Amos Hoffman started on guitar at age six in Jerusalem and picked up the oud a few years later, training privately and at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem (today part of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance). Most players who add a second instrument treat it as color; Hoffman built his whole career on making guitar and oud sound like one continuous musical idea. That project deepened once he left Israel, first for Amsterdam and then New York, where he studied Middle Eastern maqam and oud formally with Lebanese oud and ney player Bassam Saba, an associate of the Palestinian-American oud master Simon Shaheen.

New York put him on stage early with drummer Dennis Charles, drummer Evelyn Blakey, percussionist Juma Santos, saxophonist Sam Newsome, pianist Jason Lindner, vocalist Claudia Acuña, trumpeter Duane Eubanks, and a young bassist named Avishai Cohen. The two first appear on record together in 1998, on Cohen's own leader debut Adama (Stretch Records), a year before Hoffman released his first album as a leader in his own right. That session opened into more than two decades of recording and touring in Cohen's band. Omer Avital was in the same NYC circle, and years later played bass on Hoffman's 2015 album Back to the City, alongside drummer Vince Ector and trumpeter Duane Eubanks.

In 1999, Hoffman relocated back to Israel after those New York years. That same year he released his leader debut, The Dreamer (Fresh Sound New Talent), recorded that February at Tedesco Studios in Paramus, New Jersey, with Cohen on bass, Jorge Rossy on drums, and Eubanks on trumpet. Four more solo albums followed over the next fourteen years he spent based in Israel: Na'ama (2006, Magda), an all-original, oud-led set built on Arabic taqasim improvisation and maqam tradition; Evolution (2008, Sunnyside/Razdaz Recordz), on which he plays an oud he built himself; and Carving (2010, Razdaz Recordz), with a young Shai Maestro on piano. When Hoffman returned to New York after those fourteen years, he recorded Back to the City (2015), whose ten tracks include "Alone In South Carolina," written before he had any idea he'd actually move there.

In 2013, Israel gave him the Landau Prize for Arts and Sciences, a national award administered by the Mifal HaPais lottery that recognizes outstanding achievement across culture, research, and the arts, one of the country's most prestigious honors in its category. He didn't coast on it. The following year, in 2014, Hoffman and his wife moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where he became a working part of building the jazz scene from the ground up, teaching at the ColaJazz Academy and performing with the SC Jazz Masterworks Ensemble.

Ten years after the prize, in 2024, Hoffman released his sixth album, Minor Operation, his debut for Jojo Records, with Return to Forever drummer Lenny White and bassist Santi Debriano behind him. It's a small, three-piece session built entirely around what his guitar and oud can do without anything else in the way.

He's also still building something new on the side. Since January 2016, Hoffman has co-led a quartet with Canadian pianist Noam Lemish under the name "Pardes," Hebrew for orchard, playing jazz arrangements of Jewish melodies collected from Kurdish, Yemenite, Moroccan, Ladino, Russian, Bukharian, and Israeli traditions. The group has toured North America, from New York and Toronto to San Diego, in the years since.

Hoffman's foundational influence is his own formal study of Arabic maqam and oud technique under Bassam Saba in New York, a lineage that also connects him, through Saba, to the circle around oud master Simon Shaheen. JazzTimes groups him with Anouar Brahem, Dhafer Youssef, and Rabih Abou-Khalil as part of the generation of players who, across the 1980s and '90s, brought the oud fully into jazz rather than treating it as an exotic guest instrument. Where Youssef's records lean toward electronics and looping, Hoffman's stay closer to the acoustic maqam tradition: All About Jazz's review pairing the two, built around his 2006 album Na'ama, describes his originals as rooted directly in traditional Arabic maqams and scales.

His sound sits on that same duality: Middle Eastern melodic and rhythmic vocabulary combined with, as SmallsLIVE puts it, "a completely American sense of groove," the product of a career built as much in New York jazz clubs as in Jerusalem conservatories. JazzTimes's own survey of essential jazz-oud recordings singles out his oud playing on Avishai Cohen's Adama, particularly the tracks "Madrid" and "Dror," as some of the most distinctive of the era, and cites him among the players most oud aficionados point to as visionary on the instrument.