Menachem Zibziner was born in Haifa on July 12, 1964, and came up through the city's rock and blues scene in the early 1980s, playing guitar in a run of local bands: Killer Lahohot, Feeling Bluesy (1982-1984), Diaz (1986) and Five in B-flat (1986-1988). At 19 he moved to Tel Aviv, where the jazz side of his career began in earnest.

In 1988 he co-founded the Minuette Jazz Quartet with saxophonist and clarinetist Nitzan Ein Habar, bassist Itai Shimron and drummer Doron Raphaeli. Minuette's debut, First Dance, was recorded live in October 1989 at Gal-Kol Studios in Tel Aviv and released in 1990 on MCI Records; a second album, Patricio's Story, followed on NMC Records in 1993. A third, Eternal River (1995), is documented in Zibziner's own biography but has no listing anywhere on Discogs. A separate session recorded the same year as First Dance, in January 1989, paired Zibziner with fellow guitarist Tom Bellman for a nine-hour continuous live set for Israeli army radio's Galei Tzahal, hosted by Danny Karpel; it went unreleased for a decade, finally appearing after restoration and remastering in 1999 as Two and Free.

In July 1996 Zibziner brought together a one-time session at Gal-Kol Studio billed as The Night Before: his electric guitar alongside saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, not yet the London-based figure he would soon become, bassist Yaron Stavi (Atzmon's longtime musical partner) and drummer Doron Raphaeli. The quartet recorded live to DAT in a single ten-hour session, most of it in first takes, including a run at Miles Davis's "Nardis." Two years later, in August 1998, American saxophonist Jay Rodriguez sat in with a Minuette lineup of Zibziner, Shimron and Raphaeli for a live date at Tel Aviv's Camelot club, released as Minuette with Jay.

Zibziner joined saxophonist Albert Beger's quartet around 1998, a partnership that produced Art Of The Moment (2000, Third Ear Music). Beger's own Wikipedia biography credits the album's personnel as Zibziner on guitars, Gabi Meir on bass and Amir David on drums, but that credit is the only source found anywhere for the session: the album has no Discogs entry, and no label page, review or archived listing corroborates the Wikipedia-sourced personnel independently.

Through the 2000s Zibziner worked across a wider range of projects: The K. Malka Project (2002-2004) with singer Keren Malka, and the groups Taram (2000-2003), Paka (2002-2003), Compulsive Disorder (2003-2005) and Urbans (2005-2007). He also became a working composer and engineer for the stage, scoring choreographer Sally Ann Frindland's From Above and Red at Tel Aviv's Suzanne Dellal Centre; a 2004 collection called Dance and Drama gathers this theater, dance and film work, running his own home studio for recording, mixing and mastering. Minuette itself resurfaced periodically, including a 2017 live release, and Zibziner guested with the Jazzlans Trio between 2012 and 2014.

After three decades mostly as a sideman, collaborator and producer, Zibziner stepped forward under his own name for the first time on record with the Primal EP (2022) and the full-length Pulse (2025). Pulse is a quartet date with bassist Ron Barzilai, drummer Naveh Raz and, on drums as well, his son Itamar Zibziner, with trumpeter Eli Hasson guesting; built around a 2024 tour, it mixes original compositions with covers of Jakob Bro, Tomasz Stanko, Luke Howard, McCoy Tyner and Eviatar Banai, and carries liner notes by Israeli jazz critic Adam Baruch.

Zibziner's playing traces a straight line from the fusion-rock bands of his Haifa adolescence to the more spacious, melodic music he leads today. He has named American jazz-fusion guitarists and the ECM roster, with its European and Nordic atmosphere, as his defining influences, and that shift shows across his catalogue: the Minuette Jazz Quartet's own billing as "contemporary jazz" shading into "spiritual" and "atmospheric jazz" describes both the 1990s group and the 2025 Pulse quartet decades later. His compositions and cover choices on Pulse, drawing on Jakob Bro, Tomasz Stanko and McCoy Tyner alongside Israeli songwriter Eviatar Banai, place him explicitly inside that ECM-adjacent, folk-inflected lineage rather than the more overtly Middle Eastern or free-improvising strands of the Tel Aviv scene he came up in alongside Albert Beger.