Noam Wiesenberg is a double bassist, composer, and arranger who grew up in Tel Aviv, the son of the Israeli composer and pianist Prof. Menachem Wiesenberg, and has spent close to two decades building a working career in New York's jazz scene. In an interview with 15 Questions, he traced his musical start to the cello, at age six, playing classical European repertoire, while his father exposed him at home to a mix that ran from the Beatles and Stevie Wonder to Duke Ellington, Paco de Lucia, Turkish and Bulgarian music, Indian classical music, and klezmer. He switched his focus to the double bass at 20, drawn, per his own biography distributed by Smalls Live, by "the musical capabilities of jazz musicians." Before he left Israel, he built a substantial career there as a cellist and arranger: he played cello, credited as part of the "Moran Ensemble" string section, on Israeli metal band Orphaned Land's acclaimed 2004 concept album Mabool, wrote string arrangements performed by the Jerusalem and Haifa Symphony Orchestras, arranged one track on pop singer Ofer Bashan's 2008 self-titled album, placed second in the "Israeli Jazz Player of the Year" competition, and received a decade of scholarships (1998 to 2008) from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation.

He moved to Boston in 2008, attended the International Association of Schools of Jazz's meeting in Riga that same year, and graduated magna cum laude in Jazz Performance from Berklee College of Music in 2010, after which he relocated to New York. Since 2013, Wiesenberg has served as musical director and strings arranger for singer and guitarist Camila Meza's Nectar Orchestra, the octet Meza built around her 2019 album Ambar. He is also a founding member of Kind Folk, a collective quartet with trumpeter John Raymond, alto saxophonist Alex LoRe, and drummer Colin Stranahan, formed in 2014 and recording for the Fresh Sound New Talent label; the band released Why Not in 2018 and, after Raymond took a teaching post at Indiana University and Stranahan relocated to Denver, reconvened in New York in 2021 to record Head Towards the Center, released in 2022.

Wiesenberg released his debut album as a leader, Roads Diverge, on Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records in May 2018: a set of original compositions built on the idea that the act of choosing matters more than what is chosen, closing with a cover of Radiohead's "The Tourist." The band paired him with trumpeter Philip Dizack, pianist Shai Maestro, drummer Kush Abadey, alto saxophonist and clarinetist Immanuel Wilkins, and, on one track, tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens. Reviewing the album for All About Jazz, Geno Thackara wrote that "the leader's arranging skills generally keep the piano and dual horns weaving around each other without crowding," praised Wiesenberg's "natural understatement" as a bassist, and called the record "a very colorful debut full of promise and heart." Filipe Freitas at JazzTrail put it more simply: the album "demonstrates sufficient conviction regarding this musician's artistic path."

His second album, NeoNomadic, followed in November 2023 on La Reserve, again built around the theme of home, this time examining what he has called the cognitive dissonance of being a global citizen. The record reunites him with Dizack on trumpet and Abadey on drums, adds guitarist Charles Altura and pianist Mike King, and features tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana as a guest on "Dark Matter." Speaking to 15 Questions about his creative process, Wiesenberg said: "I believe the music is already there, but like a fine diamond, you have to find it and then polish and clean it until it's perfect." He added that he never writes a tune "as a platform for musicians to improvise," aiming instead for pieces with "an interesting arc," a quality he says listeners have described as cinematic.

Beyond his own catalogue, Wiesenberg's own official biography credits him with performances alongside drummers Ari Hoenig, Billy Hart, Antonio Sanchez, and Jeff "Tain" Watts, pianists Aaron Goldberg and Uri Caine, saxophonists Dave Liebman, Seamus Blake, and Will Vinson, guitarists Lage Lund and Jonathan Kreisberg, and fellow Israeli-born musicians Gilad Hekselman and Yotam Silberstein (see notes.md on the sourcing of this list). He has performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Kennedy Center, and the Blue Note, and toured across Africa, India, and Europe. He teaches bass and composition, giving master classes internationally, and lives in Brooklyn.

Wiesenberg's writing sits at the intersection of the classical training he started as a child and the postbop language he absorbed at Berklee and in New York. He has said he was raised on an unusually wide range of records via his father, spanning the Beatles and Stevie Wonder to Ellington, Paco de Lucia, Turkish and Bulgarian folk music, Indian classical music, and klezmer, and traces of that range surface on Roads Diverge in the Hebrew-titled pieces "Shir Le'Shir" ("song for a song") and "Davka" (a Hebrew word roughly meaning "specifically," or "just to spite"), set alongside straight-ahead postbop writing for a horn-and-rhythm-section band. More than one reviewer has picked up on a Wayne Shorter influence in his harmonic writing. He has also said that he does not write tunes "as a platform for musicians to improvise," preferring compositions with a clear dramatic shape, a quality listeners have told him sounds cinematic. As an arranger, his work runs from small-group jazz to orchestral commissions performed by the Jerusalem and Haifa Symphony Orchestras, and continues today in his role as musical director and strings arranger for Camila Meza's Nectar Orchestra.