Reut Regev is a trombonist, composer, and bandleader who has spent more than a quarter century inside New York's most demanding improvised-music circles while never losing the funk, blues, and Latin-music instincts she picked up on the way there. Raised in Israel, she started on piano at five and added trombone at thirteen, then served in the Israel Defense Forces band as its first trombonist and soloist. Her first documented recording came before she ever left the country: in 1996 she played trombone, alongside fellow trombonist Rafi Malkiel, on South African-born Israeli free jazz clarinetist Harold Rubin's album Blue Bag, joining bassist/guitarist Mark Smulian, drummer Assaf Sirkis, and vocalist Gani Tamir, a session that placed her, still a young player, inside Tel Aviv's small free jazz scene. She was discharged from the army in 1998 at nineteen and, by her own account, left for New York the very next day to be with drummer Igal Foni, whom she had met in Israel and later married.

In New York she settled in East Harlem and broke in playing salsa bands whose gigs often started near midnight, work that gave her a Latin-music grounding she still draws on. She briefly attended the Manhattan School of Music but left over a disagreement with its teaching approach, choosing instead to build a career directly on the bandstand. Through the 2000s that meant steady sideman work inside New York's avant-garde and free-improvisation scene: multiple large-ensemble projects led by Anthony Braxton between 2006 and 2025 (documented Discogs credits include the 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006, 12+1tet (Victoriaville) 2007, Trillium E, Echo Echo Mirror House (NYC) 2011, Trillium J (2016), and 2 Comp (2023) releases); cornetist Lawrence "Butch" Morris's Jump Arts Orchestra on Conduction 117 (2003); and two projects led by fellow Israeli saxophonist Assif Tsahar, the Zoanthropic Orchestra's Embracing the Void (2001) and the New York Underground Orchestra's The Labyrinth (2002). Her own artist biography also names guitarist Elliott Sharp among her collaborators from this period. Other early-2000s sideman credits include the Ras Moshe Ensemble's Schematic (2002), klezmer-and-beyond composer Koby Israelite's Dance of the Idiots (2003, Tzadik), and saxophonist Michaël Attias's Credo (2005).

In 2009 Regev and Igal Foni formed RTime, the trombone-led quartet that has been her main vehicle ever since. Its debut, This Is RTime (Ropeadope), paired her and Foni with guitarist David Phelps and bassist Brad Jones on nine original compositions that critics described as sitting between avant jazz, funk, rock, and dub; it was named Best New Discovery of 2009 by All About Jazz, voted the number one Best New Talent of 2009 in Brazil's Jazz Station poll, and placed on David R. Adler's Top 25 Best Debuts of 2009. The album drew notice well beyond the jazz press: the New York Times called her playing "remarkable" and floated the idea that she could be "the jazz equivalent of alternative rock's Riot Grrrl phenomenon," JazzTimes called the record "wildly imaginative and virtuosic," Time Out New York flagged her as a "fast rising trombonist," Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that her playing "travels from Thelonious Monk through Free Funk," France's Citizen Jazz called the album essential listening, and Haaretz described it as "all about now."

RTime's lineup evolved around Regev and Foni, adding guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly and bassist Mark Peterson by the band's second album, exploRing the Vibe (Enja Records), recorded in January 2011 at Bennett Studios in New Jersey (release-year sources vary between 2012 and 2014, see notes.md), which widened the group's palette with guest tuba from Jon Sass and a run of hand percussion and found sounds from Foni. Keep Winning (Enja Records, 2018) kept the same core quartet and folded in group vocals from Regev, Foni, Bourelly, and Peterson, plus a guest vocal from Regev and Foni's daughter, Liana Foni. The band's most recent album, It's Now: RTime Plays Doug Hammond (ESP-Disk', 2024), is devoted entirely to the songbook of veteran American composer, drummer, and singer Doug Hammond, who has been based in Linz, Austria since 1989; the project grew out of a chance connection at a Linz gallery concert, brought Hammond to Regev's home studio in New Jersey for a week of rehearsal and recording in June 2023, and features bassist Eric Revis as a guest, liner notes from critic Howard Mandel, and cover artwork by Liana Foni. In 2021 Regev and Foni also released a duo album as Two Much, Never Enough (Relative Pitch Records), twenty tracks of trombone-and-drums free improvisation with electronics, recorded just before the COVID-19 pandemic and finished during lockdown in their home studio.

Alongside R*Time, Regev has kept a busy parallel career as a sideman across genres: the klezmer ensemble Metropolitan Klezmer's Traveling Show (2007); the blues-and-world band Hazmat Modine's Cicada (2011), Box of Breath (2019), and Bonfire (2023); pianist Monika Herzig's The Whole World in Her Hands (2016) and the all-female supergroup project Sheroes, on both its self-titled 2018 album and 2024's All In Good Time (ZOHO); the Afro-Latin big band Positive Catastrophe's Garabatos Volume One (2009) and Dibrujo, Dibrujo, Dibrujo (2012); bassist Adam Lane's Full Throttle Orchestra on Ashcan Rantings (2010) and Live In Ljubljana (2014); tubist Joseph Daley's Earth Tones Ensemble on The Seven Deadly Sins (2010); pianist Burton Greene's Burton's Time (2014); and singer-songwriter Rachelle Garniez's Who's Counting (2015), among many other credits detailed in discography-full.md. She teaches privately and runs international workshops under the name Notes and Beyond, and lives in Rahway, New Jersey with Foni and their daughter. Her next major project, announced on her own site as Solo Illusion, a solo-trombone piece built from loopers and an octave pedal and combined with spoken personal narrative, is slated for Relative Pitch Records in 2027.

Regev has always resisted a single genre address. By her own description she moves between improvisation, contemporary classical music, jazz, klezmer, blues, and Latin music, and her two defining bandstands bear that out: a two-decade run inside New York's most rigorous notated-and-improvised music, playing under Anthony Braxton and Assif Tsahar, sits alongside a parallel life in salsa, klezmer, and blues-based bands. R*Time is where those strands meet on her own terms: reviewers have located the band's sound "between avant jazz, rock, funk, reggae, and dub," and outlets from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ("Thelonious Monk through Free Funk") to Time Out New York have reached for the same vocabulary of genre-crossing to describe her. The 2024 album built entirely around Doug Hammond's songbook reflects a related instinct: a willingness to devote a whole record to championing an overlooked veteran composer rather than her own writing. Her working life is also a family affair, with husband Igal Foni her constant musical partner since before either of them left Israel, and their daughter Liana Foni now a contributing voice and visual artist on the band's most recent releases.