Katia Toobool is a jazz pianist and keyboardist, born in Moscow, Russia, who has spent the last several years at the center of Tel Aviv's working jazz scene, both as a bandleader and as one of its most in-demand sidewomen. She trained at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Israel before continuing her studies at the New School in New York. Per her own artist biography, distributed by the Jerusalem Jazz Festival for a 2021 concert billing, after graduating she "worked her way into the contemporary jazz scene" in New York, playing with drummers Eric Harland and Gregory Hutchinson and with Milena Gillard, among others, before returning to Israel. Back home, she and her partner, drummer Eddie Tubul, formed their own ensemble, and she built a working career alongside a long list of the country's established jazz musicians, among them Arale Kaminsky, Amikam Kimelman, Jess Koren, Ilan Salem, Avi Lebovich, Assaf Hakimi, and Amit Friedman. The same biography credits her as a teacher at the Rimon School of Music and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

Her most visible ongoing credit is as the pianist in saxophonist Alon Farber's long-running band Hagiga, appearing on the live album The Magician: Live in Jerusalem (2024, Origin Records), recorded with American trumpeter Dave Douglas at the Jerusalem Jazz Festival, and on the group's most recent studio album, Dreams I Dream (2025, Origin Records), scaled down to a working quartet. Reviewing that record for All About Jazz, Jack Bowers singled her out alongside bassist Assaf Hakimi and drummer Yonatan Rosen as having "vital roles to play, fashioning a durable comfort zone wherein Farber is free to stretch his improvisational wings," and noted that the quartet "holds forth for the most part" on her own ballad, "An Old Friend."

She is also the keyboardist behind two of guitarist Inbar Fridman's recent releases: the 2023 vocal single "Migdalim," Fridman's first released original composition with her own lyrics, and Fridman's fourth album as a leader, Mercy (2025, Adhyâropa Records), alongside bassist Lior Ozeri and drummer Yogev Gabay.

As a leader in her own right, Toobool released her debut trio album, New Sun (2024, Ainola), with bassist Yonatan Levi and drummer Ofri Nehemya, a set of original compositions she has described as drawing on a classical training background layered with jazz harmony and groove. The same rhythm section, expanded with saxophonists Asaf Yuria and Alex Levin, performs as the Yonatan Levi & Katia Toobool Quintet, co-leading original material at venues including the Jerusalem Jazz Festival. For close to a decade, she has also recorded and performed as a duo with saxophonist Yehonatan Cohen; the pair released Neshima ("Breath") in 2020, built on melodies she composed for the first time, and have continued to perform together since, including at Tel Aviv's Felicja Blumental Music Center (press coverage of that duo also references a second, later duo release; see notes.md for a sourcing caveat on that title).

Toobool's other credits include piano on saxophonist Amit Friedman's sextet album Long Way To Go (2016, Origin Records), alongside oud and guitar player Amos Hoffman and drummer Amir Bresler; a place in the Queenta Ensemble, an all-women Israeli jazz group organized around the Queenta Woman Jazz Festival in Jerusalem, alongside vocalist Chen Levy and flutist Hadar Noiberg; and a 2021 duo performance with trumpeter Avishai Cohen (the trumpeter, not the bassist of the same name) at Tel Aviv's Zikuk Festival, billed as original, improvised music "traveling between New Orleans and the Middle East." Her own official discography page also credits her as pianist for a performance of Yuval Cohen's Chamber Jazz Sextet's ten-part KadishZuger Suite; other sources list the sextet's studio pianist as Gadi Lehavi, so this credit is noted here with that caveat (see notes.md).

Toobool's playing draws on the two traditions her training crossed: formal classical piano technique, the "classical training background" she herself cites for her own compositions, and the small-group New York jazz vocabulary she absorbed at the New School and, by her own account, playing alongside drummers Eric Harland and Gregory Hutchinson before she returned to Israel. That combination surfaces most clearly in her highest-profile sideman work: Alon Farber's Hagiga folds swing-era harmony together with Moroccan, Brazilian, and Middle Eastern material, and reviewers have singled out Toobool's own writing as the band's emotional anchor point. All About Jazz's Jack Bowers called her ballad "An Old Friend" a "luminous composition (and touchstone)" that the whole quartet plays around. Her own leader work, on New Sun, leans more directly into a straight-ahead piano-trio idiom built, in her own words (from the album's liner notes), to give "each and every interpretation of a tune" room to be "totally different and unique," while her long-running duo with saxophonist Yehonatan Cohen strips the format down further, to a single melodic horn and piano, an intimate chamber-jazz pairing built on original tunes rather than standards.