Erez Bar-Noy was born in Be'er Sheva on March 17, 1966 and grew up in Givatayim, in a household with no musicians in it. Music reached him early anyway: he said the Israeli rock band Kaveret took hold of him in second grade, though he played nothing at the time. He did not pick up an instrument until he was 22, and the trigger was a radio broadcast. Dani Carpel ran a John Coltrane marathon on Galei Tzahal, Bar-Noy heard it, and he bought a saxophone. Twenty-two is late by any conservatory's standards, and he built a thirty-year career on top of that late start.

His first teacher was Stu Cohen, the Israeli multi-instrumentalist who produced Arik Einstein's first album. Bar-Noy's account of him is the line he repeated in interviews for the rest of his life: Stu, he said, awakened in him an enormous love for jazz, believed in him and pushed him forward. Cohen's own verdict came after the second lesson, when he told his student he thought he would become a musician because he had the madness for it. From there Bar-Noy went to the Rimon School of Music, studying with the saxophonists Amikam Kimelman and Mamlo Giatnopoulos, and at 26 he moved to New York. He enrolled at Mannes College and then at The New School, where his teachers included Billy Harper and George Garzone. He described the shock of the New York practice-room economy plainly: thousands of saxophonists, most of them playing better than he was, and nothing to do about it but practise and go to sessions. He came home in 1997, a decision he attributed to his father's cancer diagnosis, his marriage and the birth of his son, and to not wanting to raise the boy anywhere but Israel.

From 1997 he worked the Israeli circuit at the head of his own groups, in quartet and sextet formats, and appeared at the country's main jazz events: the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat, the Tel Aviv Jazz Festival, the Jazz Films festival in Tel Aviv and the Shuni festival. He shared bandstands with the American trumpeter Randy Brecker and the tenor saxophonist Abraham Burton, whose Israeli visits produced what one Israeli listing called an unforgettable dialogue between the two horns. On June 9, 2014 he played Beit Avi Chai in Jerusalem with the pianist Omri Mor in "Jazz in Hebrew," an evening of his own arrangements of Mordechai Ze'eira songs curated by Barak Weiss. He also worked abroad: on November 18, 2017 he played the EverJazz club in Yekaterinburg with the Russian ASK Trio, and on March 23, 2018 he brought the Israel Conservatory Jazz Quartet to the University of Pennsylvania for a masterclass and a concert at Rose Recital Hall.

He recorded one album. At Last came out in April 2009, nine tracks and about 56 minutes, and it is the only leader date he made. By his own account he had not written seriously until 2007, when he started assembling material for it, and what came out surprised him: after years in New York chasing an American idiom, the tunes had Israeli roots showing through. Two of the titles say so outright, "Emek Israel" and "Beit Yanay," and they sit next to "Skylark," "Minor Mishap," "Three Little Words" and "That's All." His position on the mixture was that Israeli material should be allowed to come through the playing honestly rather than be bolted on as fusion.

The teaching is the larger half of the record. Bar-Noy taught theory, improvisation and saxophone and directed ensembles across Israel: he ran the jazz department at the Ironi Alef High School for the Arts in Tel Aviv, and taught at Rimon, at the Mizmor school of music, at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, at MATAN and in masterclasses around the country. From 2009 to 2019 he directed the Center for Jazz Studies at the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv, the Stricker Street department founded in 2001 by Amit Golan, and with it the joint academic track with The New School in New York, which remains the only formal Israel-to-New School route of its kind. He was categorical about how young the work should start, teaching from age 12 upward and refusing to soften the material for children. Among the players who came through him are the baritone saxophonist Eden Bareket, who names him first in the list of Conservatory teachers he studied with, and the pianist Hila Kulik, whom he taught from her high-school years and with whom he played a duo that turned out to be his last stage partnership.

Bar-Noy died suddenly on August 7, 2021, at 55. Writing in Haaretz a week later, Ben Shalev headlined his appreciation with the flat claim that local jazz is hard to imagine without him, and called the Conservatory department Bar-Noy had run the most important jazz training ground in the country. Amikam Kimelman, his old Rimon teacher, called the loss enormous for Israeli jazz and for music education. Two memorials followed in 2022. On May 12 the Israeli Jazz Society marked International Jazz Day at Tel Aviv's old railway station with an "Alto Summit" in his memory, three alto players (Hagai Amir, Eyal Hai and Alon Farber) with Kulik on piano. On June 1 the Pannonica Jazz Association filled the Tel Aviv Museum of Art: Yuval Cohen and his brother Avishai Cohen on trumpet with Barak Mori, Shai Maestro and Ziv Ravitz playing Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance"; a reconstituted Erez Barnoy Sextet with Hagai Amir, Asaf Harris, Jonathan Voltzok, Yonatan Riklis and Alon Binyamini playing his tune "Concepts"; Kulik alone at the piano with a piece she had written called "Erez"; and Voltzok's big band closing the night with Alon Oleartchik. Kulik's 2023 album More Than a Change is dedicated to him and carries one of his compositions, "Are You Too Barnoy."

Bar-Noy came to the horn through Coltrane on the radio and trained inside the New York mainstream, and the tenor sound he brought back is out of that lineage: hard-swinging, blues-anchored, more interested in line than in effect. What separates him from the many Israeli players who made the same New York trip is what he did with the material once he was home. He arrived at composition late, at 41, and found that the songs his mother had had on the radio in Givatayim were still in his ear, which is why his one album puts "Emek Israel" and "Beit Yanay" alongside a Hoagy Carmichael ballad and a Tommy Flanagan blues without announcing a fusion, and why he spent an evening at Beit Avi Chai rewriting Mordechai Ze'eira for a jazz group rather than writing a Middle Eastern suite. He was explicit that he wanted the Israeli element to be audible without being decorative. His influence, though, is transmitted mostly through other people's playing: three decades of Israeli saxophonists, and a good share of the country's rhythm sections, learned improvisation from him at Ironi Alef, Thelma Yellin, Rimon or Stricker Street, and the players who turned out for his memorial are the argument.