Benny Sharoni grew up on Kibbutz Kissufim, in the western Negev a few kilometres from the Gaza border. His first instrument was the flute, chosen for him by circumstance rather than inclination: it was one of the few instruments the kibbutz had. The saxophone came later, put into his hands by someone else on the kibbutz, and he has described the moment as falling in love.

The household he grew up in was unusually musical and unusually mixed. His mother is Chilean and played accordion. His father is Yemenite and played harmonica. Sharoni has described the music at home running from Latin and South American on his mother's side to Yemenite and African-based on his father's, with classical underneath both. That combination is audible on his records decades later, and not as ornament.

Jazz arrived from outside. His mother returned from a trip to the United States carrying records by Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt and Zoot Sims. Three tenor saxophonists, and that was the beginning. Sharoni has said he was drawn to the tenor for its expressive range, and to jazz for a freedom he did not find inside classical playing.

In 1978 he toured Europe performing Israeli folk music. In the early 1980s he served three years in the Israeli army, a period that included combat. He has said that music "often saved both his life and his soul," and that the material which eventually became Eternal Elixir was largely drawn from those years.

He emigrated to the United States in 1986 and enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston. The study that shaped him most happened privately, with George Garzone and Jerry Bergonzi, two saxophonists whose Boston teaching has produced a long line of tenor players. Boston has been his base ever since. Over the years he has appeared alongside Joshua Redman, Danilo Perez, Kenny Garrett and Larry Coryell.

His catalogue as a leader is small and unhurried: three albums across fourteen years. Giant Step came out in Boston in 2001, a sextet date with Artie Barbato on trumpet, Joe Barbato on piano, John Lockwood on bass, Peter Moutis on drums and Damian Padro on congas. Eternal Elixir followed in 2009 on Papaya Records, his own label, and was the record that brought him serious critical attention. Slant Signature arrived in 2015, billed as "Benny Sharoni featuring Jim Rotondi," pairing five originals with Freddie Hubbard's "Down Under," Lee Morgan's "Ceora" and Ray Bryant's "Tonk."

The two Papaya albums share a rhythm section: Joe Barbato on piano, Todd Baker on bass, Steve Langone on drums, six years apart. That continuity is the shape of his working life. He is not a musician who assembles a new project every eighteen months; he is a bandleader with a band, recording when there is something to record.

Eternal Elixir is the clearest single document of who he is. Donald Byrd's "Pentecostal Feelin'" and Jimmy Heath's "The Thing To Do" put him squarely in the Blue Note hard bop line his teachers came from. His own "Benito's Bossa Bonita" and "Senor Papaya" bring his mother's Latin material into the same session. And track 7 is "To Life," the drinking song from Fiddler on the Roof, played as a jazz tune. A Chilean-Yemenite musician raised on a Negev kibbutz, recording the best-known Ashkenazi song in the American popular canon in the language of hard bop, is the whole biography compressed into five minutes and seven seconds.

Sharoni is less visible in accounts of Israeli jazz than his body of work warrants, largely a matter of timing. He left Israel in 1986, roughly a decade before Israeli jazz became a category critics wrote about, and by the time that story was being told he had a Boston address and a Boston band.

Sharoni is a straight-ahead tenor player working in the hard bop and post-bop tradition, with a big, warm tone and a strong rhythmic drive. He names Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon as his central influences, and the Rollins connection goes back to the first jazz record he ever heard. Sonny Stitt and Zoot Sims came in the same shipment and belong in the same lineage.

Two things separate him from a straight revivalist. The first is the Latin rhythmic material that runs through both Papaya records, in original writing rather than in cover choices: "Benito's Bossa Bonita," "Senor Papaya," "Subterranean Samba." That is his mother's Chilean side, worked into hard bop rather than set beside it. The second is his repertoire logic. He builds records around composers rather than around standards, reaching for Donald Byrd, Jimmy Heath, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Ray Bryant, the writing end of the Blue Note catalogue.

His own description of what he is after is plainer than any of that: tasteful, beautiful playing and dynamic swing. He has framed his move to jazz as a search for freedom that classical training would not give him.