Gal Shaya is an Israeli jazz bassist, playing both electric and upright bass, raised in Haifa before splitting his career between the Israeli jazz scene and, since relocating, New York's. Per his own America-Israel Cultural Foundation (AICF) artist bio, he grew up playing "a wide variety of genres" on electric bass before adding upright bass, working in "a diversity of situations from jazz bands to theater orchestras," and, while still in Israel, played alongside saxophonist Yuval Cohen, saxophonist Erez Bar-Noy, and saxophonist Gilad Ronen, toured Russia and the United States, and led his own band, AKT5; none of these specific claims could be independently corroborated beyond his own bio, so they are reported here as self-described background rather than verified credits.

He moved to New York to study at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, where his teachers included drummer Andrew Cyrille, saxophonist Bill McHenry, bassist Thomas Morgan, bassist Chris Lightcap, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. He won a full scholarship in the school's 2013 "New School Competition" and is also an AICF scholarship recipient. Now based in Brooklyn, he is Discogs-verified on double bass on the Ofir Shwartz Trio's second album, Shades of Fish (2013, Hevhetia), alongside pianist Ofir Shwartz and Slovenian drummer Gašper Bertoncelj; reviewing the album, All About Jazz singled out the ballad "Folk Song," where "the theme is implied, alternately by Shaya and Shwartz while Bertoncelj adds colors and spare dramatic dimension, never delivered with full force." He also plays bass in pianist Micha Gilad's own jazz piano trio, alongside drummer Ben Silashi, appearing on its 2016 debut, A Farewell to Brahms -- a connection independently documented in Gilad's own already-published jazzprofiles.com profile. He leads his own project, the drum-less Gal Shaya Quartet, described in his AICF bio as playing "ambient modern compositions," and says he is working toward a debut album of original material intended to "bridge between contemporary classical music and jazz medium." His own bio also states he has played NYC-area venues including Webster Hall and Lincoln Center as a sideman, a claim not independently corroborated with a specific date or billing.

His own AICF bio describes him, memorably, as "willfully residing on the sidelines of jazz" while working to "bridge between contemporary classical music and jazz medium" -- a description that matches his two documented recorded appearances: a conventional acoustic piano-trio date (Shades of Fish) alongside a drum-less "ambient modern compositions" project of his own. On record, that in-between quality shows up in the one specific passage a reviewer singled out: All About Jazz's review of Shades of Fish describes him sharing the ballad "Folk Song"'s theme directly with pianist Ofir Shwartz rather than simply anchoring the rhythm section, on an album the same review locates within "the aesthetics of the ECM school of lyrical jazz," naming pianist Keith Jarrett and Bobo Stenson as reference points for the trio's sound.