Uri Sharlin came to New York from Tel Aviv to study jazz piano and finished a BFA with honors in music performance at the City College of New York. What he actually ended up doing there was something else. His first steady work in the city was in a cumbia band, and on a trip home to Tel Aviv he ran into the accordion teacher he had studied with as a child, who sold him his instrument. That secondhand accordion, which he then taught himself to play at a professional level, turned out to be the thing that let him hold his separate musical vocabularies in one place, and it made him one of the first-call accordionists across several New York scenes at once: klezmer and Radical Jewish Culture, Balkan, Brazilian, folk, and jazz.

It is worth being plain about the proportions. Sharlin is not primarily a jazz improviser and his catalogue does not pretend otherwise: his two leader records are instrumental world music with jazz harmony and jazz solo space inside them, and most of his sideman log is Jewish, Balkan and Brazilian repertoire rather than standards. The jazz connection is nonetheless real and documented rather than decorative. He has recorded for Smalls Records with a New York hard bop cast, played on a Grammy-winning Afro-Latin jazz orchestra album, recorded with the stride and swing pianist Dick Hyman, and headlined the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat with his own band. He belongs on this site the way a working crossover player belongs on it, as a musician the jazz scene actually hires.

His own bandleading started in 2003 with the Cardamon Quartet, a piano-and-accordion group with Gilad Harel on clarinet and saxophone, Jennifer Vincent on bass and the Israeli drummer Dan Aran. Its one album, Reflections of the Road, came out on Folk Dune Records on September 15, 2005: ten pieces of his own writing and rearranged traditional folk material, pulling Mediterranean melody against rumba, samba and jazz.

Through the second half of the 2000s his name turns up repeatedly in John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture orbit at Tzadik. He plays accordion and organ on Oy Vey.....Olé!!! (Tzadik TZ 8109, 2006), the meeting of the veteran Jewish-Latin pianist Irving Fields with the Cuban-born percussionist Roberto Juan Rodriguez, which Zorn executive produced; piano, accordion and organ on Rodriguez's own The First Basket (Tzadik TZ 8136, February 2009); and piano, accordion and glockenspiel on Songs of Wonder (Tzadik TZ 8165, 2011), the singer and oud player Basya Schechter's settings of Abraham Joshua Heschel's Yiddish poems. Frank London plays trumpet on both of the latter two, and Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz is on Songs of Wonder and on Schechter's band Pharaoh's Daughter's Haran (oy!hoo Records, 2007), where Sharlin plays accordion alongside Jason Lindner on keyboards.

The clearest straight-jazz credit is Dan Aran's Breathing (Smalls Records SRCD-0045, 2009), where Sharlin doubles piano and accordion on a record whose cast is a roll call of the Smalls generation: Eli Degibri on tenor, Avishai Cohen and Ben Holmes on trumpet, Jonathan Voltzok on trombone, Nir Felder on guitar, Art Hirahara on piano, Itai Kriss on flute, Gili Sharett on bassoon, and Matt Brewer and Tal Ronen splitting the bass chair. Three years later he is the accordionist on Late Last Summer (Left Ear Music, 2012), the album the fiddler Judy Hyman made with her father, the pianist Dick Hyman, appearing on nine of its thirteen tracks. In 2014 he was the guest accordion on "Gnossienne 3 (Tientos)" on The Offense of the Drum by Arturo O'Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra (Motéma, May 6, 2014), the album that won the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album.

Back to the Woods, released October 29, 2013 on Folk Dune Records (FD002, distributed by Naxos), is the record his reputation rests on. It introduced the DogCat Ensemble, a group whose instrumentation says most of what needs saying: Sharlin on accordion, Wurlitzer and piano, Gili Sharett on bassoon, Matt Darriau on bass clarinet, Kyle Sanna on guitars, Jordan Scannella on bass, and Rich Stein and John Hadfield on percussion, with Itai Kriss guesting on flute and alto flute and Ze Mauricio and Michael Lavalle adding pandeiro and zabumba. The nine pieces run from "Night Swim" and "Monte Verde" through the pair "Mundau By Day" and "Mundau By Night" to "Baiao," and Sharlin has said the Brazilian thread is the strongest of them. Reviewing it for Audiophile Audition on October 22, 2013, John Sunier called it an innovative instrumental world music album that owed part of its sound to the classical instruments in the band, and Dawoud Kringle, writing for DooBeeDooBeeDoo NY the next day, described tightly arranged writing that stays accessible. Watching the band at Lincoln Center that September, New York Music Daily noted that Sharlin kept handing the solos to the others and singled out the Balkan metric games, bars of twelve with a bar of eleven slipped in. In February 2016 he brought a five-piece DogCat Ensemble of mostly New York based Israelis to the sixth winter edition of the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat, playing a program that ran from Brazilian material to Yemenite and rock motifs.

The year 2017 was his most visible. In March, Deutsche Grammophon released Avital Meets Avital (479 6523 GH), the record the classical mandolinist Avi Avital made with the bassist and oud player Omer Avital, no relation, with Yonathan Avishai on piano, Itamar Doari on percussion, and Sharlin the accordionist of the quintet. Sharlin and Avi Avital had already recorded together on Songs of Wonder. The same spring he was in the pit and on stage on Broadway: Playbill lists him on Paula Vogel's Indecent, which opened at the Cort Theatre on April 18, 2017, as the original understudy for accordion, baritone ukulele and percussion. That show produced a spinoff band, Broadway Folk, assembled by the Indecent composer and Klezmatics violinist Lisa Gutkin to play the show's music and the players' own writing, with Sharlin alongside Gutkin, Matt Darriau, Zoe Aqua and Doug Wieselman; it played Jalopy in Brooklyn on November 17, 2017.

Alongside all of it, Sharlin spent years in Natalie Merchant's band, credited on piano and accordion on Paradise Is There: The New Tigerlily Recordings (Nonesuch, 2015) and listed by Discogs across her Leave Your Sleep (2010), self-titled (2014) and Keep Your Courage (2023) albums, and he was featured as a pianist and composer on HBO's Flight of the Conchords. He founded Play Me a Story, a musical storytelling program for children. His website went dark around 2019 and his public performing calendar since then is thin; his own Facebook page now lists him as a musician and music teacher in Rehovot, Israel, which no second source confirms.

Sharlin's accordion playing is built for ensemble writing rather than for display. Reviewers who have watched him lead the DogCat Ensemble note that he spends most of a set comping and cueing and gives the solos away, and the records bear that out: the interest is in what the bassoon, bass clarinet, guitar and two percussionists are doing to each other, not in accordion virtuosity. His compositional habit is to keep a Balkan asymmetric meter running underneath a Brazilian harmonic move or an Arabic mode, so that the pieces read as through-composed even when they open into free playing. All About Jazz has called him a wonderfully free flowing accordionist and AllMusic has praised his masterfully crafted arrangements, and Hot House described his writing as classy and compelling. What separates him from a straight world-music arranger is where he learned: the jazz piano training at City College, the years in the Tzadik circle, and the working relationship with the Smalls generation of Israeli players in New York. The accordion is the joint. He has said he found it after his jazz-piano training and his cumbia work had already pulled in different directions, and it gave him one instrument that could sit convincingly in a klezmer band, a choro group, a Balkan set and a jazz rhythm section without changing its accent.