Gregory Rivkin is an Israeli jazz trumpeter, flugelhorn player, composer, and educator based in Jerusalem. In his teens he won first prize in several national instrumental competitions in Israel and, six years in a row, a scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, recognition that led to an invitation to appear as a soloist with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997. He went on to further his training in Paris, then in New York, where he built a reputation within the city's jazz scene playing alongside two of jazz's most storied big-band lineages: the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine, led by the drummer who anchored John Coltrane's classic quartet, and the Mingus Big Band, the repertory ensemble that carries on Charles Mingus's compositions. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2006, holds diplomas with excellence in classical trumpet, and earned a Master of Musical Arts and Musicology from Rutgers University.

During his New York years, Rivkin recorded as a sideman on bassist Harvie S's 2004 ZOHO Records album Texas Rumba, playing trumpet alongside saxophonist Scott Robert Avidon, pianist Daniel Kelly, drummer Adam Weber, and percussionist Renato Thoms.

Back in Israel, Rivkin teaches trumpet and jazz improvisation at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and serves as a core trumpeter with the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra, maintaining a parallel classical practice alongside his jazz career. He performs as a leader and featured soloist with both the Tel-Aviv Big Band and the Eli Degibri Big Band; he and Degibri are colleagues on the Jerusalem Academy's jazz faculty, alongside bassist Arnon Palty, who chairs the school's Cross-Disciplinary Music Faculty.

Since 2011, Rivkin has co-led the Sendersky-Rivkin Quintet with saxophonist and composer Lenny Sendersky. The group's repertoire draws on Jewish folklore, odd-metered structures, and Latin, African, and Cuban rhythms alongside traditional and modern jazz, blending Sendersky's European sensibility with Rivkin's hard-swinging, New York-rooted hard-bop attack; the project performs, depending on the booking, as a sextet, quintet, or quartet, and appears regularly at Israel's major jazz festivals and clubs.

Rivkin also leads his own working quartet, a regular presence at Tel Aviv's Shablul Jazz club, and keeps an active international gig calendar: recent bookings include the Jaffa Jazz Festival (October 2024), a "Dance 2 Jazz" performance in Haifa (September 2024), and European dates with a "Barth&Rivkin Quintet," including a November 2025 concert in Fürth, Germany.

His debut as a leader, A Certain Attitude, appeared in 2018: an independently released quartet session, credited to acertainattitude@gmail.com as the project's own point of contact, pairing Rivkin's trumpet and flugelhorn with pianist Tony Pancella, drummer Matthias Gmelin, and bassist Henning Sieverts across eleven original compositions in a post-bop and hard-bop vein, including "Portrait of Elvin," a tribute to Elvin Jones.

Rivkin names Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard, and Lee Morgan as his touchstones on trumpet, a hard-bop lineage he draws on for what he describes as a balance between structure and fire, prioritizing ensemble communication and phrasing over pure technical display. That straight-ahead vocabulary widens considerably in the Sendersky-Rivkin Quintet, where Jewish folklore and Latin, African, and Cuban rhythms are folded into the hard-bop core. Rivkin also maintains a genuinely separate classical-trumpet practice, as a core player with the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra and through a musicology degree from Rutgers, but his teaching post, working bands, and performing career are squarely built around jazz.