Gur Liraz picked up the guitar at nine years old, growing up in Tel Aviv. By the time he reached the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts he was majoring in jazz, studying under a group of teachers who between them shaped much of Israel's jazz-education pipeline: pianist Amit Golan, soprano saxophonist Yuval Cohen, Erez Barnoy, and guitarist and oud player Amos Hoffman. Outside the classroom he spent four years studying privately with guitarist Ofer Ganor.

In 2013 Liraz left for New York and spent eight months studying with Peter Bernstein, one of the defining voices of modern mainstream jazz guitar. Rather than settling there, he moved on to Berlin at the end of that stretch and has been based in the city ever since, building his career inside its jazz scene rather than returning home.

Berlin gave him two long-running vehicles before he ever released a record under his own name alone. The first paired him with German vocalist Amanda Becker: 2020's self-released You're Looking at Me, credited to Amanda Becker & the Gur Liraz Quartet, followed by the 2023 duo record Ask Me Now. Both lean on the Great American Songbook, refitted with Liraz's own arrangements. The second is Fuasi's Organ Ensemble, a quartet built around organist Tal Balshai's Hammond B3 alongside bandleader Fuasi Abdul-Khaliq and drummer Tilman Person; the group's album When We Were Young was shortlisted for the German Jazz Prize (Deutscher Jazzpreis) in 2025.

2023 also brought Liraz's first record as a leader in his own right: Squiggles (Ubuntu Music), a nine-tune date built around the classic guitar-and-organ trio, with Tal Balshai back on organ and Omri Gondor on drums. Seven of the nine tunes are Liraz's own compositions, the other two are Balshai's, and the whole record is a deliberate throwback to the guitar-organ combos of the 1960s: Wes Montgomery and Melvin Rhyne, Grant Green and Larry Young. Ubuntu Music, the London-based label, released it on May 19, 2023.

Alongside his bands, Liraz teaches in Berlin and has picked up two rounds of Germany's Neustart Kultur emergency-culture grant plus a 2021 GEMA scholarship. He is a member of both GEMA, Germany's music-rights collection society, and the Deutsche Jazzunion (German Jazz Union).

Liraz's playing sits inside the mainstream, blues-rooted swing tradition his two main teachers pointed him toward: four years of private lessons with Ofer Ganor, then eight months in New York under Peter Bernstein, whose own soul-jazz-inflected sound is audible across Squiggles. The organ-trio format itself points further back, to Wes Montgomery and Grant Green and their organist foils Melvin Rhyne and Larry Young, the exact sound Squiggles sets out to revisit. His work with Amanda Becker runs a quieter, parallel lane: guitar in service of a vocalist inside the Great American Songbook, closer to an accompanist's role than the organ trio's groove-first attack.