Tal Mashiach grew up in Harashim, a small village in the Galilee mountains of northern Israel, and came to his two instruments in the opposite order from most jazz bassists. Classical guitar arrived first, at ten. The double bass did not turn up until he was seventeen, an age by which most players in that chair already have years behind them. Both instruments stayed, and the refusal to choose between them has shaped everything since.

At eighteen he won first prize at the national guitar competition run by the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, the oldest and largest academic performing arts institution in Israel, founded in 1933. The America-Israel Cultural Foundation backed him with scholarships for classical study and for jazz study, a split that mirrors the split in his own playing. A full scholarship to The New School in New York followed, and he moved there in 2015. He has been based in Brooklyn since.

His arrival in New York put him quickly into the orbit of clarinetist Anat Cohen and her label, Anzic Records. Mashiach played bass on the Anat Cohen Tentet's Happy Song (2017) and again on Triple Helix (2019), the Tentet's second album, which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. He also took the bass chair in the Anat Cohen Quartetinho, the four-piece she runs with pianist and accordionist Vitor Gonçalves and vibraphonist James Shipp, appearing on Quartetinho (2022) and Quartetinho: Bloom (2024). On both Quartetinho records Discogs lists all four musicians under main-artist billing rather than treating them as a leader's sidemen, which reflects how the group actually works.

His own first album arrived after the Grammy nomination rather than before it. Tiyul came out on Anzic Records in March 2022, and its making is the most revealing thing about him. The word is Hebrew for travel, and each of its eight pieces had been written somewhere else in the world, on a different trip. In April 2021 he took all of them back to Harashim, shut himself into a cabin in the woods for seven days, and recorded, produced and edited the record there alone with a classical guitar. Guests appear only briefly: Oded Shoub adds a second guitar to "Goats," and "Vv & Zaco" brings in vocals from Aviva "Vv" Mashiach and Dana Herz alongside a small string trio. Everything else is one man and one instrument in a room.

Between the two leader records he kept the sideman work running. He plays bass and shares a producer credit on the GTO Trio's Within (Anzic, January 2025), the debut under their own name by pianist Gadi Lehavi and drummer Ofri Nehemya. He appears on East of the River's Ija Mia: Soundscape of the Sephardic Diaspora (Avie Records, 2024). In March 2026 he turned up on guitar rather than bass on track nine of Shai Maestro's The Guesthouse (Naïve), and on Gilad Barakan's Unsettled the same month.

Who's Around?, released 26 June 2026 on Anzic Records, is the record that finally puts the whole range in one place. It answers its title with seventeen musicians whose roots run through Israel, Greece, Georgia, Venezuela and Chile, and its ten tracks move between jazz, Greek zeibekiko, Brazilian samba, Spanish flamenco and straight classical writing. Anat Cohen plays clarinet on the lead single "Titu," released two months ahead of the album. Itamar Borochov is on trumpet, Gadi Lehavi on piano and organ, Ofri Nehemya on drums, Maya Belsitzman on cello, with bouzouki, doli, trombone and flute filling out the rest. Where Tiyul was one player alone in a cabin, this is the same musician using an entire scene as his instrument.

Mashiach's playing sits on a genuinely double foundation, and the two halves feed each other rather than sitting side by side. The classical guitar training gives his writing a contrapuntal, through-composed quality that survives even in ensemble settings; the double bass work, learned later and in a jazz context, gives him the rhythmic authority to hold a bandstand together. On Tiyul the guitar is the whole voice. On the Anat Cohen Tentet and Quartetinho records the bass is, and the writing instinct shows up in how he places notes rather than in how many.

The other constant is Mediterranean and Balkan material treated as first-class jazz vocabulary rather than as decoration. Greek zeibekiko, Brazilian samba, Spanish flamenco and Georgian song all appear on Who's Around? played by musicians who grew up inside those traditions, which is a different proposition from a jazz group borrowing a rhythm. This places him alongside the strand of Israeli jazz, running through Omer Avital, Amos Hoffman and Itamar Borochov, that treats the eastern Mediterranean as home ground rather than as an exotic guest.