Tal Gamlieli is an Israeli double bassist, composer, and bandleader from a farming community in the hills near Jerusalem, raised between two family traditions: a father whose roots trace to Kurdistan (the Iraq-Turkey border region), whose family celebrations brought in traditional Kurdish musicians and dance, and a mother whose parents fled Berlin in 1936 and carried a classical-music household with them. He started out on rock guitar as a teenager before a set of workshops with the American saxophonist and Israeli-jazz-education pioneer Arnie Lawrence pulled him toward jazz and, soon after, toward the double bass.

He trained classically first, earning an undergraduate degree in double bass from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (commonly known by its founding name, the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance) under Michael Klinghoffer, with additional ear-training and theory study under Dr. Bat-Sheva Rubinstein. He left for the United States to study at the New England Conservatory in Boston, earning a master's degree there and working directly with faculty bassists Dave Holland and Cecil McBee, alongside private study with pianists Danilo Perez and Joanne Brackeen, saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi, and drummer Yoron Israel. It was a period that put him in the same Boston jazz-scene orbit as fellow NEC-connected musicians such as Luxembourg-born pianist Michel Reis and American pianist Jason Yeager, both of whom later hired him for their own leader debuts.

Gamlieli has been active as a working jazz bassist since 2007. His two earliest documented recordings as a sideman both came out of that Boston circle: pianist Michel Reis's trio debut Point of No Return (2010, Armored Records), with drummer Adam Cruz, and pianist Jason Yeager's trio debut Ruminations (2011, Inner Circle Music), with drummer Michael Gleichman. Both are independently confirmed through the Discogs API under Gamlieli's own, single, unambiguous artist entity (no name variations, no collision with another artist of the same name).

In 2014 he formed his own working trio, originally with pianist Moshe Elmakias and drummer Amir Bar Akiva; the piano chair later passed to Chai Bar David, with Bar Akiva remaining the trio's constant drummer through its subsequent recordings and touring. The trio made its first international festival appearance at the Panama Jazz Festival in January 2016, and went on to play the Love Supreme Jazz Festival (UK), Jazz Dock (Prague), the Bansko Jazz Festival, and club dates including Small's Jazz Club (New York), the Smithsonian Institution and the Kimmel Center. His debut album as a leader, Dania (2017), is named for and dedicated to his wife and was recorded with pianist Kevin Harris and drummer Jorge Perez-Albela, with guest appearances from trumpeter Avishai Cohen, saxophonists Marco Pignataro and Stan Strickland, and drummer Richie Barshay.

His most widely reviewed record is Change of Heart (2019), co-led and co-billed with American saxophonist Dayna Stephens as "Tal Gamlieli Trio meets Dayna Stephens," with Chai Bar David on piano and Rhodes and Amir Bar Akiva on drums. The two conceived it on tour in Israel in December 2016, setting themselves the goal of writing music about peace without ever using the word; the trio was already playing the material live at Small's by December 2017, and the finished album, released on the Dutch label Jazztribes, was reviewed in DownBeat. He currently teaches at his own alma mater, the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem, and led the classical-and-jazz program at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance High School for three years starting in 2014.

Several secondary artist-bio sources (SmallsLive, One Stop Jazz Collective, and others that appear to draw on his own press materials) describe him as a recipient of "a DownBeat Award for Outstanding Performance." No independently locatable DownBeat notice naming a specific year or award category could be found to corroborate this beyond his own stated biography; it is carried here as his own long-stated credential rather than an independently verified award, consistent with how this project treats similar uncorroborated bio credits elsewhere (see notes.md).

Gamlieli's own music sits at the point where a conservatory-trained, post-bop double bass vocabulary (by way of Dave Holland and Cecil McBee at NEC) meets the specific, personal folk material of his own upbringing: Kurdish Debka dance rhythms, Yemenite melodic material, and North African rhythmic ideas, worked into his trio's original compositions rather than quoted as decoration. That same instinct extends into overtly programmatic writing: Change of Heart's song titles ("Common Ancestors," "Check Point," "Just an Ordinary Girl," "At Least 37th Cousins") each approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a specific, human angle without naming it directly, a lyric-free protest suite built entirely from instrumental jazz writing. As a sideman on Michel Reis's and Jason Yeager's Boston-scene debut recordings, he plays a more straightforwardly mainstream, tightly interactive piano-trio role.