Amit Friedman was born in Ashdod in 1981 and came to music through an older cousin who played trumpet, which is what got him into the Ashdod Conservatory. He started on saxophone at eight. At twelve he went to a summer camp for young musicians, heard what saxophonists from the rest of the country could do, and decided on the spot to apply to the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts. The commute was about ninety minutes each way and his father, a physics teacher, drove him, leaving the house at five in the morning.

Jazz arrived at fourteen, in New York. His parents took him to the Blue Note on a family trip and he sat through two sets, one led by a singer and one by an organ player, without knowing who either was; he worked out later that he had watched Jon Hendricks and Jimmy Smith. Writing about it in the sleeve notes to Unconditional Love twenty-odd years afterwards, he remembered his father telling him from then on that when he finally played the Blue Note he wanted to be the chauffeur who drove him there. In the same years he was making a weekly drive of his own, to Jerusalem, to study with the American-born composer and saxophonist Stephen Horenstein. His military service was in the IDF Orchestra.

The working career started underneath other people's names. Through the 2000s Friedman was a first-call horn player on Israeli pop and rock records and stages, backing Danny Sanderson, HaDorbanim, Funkenstein, David Broza and The Idan Raichel Project; his earliest documented session is the whole of Shlomi Shaban's 2000 debut. From 2006 to 2009 he played in, and for three years musically directed, the house band on Lior Schlein's late-night television show, which is where he met the guitarist Tamar Eisenman. The more consequential job of that decade was a jazz one: he was in the quintet that grew into Avi Lebovich's big band, later billed as the Israel Jazz Orchestra, and held a tenor chair in it across Groove Collage (Hed-Arzi, 2008), Volcano (2013), the Shem-Tov Levi collaboration Bechevra Tova (2015) and Nine Tales One Story (2018), where he splits the tenor book with Alexander Levin. He also wrote for the orchestra, and it invited him back as a guest soloist in June 2026.

His own first record, Ish HaSakiot (2009), was a set of Hebrew songs rather than a jazz album, launched at the HaKochav HaShmini club in Herzliya with Efraim Shamir and Eisenman guesting. The jazz debut came three years later and went further than anyone expected. Sunrise, cut over two days at Pluto Studios at the end of December 2010 and released by the Seattle label Origin Records in 2012, is twelve Friedman originals for a sextet of Amos Hoffman on oud and guitar, Omri Mor on piano, Gilad Abro on bass, Amir Bresler on drums and Rony Iwryn on percussion, with a string quartet on seven of the tracks and Eisenman singing the closing title tune. It was the best-selling jazz album in Israel that year and the title track went onto 88FM's most-played list, which is not where Israeli jazz records usually end up.

Long Way To Go followed on Dot Time Records, an American label with a European arm in Bremen, and was launched at the Tel Aviv Jazz Festival with Katia Toobool at the piano in place of Mor and three guest singers: the Chilean vocalist Claudia Acuña, Ravid Kahalani of Yemen Blues, and Eisenman again. It also took him abroad under his own billing. In April 2017 he played the Duc des Lombards in Paris, b-flat in Berlin, and Belcampo and Zaal 100 in Amsterdam, with two different rhythm sections, the Paris one including bassist Yoni Zelnik. He returned to the Duc des Lombards with a quartet in May 2023 and has since taken the group to the Bansko Jazz Fest in Bulgaria and to concerts in Vilnius, Kėdainiai and Kaunas with the Lithuanian pianist Dmitrijs Golovanovas.

The third album is the personal one. Unconditional Love was recorded at Bardo Recording Studio in Ramat Gan in June 2018, held back until 2021, and dedicated to his father, who had died in 2017, and to his two daughters, who are the children playing a toy saxophone and a toy piano on the cover. Tom Oren plays piano, Abro is back on bass, Yonatan Rosen is on drums, Hoffman and Iwryn appear on the Middle Eastern and Brazilian-leaning tracks, and Joca Perpignan sings "Alma," named for one of the daughters, in Portuguese. It is nine originals plus a reading of Paul McCartney's "Junk." That December Friedman won the Prime Minister's Prize for Composers in the jazz category. Alongside the playing he teaches at Thelma Yellin and at the Megamot Musica centre in Tel Mond, and for roughly fourteen years he and his partner, the musician Lior Levin, ran a jazz and world music concert series at HaKochav HaShmini in Herzliya built around getting high-school students into a room with the musicians afterwards.

Friedman writes tunes you can hum and then makes them harder than they sound. His records are almost entirely original material, built on melodies with a clear top line and arrangements that keep changing what is underneath them: a string quartet threaded through a hard-swinging sextet on Sunrise, Amos Hoffman's oud shadowing the tenor, odd metres on pieces like "Enough Is Enough," a Portuguese vocal on one track and a blues on the next. The Middle Eastern element is structural rather than decorative, mostly a matter of mode and of Hoffman's and Rony Iwryn's colours rather than of exotic surface. His tenor sound comes out of the mainstream American line he grew up on in his father's car, Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker and Branford Marsalis and Joshua Redman, and he named one Sunrise track "Optimism (for Sonny Rollins)" in case the debt was unclear. Critics have latched onto the accessibility: All About Jazz credited him with memorable melodies inside lively arrangements, and Jazz in Europe's Peter McLaren called Long Way To Go the work of a composer at the top of his game. Friedman himself has said the reaction he hears most after a concert is from people who tell him they do not like jazz but were moved anyway.