pianist Fred Hersch.

His debut as a co-leader arrived in 2008: Half Colors, Half Voices, made with pianist Uriel Herman, setting original music to poems by the Israeli poet Rachel Bluwstein and pulling in a roster of Israeli vocalists and instrumentalists, including a young Eli Degibri on saxophone and vocals. Haaretz named it one of the top 15 Israeli albums of that year. It's the first entry in a catalog that's bigger than it looks from the outside: seven albums as bandleader or co-leader since, most of them self-released or issued through Internal Compass, the label Ettun founded himself in Boston with a stated mission built around music education and cross-cultural connection. Heading North (2012) came out the same year he finished his NEC degree. Raw Gestures followed as a trio record with pianist Daniel Schwarzwald and drummer Matan Asayag. Then, in 2014, came BiPolar, the first record in what's become the defining thread of his career as a leader: a duo with Japanese pianist Haruka Yabuno that the two of them have now sustained for fifteen years, through Collage of Moments (2016, with Serbian flutist Milena Jancuric added to the mix) and on to 2024's Knights of Silence, a record Yabuno herself has described as carrying meanings "that only the true knights of silence know."

The best story in the catalog belongs to Deep in the Mountains (2019). It came out of a 40-day artistic residency in the mountains of PyeongChang, South Korea, tied to the region's 2018 Winter Olympics cultural program, and the record mixes traditional Korean song and Argentine folk with Leonard Bernstein and modern Israeli jazz, an unlikely combination that somehow plays like a single, coherent idea rather than a tour itinerary set to music.

Alongside his own projects, Ettun has built a substantial career as a sideman and session player, recording with pianist Fred Hersch, saxophonists George Garzone and Eli Degibri, pianist Kenny Werner, and Anat Cohen, and documented studio credits with saxophonist/composer Tal Gur (Air Portrait, 2007), saxophonist Yoni Kretzmer (Yoni Kretzmer's New Dilemma, 2009), guitarist Guy Kark (4 Quarters, 2010), pianist Devin Roth (Childhood Places, 2012), and, more recently, Russian-Israeli saxophonist Lenny Sendersky's Moon Strings project (Blues Mizrahi, 2020). He's played the Blue Note in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Boston's Symphony Hall, with tour stops in Toronto, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Seoul.

Back in 2019, Ettun told the Times of Israel he was giving himself ten years to make it in New York, with a longer-term plan to return to Israel and open a music school in the Negev desert. He's already acting on that second half: his newer project, the Internal Compass Collective, is based in Mitzpe Ramon, the desert town that now gives his label its full identity as a working hub rather than just an imprint. The bassist who's spent fifteen years commuting musically to Japan is also, in parallel, building something permanent at home.

Ettun's playing sits at the crossing point of a fairly traditional jazz education (Klinghoffer's classical bass discipline, Hajdu's composition training, McCaslin and Hersch at NEC) and a restless, specifically cross-cultural curiosity that keeps showing up in his choice of collaborators and material. Half Colors, Half Voices set his bass against Hebrew poetry and a chamber-pop vocal ensemble. Deep in the Mountains folded Korean traditional song and Argentine folk into a modern jazz frame built around a residency rather than a studio booking. The Yabuno Ettun Project, running fifteen years and four records deep as of 2024's Knights of Silence, is built on the specific chemistry of an Israeli bassist and a Japanese pianist finding common ground in original compositions, classical repertoire, and standards side by side.

That range is matched by a compositional streak that runs through nearly every one of his own records as leader: the vast majority of his leader and co-leader output, going back to his 2008 debut, is original material, not standards dates. Where he does turn to other people's songs, as on the duo work with Yabuno, the treatment stays personal rather than deferential. The double bass itself is described consistently, across reviews and his own bio, in melodic and expressive terms rather than purely functional ones, an emphasis that fits a player whose main portfolio is bandleading, not just anchoring other people's rhythm sections.