Gilad Ephrat is an Israeli double bassist and composer built around the 5-string double bass, an extended-range instrument that lets him carry a cello-register melodic voice as easily as a walking bass line. He trained classically under Michael Klinghoffer at the Academy of Music in Jerusalem and Teddy Kling of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. By his own account, on his official site's biography page, he grew up moving between the United States, Sweden, and Israel's Jezreel Valley, an upbringing he credits directly for the mix of idioms in his writing.

For four years, Ephrat toured internationally as double bassist for Lara Fabian, a Belgian-Canadian singer with a global pop and adult-contemporary audience far outside jazz. That stint sits alongside a long list of session and touring work with Israeli artists spanning genres, including Idan Raichel, Yasmin Levy, Noa (Achinoam Nini), and Nurit Galron, plus world-music and Mid-Eastern specialists Ara Dinkjian, Giora Faidman, Yair Dalal, Eyal Sela, Mark Eliyahu, the Israeli Ethnic Ensemble, and percussionist Zohar Fresco, whose own frame-drum career is profiled elsewhere on this site. He was also a founding member of Makondo, a world-music group whose two mid-2000s albums Discogs catalogs under a split Jazz/Folk-World-Country genre tag.

In 2012, Ephrat formed his own quartet, the Gilad Ephrat Ensemble: his own double bass alongside violin, cello, and mandolin, with oud on some tracks, and no drummer anywhere in the lineup. This is where his most sustained and most explicitly jazz-facing work lives. The Ensemble's self-titled 2015 debut and its 2018 follow-up, Stockholm (recorded at Nilento Studio in Molndal, Sweden), are both tagged "Jazz" on Discogs and "Jazz" / "Israeli Jazz" on the group's own Bandcamp label page, and Stockholm closes its run of Mid-Eastern- and Balkan-leaning original material with a chamber-strings reading of the jazz standard "My Funny Valentine." A 2025 performance video, "One for Chick," makes the connection explicit: Ephrat wrote the tune, by his own account his first blues, after learning one of Christian McBride's bass solos, and dedicated it to Chick Corea. No Treble's review of the piece specifically describes the sextet arrangement swinging through an arco (bowed) bass solo.

Beyond the Ensemble, Ephrat runs an ongoing instrumental series called "Gilad Ephrat Plays Van Gogh," singles composed after a family visit to a Van Gogh exhibition and named for individual paintings ("Noon," "Vegetable Gardens," "Almond Blossom," "The Sower," "Congregation," "Song of Hope"), and "Bassolin," a working duo with mandolinist Shmuel Elbaz built around close pizzicato interplay, with tracks including "Bread & Butter" (2024), "Desert Land" (2024), and "Ocean Forest" (2025). He also led the Gilad Ephrat Ensemble in a 2020 concert with Israel's Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra. As of an April 2026 club date at Jazz on Main in Mount Kisco, New York, listed on Bandsintown, he continues to tour.

Ephrat's core sound sits at the intersection of what this site's taxonomy calls Chamber Jazz and Ethno Jazz: a strings-and-mandolin chamber lineup drawing on Mid-Eastern maqam material, Israeli folk song, and jazz vocabulary in something close to equal measure, rather than a horn-and-rhythm-section band playing standards. That places him closer to a chamber-jazz lineage than to a straight-ahead combo, and it is worth being direct about the balance of his career: a large share of his public performing and recording history, four years with pop singer Lara Fabian, session and touring work with Idan Raichel, Yasmin Levy, Noa, and Nurit Galron, an ongoing Van Gogh-inspired instrumental series, and a 2020 date with a kibbutz orchestra, sits in world, pop, and classical-adjacent territory rather than jazz proper. The jazz case for him rests specifically on the Gilad Ephrat Ensemble's own two albums, independently genre-tagged "Jazz" by both Discogs and the group's own label, and on a small but real run of directly jazz-referential material: a "My Funny Valentine" arrangement and "One for Chick," a blues written after transcribing a Christian McBride solo and dedicated to Chick Corea.