Shalosh is not a leader-and-sidemen outfit; it is three names sharing a name, "Shalosh," the Hebrew word for "three." Pianist Gadi Stern and drummer Matan Assayag started playing together as teenagers in Jerusalem, in an earlier band called Enoma Elish. When that group ended, the two kept working together, splitting time between Israel and New York, where Stern spent time absorbing the local jazz scene. In early 2014 they formed Shalosh in Tel Aviv; bassist David Michaeli joined in 2016, replacing founding bassist Daniel Benhorin and locking in the trio's current lineup.

Their debut, The Bell Garden, was recorded live in-studio at Kicha Studios in Tel Aviv in January 2014 with founding bassist Daniel Benhorin, and was named album of the year by the Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom — a strong opening statement for a trio with no label behind it yet. Rules of Oppression followed in 2017 (recorded live at Bardo Studios in Tel Aviv in January 2016, with David Michaeli now on bass), released through Jazz Family and Contemplate Music, and was picked up by European critics as one of the year's better jazz records. A year later, in 2018, the trio also cut Studio Konzert for the German label Neuklang — a direct-to-tape live-in-studio session at Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg, recorded July 3, 2017, part of Bauer's well-regarded audiophile "Studio Konzert" series and one of the trio's better-reviewed Discogs entries. By 2019 the trio had a deal with ACT Music, the German label, and their ACT debut, Onwards and Upwards, arrived that May; that same year they gave their first-ever performance with a full orchestra, the Würzburg Philharmonic, in Germany. Broken Balance (2020) followed on ACT, then Tales of Utopia, a concept record built around ancient tales and legends, recorded January and March 2023 and released that September. Along the way the trio has also performed with the Trier Philharmonic Orchestra and sold out Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie, the landmark concert hall, on tour — rare territory for an instrumental piano trio with no vocalist and no guest headliner.

What holds all of this together, orchestra dates and jazz clubs alike, is a refusal to stay inside one genre's fence — and reworking pop and rock songs into the trio's own vocabulary is a habit that goes back further than it might look. Studio Konzert (2018) already carried a version of Lana Del Rey's "Video Games"; Onwards and Upwards (2019) worked over a-ha's "Take On Me" and the standard "You'll Never Walk Alone"; Broken Balance (2020) took on Nirvana's "Breed." That instinct is most visible yet on the trio's sixth studio album, What We Are Made Of, released March 27, 2026 on ACT Music, which mixes originals with reworked covers of Oasis's "Don't Look Back in Anger," Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn," and — the one that got the most attention — Aqua's 1997 novelty hit "Barbie Girl." Stern doesn't treat the cover as a joke: he has described the original as "a brilliantly cynical song with great lyrics," minor-key and melancholic underneath its pop shine, and said the trio "broke down all the elements to see how we could put it back together and make it more faithful to the essence of the song." That's the same process, in miniature, that has carried the trio from a self-released debut to a sold-out night at the Elbphilharmonie: take something apart, keep what's true in it, and rebuild it as a trio.

Shalosh works the same nerve as Avishai Cohen's rock-inflected Gadu project: serious jazz musicians who treat genre boundaries as optional. Their sound sits at the intersection of jazz-rock and electronic music, built on Stern's piano, Rhodes, and synth textures over Michaeli's bass and Assayag's drums, but the trio also folds in classical structure, African and Middle Eastern rhythmic ideas, and — increasingly, on record — direct engagement with pop and rock repertoire, reworked rather than covered straight. It's a chamber-sized, high-energy sound that has translated equally well to jazz clubs, rock-festival stages, and orchestra halls.