Dan Gottfried, also credited as Danny Gottfried, is the pianist who played on the first instrumental jazz album recorded in Israel and then spent the next four decades building the institutions the country's jazz scene grew inside.

He trained as a classical pianist at the Tel Aviv Academy of Music and won First Prize in the Mozart Piano competition in 1959. In 1962 he took an undergraduate degree in economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and went on to study law. His performing career began in the early 1960s on the classical side, and it turned toward jazz through his working partnership with the saxophonist Albert Piamenta, which produced the two recordings that make up almost his entire discography.

The first was an EP for the A.Z.R. label by the Carmel Quartet, a dance band assembled around Gottfried and Piamenta for a European tour that took them to Holland and Sweden in 1963. Produced by the Greek-Israeli singer Aris San, it is a working musician's record rather than a statement.

The second is the one that matters. In 1973 Isradisc released Mezare Israel Yekabtzenu (SI 31028), six tracks cut in a single day at Koliner Studios in Tel Aviv by a quartet billing itself as the Jazz Work Shop, or Sadnat Hajazz: Piamenta on alto and soprano saxophone, Gottfried on piano, Teddy Kling of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra on double bass, and Jerry Garval, a student of Max Roach who had played with Sun Ra, on drums. It was the first instrumental jazz album recorded in Israel, and its argument was that Israeli jazz should draw on Arab maqams, Druze rhythms and Hasidic melody rather than reproduce American standards. The record then went out of print for 41 years, until Fortuna Records reissued it on vinyl in 2014 and the London label Jazzman placed its title track on the compilation Spiritual Jazz 5: The World the same year, with CD reissues following in Israel and Japan in 2015.

The larger part of Gottfried's working life went into building places for other musicians to play. In 1981 he founded the jazz faculty at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and led it for eight years. In 1985 he founded the jazz studies department at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Givatayim, the school that has since trained a large share of Israel's internationally known jazz musicians. In 1987 he initiated the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat and served as its artistic director for 22 years, presenting more than 1,500 musicians and building an event that draws audiences of around 70,000 at roughly 2,500 people per concert. He stepped down in 2008 and was succeeded by the bassist Avishai Cohen.

He built concert programming alongside the schools and the festival. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art commissioned him to direct its jazz concert series in 1992. In 1994 he began an annual ten-lecture series on the history of jazz at the Open University of Israel. From 1998 to 2004 he ran "Jazz at The Opera" at the Tel Aviv Opera House.

Through all of it he kept playing. He leads a trio with Eli Magen on bass and Arale Kaminsky on drums, and a quintet that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent abroad to present Israeli jazz: Belarus in 1993, Latvia in 1996, India in 1998, Italy in 2004. He has shared stages with Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Golson, Frank Foster, Sam Rivers, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Randy Brecker, Von Freeman, Clark Terry, Ronnie Cuber, Sheila Jordan, Georgie Fame, Mark Murphy and Kevin Mahogany. None of that work was commercially recorded.

Israel's Ministry of Culture gave him its lifetime achievement prize in jazz in 2007 and its senior artists prize in 2018. The Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance awarded him its Gold Medal in 2010. He is president of the Israeli Musicians' Union and general manager of the Israeli Musicians' Collecting Society. His son, Yaron Gottfried, is a conductor, composer and pianist.

Gottfried came to jazz from a classical training, and the discipline shows in his playing: clean voicing, an accompanist's restraint, and a comping style built to leave room for a horn rather than to compete with one. On the 1973 record his role is structural. He holds the harmony steady underneath Piamenta while the melodic material moves through modes that the standard jazz vocabulary does not accommodate, which is the whole point of the album.

That record places him in the same current as the ethno-jazz and spiritual-jazz recordings being made elsewhere in the world in the same years, and Jazzman's decision to anthologise it alongside them in 2014 confirmed the connection retroactively. His own trio work runs on different ground: international jazz standards, played straight, in a mainstream idiom.

The more durable part of his influence is not stylistic but curatorial. As artistic director in Eilat for 22 years he decided which musicians Israeli audiences heard, and as the founder of two jazz departments he decided what Israeli students were taught. Both are compositional acts at a different scale.