Oz Noy was born in Rishon LeZion in 1972 and picked up the guitar at ten, drawn in by the Beatles, by the Israeli guitarist Miki Shaviv, and by an older brother who played bass. He turned professional at thirteen. By sixteen he was working alongside established Israeli musicians, and by his early twenties he was one of the busiest session guitarists in the country and a member of the house band on Israel's top-rated television programme for more than two years.

The records from that period bear him out. In 1992, at twenty, Noy is credited on electric guitar on two albums by the singer Yael Levy and on electric and acoustic guitar on Mazi Cohen's Ma'avarim, all three for Hed Arzi, Israel's oldest record company, founded in Tel Aviv in 1946. He also appears on Shlomo Artzi's Yare'ach the same year. A 1991 credit on Ovadia Hamama's Brach! is his earliest catalogued appearance of any kind. Four Israeli records inside twelve months, four years before he set foot in a New York club.

He moved to New York in 1996 and built the next stage the way he had built the first, by playing constantly in one room. A weekly residency at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village drew the attention of players including bassist Will Lee and drummer Anton Fig, and it produced his 2003 debut, Oz Live!, recorded on that stage for Magna Carta. The studio follow-up Ha! arrived in 2005 with Mike Stern guesting, then Fuzzy (2007) with Vinnie Colaiuta and Jimmy Johnson, and Schizophrenic (2009) with Steve Lukather.

The move to Abstract Logix in 2011 opened the most visible phase of his career. Twisted Blues Volume 1 put John Medeski on organ and Allen Toussaint on piano; the second volume, in 2014, added Warren Haynes, Eric Johnson and Chick Corea, who played Rhodes on "Rhumba Tumba." Who Gives A Funk (2016) ran through Fred Wesley, Randy Brecker, Chris Potter, Robben Ford, Dweezil Zappa and Joe Bonamassa. Booga Looga Loo (2019) and Snapdragon (2020) drew on rotating rhythm sections of Colaiuta, Dave Weckl, Dennis Chambers, John Patitucci, James Genus and Will Lee. Alongside these he kept two co-operative bands running: BANN, with saxophonist Seamus Blake, bassist Jay Anderson and drummer Adam Nussbaum, whose As You Like appeared in 2010, and the soul and R&B trio Ozone Squeeze with Rai Thistlethwayte and Darren Stanley, which released records in 2017 and 2023.

Since 2022 his own records have turned sharply toward straight-ahead playing. Riverside (Outside In Music) is a guitar, bass and drums trio with Ugonna Okegwo and Ray Marchica, built from sessions the three had been playing outdoors in Riverside Park on Manhattan's Upper West Side while the clubs were closed. Seven of its ten tracks are standards, among them "All The Things You Are," "Anthropology," "Billie's Bounce" and "Donna Lee." Fun One followed in 2024, his first album for Criss Cross Jazz, recorded in New York with pianist David Kikoski, bassist James Genus and drummer Clarence Penn after the quartet had spent half the year working the material at The Bitter End. In January 2025 he released Recreational Substance, a two-guitar quartet date co-led with Andrew Synowiec.

Noy has never stopped being a sideman. Discogs catalogues 110 releases against his name, of which nineteen credit him as a main artist. The rest run from Israeli pop in 1991 through Gavin DeGraw, Roger Glover, Gov't Mule, Will Lee, Dweezil Zappa and the Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks, and include the two Alternative Guitar Summit volumes honouring Pat Martino, in 2022 and 2026. He also teaches, at Berklee College of Music, The Collective School of Music and Musicians Institute.

Noy's playing sits at the point where jazz harmony meets blues, funk, rock and R&B phrasing. His stated influences run from Charlie Parker to Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and his own description of what he does has been on his website for years: "It's Jazz. It just doesn't sound like it."

That line is worth taking literally. The improvisational vocabulary underneath is bebop-derived, but the surface, distorted tone, heavy effects, groove-first rhythm sections, reads as blues-rock. Guitar Player magazine recognised the tension in its own way, naming him Best Guitar Riff on a Record in 2007, Best New Talent in 2008, and Best "Out There" Guitar Player in 2013.

The two most recent phases of his catalogue complicate that "out there" label. Riverside and Fun One are conventionally instrumented, largely standards-based records with acoustic guitar on several tracks and none of the effects that define his fusion work. Taken together with the Twisted Blues volumes, they suggest the distortion was always a choice rather than a limit.