Alon Farber is a saxophonist, composer, and arranger who has anchored the Israeli jazz scene for more than two decades, first as a Berklee-trained voice in the horn section and, since 2001, as the leader of his own sextet, Hagiga. Farber studied jazz composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he won two of the school's own honors: the Wayne Shorter Award from the Jazz Composition department in 1998, and the Sadao Watanabe Award from the woodwind department. Those two names are not incidental to his sound. Farber has named Wayne Shorter, along with trumpeter Dave Douglas and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, as his own primary influences, and both threads, Shorter's harmonic reach and Douglas's outward-looking eclecticism, run straight through his later work.

In 2001, Farber and drummer Dani Benedikt founded Hagiga (Hebrew for "celebration"), a group built around Farber's own compositions and arrangements. The band's name doubles as a mission statement: Hagiga's music deliberately mixes swing-era jazz vocabulary with Moroccan, Brazilian, and funk elements alongside Israeli and Middle Eastern melodic material, a combination Farber and his label describe as the "Israeli soundtrack." Over 25 years the group has released six albums under Farber's leadership, moving between a quintet, sextet, and quartet format as personnel shifted, and has toured festivals including the Paris Jazz Festival, the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Red Sea Jazz Festival, the OCT-LOFT Jazz Festival in China, and the Jerusalem International Jazz Festival.

The group's discography traces a path across three labels. Its first two records, Exposure (2005) and Optimistic View (2007), came out on the Barcelona-based Fresh Sound New Talent, a label with a strong track record for young jazz musicians; Exposure, credited to the Alon Farber Hagiga Quintet, features a guest turn from trumpeter Avishai Cohen (the trumpeter, not the bassist of the same name), while Optimistic View expanded the group to a sextet with pianist Omri Mor, guitarist and oudist Amos Hoffman, and bassist Haggai Cohen Milo. A third album, New Directions, followed in 2019 on the Berlin label QFTF, with pianist Gadi Lehavi sharing keyboard duties across the record with Tomer Bar; saxophonist Eli Degibri praised the record as a "deliberate, fascinating and wondrous journey."

Since 2021, Hagiga has recorded exclusively for the Seattle label Origin Records, releasing three more albums in that stretch. Reflecting On Freedom (2021) widened the group's palette further with a horn section (Yehonatan Cohen on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Oded Meir on trombone) plus guest vocalist Sarai Zak-Levi and percussionist Rony Iwryn. In the summer of 2023, American trumpeter Dave Douglas joined Hagiga on stage at the Jerusalem Jazz Festival, a performance recorded live at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on June 27, 2023, and released the following year as The Magician: Live in Jerusalem (2024); Farber gave Douglas the nickname on the album's cover, crediting him with lifting the whole ensemble. Farber's most recent album, Dreams I Dream (2025), pares the band back down to a quartet with pianist Katia Toobool, bassist Assaf Hakimi, and drummer Yonatan Rosen, and was built, in Farber's own account, around the dream state in which he does much of his early compositional thinking; DownBeat called it "a record worthy of celebration... approachable but very stimulating."

Beyond Hagiga, Farber is a founding member of the Israel Jazz Orchestra, a big band in which he plays lead saxophone and serves as an associate arranger and composer, a role he has held for as long as Hagiga has existed. His compositional work was recognized nationally in 2016, when he received the Israeli Prime Minister's Award for Jazz Composers. He has also spent more than 20 years teaching saxophone privately and teaching jazz harmony and arranging at arts high schools in Israel, work that runs in parallel with his own performing and recording career. On record, his path has crossed with a wide circle of Israeli musicians who also carry their own leader careers, including bandleader and trombonist Avi Lebovich, on whose orchestra recordings Farber has appeared as a sideman saxophonist across multiple releases.

Farber's writing is built on "rich harmonies with contrapuntal writing," in his own description, a horn-arranger's sensibility that reviewers have singled out as his strongest asset: All About Jazz called him "a fantastic find," praising "Farber's brilliance as a songwriter and arranger," while a Fresh Sound Records retrospective ranked Hagiga among "one of the finer groups that the label has produced." His stated influences, Wayne Shorter, Dave Douglas, and Ornette Coleman, point to a musician equally comfortable inside advanced post-bop harmony and outside it. What distinguishes Hagiga specifically is the way that harmonic language gets folded into material drawn from Moroccan, Brazilian, funk, and Israeli/Jewish folk sources without ever losing its jazz backbone; one review of Optimistic View described the result as "advanced jazz and Jewish music" walking the same line. That same instinct for hybrid material is presumably what drew Dave Douglas, a trumpeter with his own long history of genre-crossing composition, to Hagiga's bandstand in 2023.