Arnon Palty is a bassist, composer, arranger, and educator who has spent more than three decades at the center of Israel's jazz education system while maintaining an active career as a leader, sideman, and big-band arranger. Born in Haifa on December 22, 1955, he first played bass professionally as a member of the Israeli Navy's entertainment troupe during his military service. By the late 1970s he was a working session bassist on Israeli pop records, including Shlomo Artzi's 1976 album My Wife, My Child and My Motorcycle, and dates connected to Arik Einstein, Gidi Gov, Yehudit Ravitz, and Yoni Rechter, several of the most prominent names in Israeli popular music of that era.

Palty's formal jazz training took him abroad and back. He earned a bachelor's degree in arranging and composition from Berklee College of Music in Boston, followed by a master's degree in jazz arranging and composition from the Manhattan School of Music in New York. He returned to Israel to complete a doctorate at Bar-Ilan University, earned with highest distinction, researching jazz harmony. That academic path led to a long run in Israeli music education: head of the bass department at the Rimon School of Music (2002-2014) and the school's vice academic director (2006-2007), a faculty position at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, jazz department head at Ono Academic College, and, most recently, professor and Dean of the Cross-Disciplinary Music Faculty at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. He has also been a regular guest lecturer at institutions across the Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Germany, Spain, Italy, England, and Mongolia, as well as at Berklee, NYU, the University of Michigan, Northeastern University, and Moravian University in the United States.

The academic career has run alongside, not instead of, a genuine playing and recording career. Palty's own site and multiple secondary sources describe a discography of ten original albums as a leader. Two are independently documented by title: his 1995 debut Pocket Size Pocket, and 2015's Treasure Map: The Music of Arnon Palty, a quintet record of his own compositions performed with saxophonist Dave Liebman, drummer Adam Nussbaum, trumpeter Tim Hagans, and pianist Uri Caine. That same Liebman connection runs deeper: Palty wrote the arrangements for Tomorrow's Expectations, a full big band album credited to the Dave Liebman Big Band, on which he also played bass, and his big-band arranging separately won first prize at a jazz arranging competition in Mannheim, Germany, in 2012. In 2015 he also co-billed a compilation, Arty Facts, with guitarist Dan Adler, pianist Lewis Porter, harmonica player Yvonnick Prene, and drummer Marcello Pellitteri, built entirely from contrafacts: new melodies written over the chord changes of jazz standards.

Palty's most unusual and longest-running project is Plutonium, a ten-piece band he formed in 1998 to play original funk and jazz-rock arrangements set to deliberately comedic, nonsense-inflected Hebrew lyrics, all written by Palty himself. Plutonium debuted at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat in 1999 and remains active today under a largely rebuilt lineup. Its signature work is Zerach the Alien, a full jazz opera for which Palty wrote both the libretto and the music. In 2021, the Israeli government recognized his body of work as a composer with the Prime Minister's Prize for Jazz Composers, the country's most prestigious honor in the field. Beyond music, Palty also holds a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Haifa and a diploma in animation from Morley College in London, and has published a poetry and short-story collection as well as several instructional books on jazz harmony and re-harmonization.

Palty's own catalog spans a wider stylistic range than his academic title suggests. His two most independently documented leader records, Pocket Size Pocket and Arty Facts, are catalogued by Discogs under Fusion and Smooth Jazz, reflecting a background steeped in the American fusion and contrafact tradition (the Arty Facts concept, new melodies laid over standards like "Four on Six" and "Giant Steps," is itself a direct homage to bebop's own contrafact tradition). His big-band arranging work, honored in Mannheim and put to direct use on the Dave Liebman Big Band's Tomorrow's Expectations, shows a second, more traditional large-ensemble side. Plutonium, by contrast, is a deliberate departure: dense horn-section funk and jazz-rock built for absurdist Hebrew comedy rather than the concert-stage seriousness of his other work. The throughline across all of it is a composer's sensibility first: Palty writes the material in nearly everything he plays on, from Plutonium's own book to the commissioned quintet compositions on Treasure Map.