Daniel Zamir grew up in a secular family in Petah Tikva and picked up the saxophone at eleven. He trained at the Thelma Yellin High School of Arts, the same school that produced a striking number of Israel's best-known jazz exports, then moved to Manhattan to finish his studies at The New School, graduating in 2002. New York is also where his career actually started: composer-saxophonist John Zorn, the central figure of the city's downtown avant-garde scene and the owner of dozens of his own record labels and hundreds of his own releases, heard Zamir play and signed him to Zorn's own imprint, Tzadik Records.

The Tzadik years produced a run of records with his band Satlah — the studio albums Satlah (1999/2000) and Children of Israel (2002), plus the live Exodus (2001) — with Zorn himself sitting in as a sideman on some of the sessions. Zamir's sound at Tzadik already leaned on the label's signature "Radical Jewish Culture" territory: jazz built from klezmer, Hasidic melody, and Jewish liturgical material rather than the American songbook.

He kept building from there after returning to Israel. Amen (2006, The Eighth Note — with bassist Omer Avital, also profiled separately in this system) is frequently cited as the best-selling jazz record in Israeli history. I Believe followed on Tzadik in 2008, recorded with Zorn's own rhythm section — bassist Greg Cohen, drummer Joey Baron, and pianist Uri Caine, all longtime Zorn/Masada-circle players. Berry Sakharof, one of Israeli rock's most influential songwriters and guitarists, guests on Song For Comfort (2012); Song For Comfort also features Matisyahu and Yoni Rechter as guests, and splits its rhythm section between Mark Guiliana/Shai Maestro/Haggai Cohen Milo and Amir Bresler/Nitai Hershkovits/Gilad Abro — the same pairing that would define Redemption Songs three years later.

The turn that reshaped everything came around Redemption Songs (2015, Tzadik), and it wasn't just musical. While living in New York, Zamir grew close to Orthodox Judaism and eventually moved back to Israel because of it. Redemption Songs was recorded at Kicha Studios in Tel Aviv across two sessions — June 2011 and March 2015 — and splits its personnel: drummer Mark Guiliana, pianist Shai Maestro, and bassist Haggai Cohen Milo appear on some tracks, while drummer Amir Bresler, pianist Nitai Hershkovits, and bassist Gilad Abro appear on others. Both Maestro and Hershkovits are otherwise known in this system as trio pianists for bassist Avishai Cohen — a small, real point of overlap between three separate Israeli jazz careers on one record. The album also set the direction Zamir has followed since: music built from Hebrew prayer and biblical text instead of jazz standards.

He has kept releasing steadily along that path — Forth and Back (2015, Jazzhaus, Germany), Alive (2015 — which already features Eviatar Banai as a guest on piano and vocals, a full decade before his NEW-launch appearance below), and further Hebrew-language records through the early 2020s — and by the mid-2020s had reached his sixteenth studio album, NEW, launched with a full-band concert at the Jerusalem Theatre featuring guest vocalist Eviatar Banai. A 2024 single, "תשע נשמות" ("Nine Souls"), got a remix release the following year. More than two decades after Zorn first signed him, Zamir is still recording inside the liturgical, Hebrew-rooted lane he found for himself in the mid-2010s.

Zamir's sound sits at the intersection of two scenes that don't usually meet: John Zorn's downtown New York avant-garde, where genre boundaries are treated as optional, and Hasidic and Jewish liturgical music, which he leaned into hard after his own religious shift in the 2010s. Reviewers and his own label describe the blend as drawing on klezmer, Eastern European Jewish melody, and Hasidic tradition as much as on jazz harmony and improvisation, with rhythmic elements pulled from India and West Africa as well. Primarily a soprano player today, though he came up on alto, his writing after Redemption Songs consistently favors Hebrew prayer and biblical text as source material over the American standards book most of his jazz peers still draw from.