Gadi Lehavi started at the keyboard at six months old and moved into serious classical study by age nine, working under Dr. Michal Tal and, later, Professor Jonathan Zack at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music. Jazz came the way it does for a lot of players who start on ear-playing and improvisation before theory: naturally, and early. He went on to study at the Rimon School of Jazz & Contemporary Music under pianist-composers Rami Levin and Avi Adrian, a dual classical-and-jazz training that shows up later in how comfortably he moves between idioms.

The turn that mattered most happened at 15, when saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, son of John Coltrane, heard him play and invited him onto the stages of the Village Vanguard and Birdland, two of New York's most storied jazz rooms. Most players wait a full career for a Vanguard booking; Lehavi got his before he could legally rent a car. Two years later, at 17, he made his recording debut on saxophonist Eli Degibri's 2013 album Twelve, a session credit that meant someone senior in the New York and Tel Aviv scenes already trusted his time and his ears.

Where Lehavi has spent most of his working life since, though, is inside one trio. GTO Trio, with bassist Tal Mashiach and drummer Ofri Nehemya, has now been together well over a decade, long enough that the chemistry stopped being a selling point and became the whole sound. Their debut, From the Road, came out in 2018. In January 2025, GTO Trio signed with Anzic Records, the New York label Anat Cohen co-founded in 2005, and released Within, nine tracks the trio wrote and produced themselves.

Lehavi's side credits read like a syllabus: piano duties alongside Chick Corea, Dave Liebman, Bobby McFerrin, Melissa Aldana, Ari Hoenig, Eddie Gomez, trombonist Phil Wilson, and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, plus stage time with fellow Israeli guitarist Gilad Hekselman. He also turns up on Newvelle Records' 2019 "Newvelle Muri" box set leading his own trio session, Wishes, a five-track feature with bassist Romeu Tristão and drummer Daniel Dor.

Lehavi now teaches at The New School in New York, the same kind of conservatory track that shaped his own early training, and works on the side as a filmmaker and film composer. He played SFJazz's Summer Sessions in 2024. Not quite thirty, he is already deep enough into a career that most players would recognize as a full arc: prodigy discovery, sideman apprenticeship, a decade-plus band, a label deal on a respected imprint, and now a teaching post of his own.

Lehavi's dual training, classical piano from age nine alongside a jazz education built on ear-playing and improvisation at the Rimon School, sits underneath a sideman resume that runs from bebop-rooted players (Eddie Gomez, Phil Wilson) to harmonically adventurous modernists (Kurt Rosenwinkel, Melissa Aldana) to a rhythmically dense, odd-meter specialist in drummer Ari Hoenig. That range, rather than any single stylistic lane, is the clearest signal of his musical identity: a pianist trusted across very different rooms.

His clearest sustained statement as a player, though, is GTO Trio, a working band rather than a project, together long enough that Lehavi, Tal Mashiach, and Ofri Nehemya play as a single unit with well over a decade of shared vocabulary. That group's signing to Anzic Records, a label built around a similarly interplay-driven, small-group aesthetic, is a fit rather than a departure. His parallel work as a filmmaker and film composer also points to a narrative, scene-setting sensibility that carries into his piano playing on record.