Itai Weissman grew up in Beer Sheva, in Israel's south, where he formed his first band as a teenager with two future bandmates, keyboardist Omer Rizi and drummer Itay Hibsher, playing instrumental fusion covers of Mike Stern, Alain Caron, and Pat Metheny. He left for Amsterdam to study jazz saxophone at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, working there with Branford Marsalis, Dick Oatts, Jasper Blom, Ferdinand Povel, and Eric Alexander (one source dates the move to 2006, another to 2008; see notes.md). Part of that education took him briefly back across the Atlantic: he and the Israeli guitar student Eran Har Even spent a semester as exchange students at Temple University's Boyer College of Music and Dance in Philadelphia, where they met the trumpeter and EVI player John Swana, the start of a creative partnership between Weissman and Har Even that has run for close to two decades since.

While still a student, in 2007, Weissman founded the trio WEIZZ! with the French bassist Charley Roussel and the German drummer Eddie Jensen. The group won Best Group at the Keep an Eye Jazz Award in 2009, and used the accompanying grant, money the three students could not otherwise have afforded, to record their debut album, From Father to Son (2011), which the Dutch blog MuziekGezien described as a kind of traditional avant-garde jazz shot through with Israeli and klezmer material and gave four stars. The tenor saxophonist Yaniv Nachum guests on two tracks, and two others, "Sahbak" and "Andy's Room," are co-written with Har Even.

Weissman's other long-running vehicle was Har Even's own band. From 2013 he played electronic wind instrument in EvenSanne, the loop-and-effects quartet Har Even led with the singer Sanne Huijbregts and the drummer Jeroen Batterink; their debut Something So Sweet appeared in 2014, and the follow-up, What If (Berthold Records, 2017), was nominated for an Edison Jazz/World Award in 2018, Dutch music's equivalent of a Grammy. The two also co-led the neo-fusion quintet Little Known Facts, whose 2014 single "In Search of the New Temple" added bassist Martin Hiltawski, keyboardist Coen Molenaar, and drummer Sebastiaan Cornelissen, and Weissman's tenor saxophone turns up on Har Even's credit list well beyond that: on the Luxembourg bassist Pol Belardi's eleven-piece Urban Voyage (Unit Records, 2016), on the guitar-EWI-drums trio record 20/21 (2022), and as a guest on Har Even's own Live at Jazz Café Alto (2026).

Weissman built his own leader catalogue around the EWI as much as the saxophone. Under his own name, the organ-trio session Guru (2020) pairs his EWI with Tommaso Perazzo's Hammond B3 organ and Henning Luther's drums; the same rhythm section, with the bassist Diego Rodriguez, recorded a live set at Amsterdam's Het Zeemanshuis in December 2018 released as Usedtobenew's Casual Activities, one of several lineups working under the Usedtobenew (also billed UsedToBeNew) banner, whose Popular Emotions (2018) is his most widely distributed release under that name. A solo run of Band of DJs (2017) and Tascam Sessions Vol. 1 (2019), built entirely around the EWI's electronic textures, documents the same instrument from the other direction, as a one-person live-looping act rather than a band voice. And in 2019 he returned to Beer Sheva's original teenage lineup: FullBite, the sax-keys-drums trio he reformed with Rizi and Hibsher once bass guitar dropped out of the arrangement, released its self-titled debut on the Dutch label Zennez Records, billed on release as "electrojazzed mind food."

Alongside his own bands, Weissman is a regularly credited sideman on other people's jazz dates: the Polish-Dutch Mateusz Pulawski Lunar Quartet's Change of Seasons (2015), the Afrobeat-inflected jazz band Koffie's Éh Lady (Dox Records, 2013), the official showcase CD for the 2014 edition of Rotterdam's Jazz Dag festival weekend, drummer Yoràn Vroom's A Forgotten Story... (2023), released on Amsterdam's own Bimhuis Records, the label of the city's flagship jazz club, and American trumpeter Philip Lassiter's Raw in Amsterdam (Color Red, 2023). He has also crossed into pop and electronic sessions along the way, playing saxophone and EWI on the Dutch pop group HAEVN's 2021 concert film and on the electronic act Polynation's 2025 EP Bloom (see Style & Influences). Since finishing his own studies, Weissman has taught saxophone and EWI at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and has spent 15 years developing a parallel specialty in wind synthesis: his current project, Instrumenta Online, records and digitally restores the sound of historical woodwinds too fragile for museums to let anyone play, using an electronic wind controller and spectral analysis to make them playable again as data rather than as physical objects.

Weissman's career runs on an instrument most jazz listeners have never heard of: the EWI, an electronic wind instrument that lets a breath-controlled player phrase and bend pitch the way a saxophonist does. Where most musicians who own one treat it as a novelty, Weissman has built fifteen years of output around it, an EWI-only solo project (Band of DJs), a wind-synthesis teaching practice at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and now a historical-instrument digitization project that uses it to give museum-bound woodwinds a second life. That specialization sits inside a genuinely jazz training and touring history, a Keep an Eye Jazz Award, formal jazz-saxophone study, and a decade of Discogs-tagged Jazz sideman dates, but his actual working discography reads as consistently cross-genre rather than straight-ahead: klezmer and Israeli folk material in WEIZZ!, folk-pop songcraft in EvenSanne, Afrobeat in Koffie, and outright pop and downtempo-electronic sideman credits with HAEVN and Polynation. He has described his own influences as a reflection of Israel's own musical mix, klezmer, Middle Eastern music, classical, and jazz side by side, and that mix, more than any single genre lane, is the throughline of his work.