Tanenbaum has performed with many of the classic salsa artists and bands such as Pete "El Conde" Rodriguez, Marvin Santiago, Daniel Santos, Tommy Olivencia, Cheo Feliciano, Santitos Colón, Lalo Rodríguez and Roberto Roena for whom he became musical director in 1986.

Tanenbaum played a vital role in defining the sound that allowed Guayacán to effectively reach out to the growing U.S. and European Latino markets.

Tanenbaum has taken special interest in all-female salsa bands -popular in Colombia- such as Caña Brava, Aché Orquesta and Santísima Charanga, and has contributed to the field as director, arranger and producer.

Since 2018 Izzy Tanenbaum can be heard performing in the San Francisco Bay Area with his ensemble Latinbaum and with renown musicians from the West Coast such as Pete Escovedo in classic venues like Yoshi's [11] and Angelicas.

In the 90's he created soundtracks for radio comedies and worked on the music for Amor, Mujeres y Flores, a Colombian documentary directed by Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, and for the TV series Otra en Mi.

For the first Iberoamerican Theater Festival in Bogota, Israel composed the music for one of the first transmedia performances in Colombia, alongside illustrator and storyteller Alekos.

In 2009 he composed the music for El Atolondrado, an adaptation for clown of Molière's classic by Argentinian director, Ricardo Behrens[15] produced by the Colombian National Theater.

On his return to Colombia in 2008, he introduced music business classes to the Javeriana Faculty of Arts where he taught and directed Latin and jazz ensembles until 2014.

In the decade of the 80s, he designed the first rehearsal studio in Bogota, Colombia (in the downtown neighborhood of "La Concordia") used by bands such as Guayacan, Ivan and Lucia and Ache.