Amit Golan was born in Haifa in 1964 and came to jazz late and from the wrong direction. His first serious training was classical: piano and composition at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, with no jazz in the curriculum at all. The music found him in New York, where he enrolled at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and then went looking for the players who had made the records he was hearing. He took private lessons from Walter Bishop Jr., Reggie Workman, Billy Harper, Jim Hall, Kenny Werner, Junior Mance and Barry Harris, and studied jazz history with the two men who effectively wrote it down for a generation of New Yorkers, the broadcaster Phil Schaap and the critic Ira Gitler. Bill Evans was what drew him in, but he concluded early that he could not get to Evans without first working through Bud Powell and Horace Silver, and that judgment set the shape of everything he taught afterward.

He came home in the mid-1990s and started teaching. From roughly 1994 he ran jazz history and small ensembles at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Givatayim, building a four-year curriculum that walked students from the roots of the music through swing and into hard bop. The school was already the standard route for Israeli teenagers serious about music; what Golan added was a spine of listening. His method was blunt about it. Jazz was an oral tradition, the records were the text, and, as he put it, "You have to have everything in your ear. Jazz cannot be dependent on paper."

In 2001 he founded the Center for Jazz Studies at the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv, the Stricker Street school that until then had been a classical institution only. It became the main jazz hothouse in the country within a few years. He then did the thing that made the department matter beyond Tel Aviv: he negotiated a joint academic track with The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York, taking in roughly twenty students a year for a four-year BFA in jazz performance, two years in Israel and two in Manhattan. Israeli players who had previously needed money and an American visa before they could get near a New York faculty could now start the degree at home. Between 2004 and 2007 he was also musical director for jazz workshops around Israel, and in 2007 he programmed "Home," a series of eight concerts at Beit Avi Chai in Jerusalem in which Israeli musicians played his compositions.

He had not written music in about twenty years when he started again in the mid-2000s, and the result was I Decided!, cut over three days in July 2007 in the hall of the Lin and Ted Arison Israel Conservatory of Music and issued on Minton's Records, the label his producer Noam Uziel ran. He was 43. The record is unapologetically hard bop, seven Golan originals plus an arrangement of Gershwin's "Love Walked In," and the band was drawn largely from the world he had built: Asaf Yuria on tenor, Eden Bareket on baritone, Gilad Abro on bass, Doron Tirosh and Yonatan Rosen splitting the drum chair, all of them current or recent students or young colleagues, with the New York trumpeter Joe Magnarelli flown in for the front line. He led the group as the Amit Golan Quintet and worked the Israeli circuit with it, and over the years he shared bandstands with Israeli players including the saxophonists Yuval Cohen and Erez Bar-Noy, Avishai Cohen, and the visiting American trombonist Slide Hampton.

On December 3, 2010 he collapsed during a pickup basketball game with his ninth-grade jazz students in the Thelma Yellin schoolyard. Resuscitation failed and he died of cardiac arrest at 46, leaving a wife and three children. He had booked studio time for a sextet record the following June and had already written and arranged six new pieces for it, with Eddie Henderson invited over from New York as guest trumpeter. In June 2011 his family, his band and his former students went into the studio and made the album anyway. Eddie Henderson & Friends Play the Music of Amit Golan came out on Minton's in 2012 with Yuria on tenor, Jonathan Voltzok on trombone, Ofer Ganor on guitar, Abro and Tav Golan alternating on bass, Jack Glottman and Yonatan Riklis alternating in the piano chair he had left, and Henderson playing the parts written for him. The Israel Conservatory has held a memorial concert for him every year since, and runs an annual Amit Golan Jazz Competition for jazz pianists under 18 and 19 to 24, with Nitai Hershkovits, one of his own students, sitting on the 2026 jury.

Golan's importance is a teaching story before it is a playing one, and he would probably have said so himself: he made one album in his lifetime, at 43, after two decades of not composing. What he transmitted was a specific and slightly unfashionable position, that the 1950s and 1960s hard-bop repertoire is the working vocabulary of the music and that ensemble cohesion outranks individual display. His own writing on I Decided! holds to it exactly, and the tribute record's programme, eight Golan tunes sitting next to Lee Morgan's "Carolyn" and Benny Golson's "Out of the Past," shows the company he thought his pieces belonged in. The pianist Roi Ben Sira, a colleague, said he was "directly responsible for almost an entire young generation of Israeli jazz," and the roster of players who name him as a teacher backs the claim up. Students called one of the scales he drilled "the Amit Golan diminishing scale," which is a compliment of a kind almost nobody gets while still alive. The Jerusalem Jazz Festival's memorial programme credits him with instilling "the social values of Jazz in his students, by teaching them to listen to and support each other."