Avi Rothbard is an Israeli-born jazz guitarist who became a fixture of the New York scene, leading his own trios and quartets at clubs including the Blue Note, Birdland, Smalls, Smoke and Minton's Playhouse. Raised on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, he began on mandolin before switching to guitar, and after service in the Israeli Defense Forces he performed around Jerusalem with players such as Avishai Cohen and Amikam Kimmelman. He first came to New York in 1991, working alongside pianist Uri Caine and drummer Jimmy Lovelace, and in 1995 won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music, where he took the Jimi Hendrix Award among other honors before completing a master's degree in jazz performance at the City College of New York. His playing moves comfortably across bebop, swing and beyond, and his writing earned him the John Lennon Songwriting Award in the jazz category in 2014 and the USA Songwriting Competition jazz prize in 2019. He documented his trio on the 2016 album City Colors.
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