Ilan Salem was born in 1961 and took up the flute at eleven. He studied with the Israeli flutists Uri Shoham and Roman Konsman, went through the jazz program at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Givatayim, and in 1988 graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston with a degree in performance. He later also studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, the institution where he would spend the second half of his career on the other side of the desk.

The teaching is not a footnote to his playing. It is roughly half of what he is known for in Israel. Around 1990 he founded the jazz program at the School of the Arts in Tel Aviv, the Arison Campus, and ran it through 2002. He taught at the Rimon School of Music from 1989 to 2017. Since 2006 he has been on the faculty of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance as a senior lecturer, teaching jazz flute, jazz saxophone, jazz guitar and methodology, and the Academy's own faculty page dates his term directing its jazz department to 2006 through 2008. He also teaches at the Israeli Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv. The students who came through those rooms are a large part of the argument for him: the trumpeter Avishai Cohen, the saxophonist Eli Degibri and the pianist Yonathan Avishai all studied with him, and the flutist Itai Kriss, who entered the Tel Aviv program at thirteen, describes Salem as the man who ran it and his first jazz teacher.

Alongside that he built one of the busiest studio woodwind careers in Israel. His Discogs listing runs to 33 entries across four decades, and a large share of it is Israeli popular music: Ofra Haza's My Soul (1994), Yoni Rechter records in 1991 and 1995, Gidi Gov in 1993, 1995, 1997 and 2003, Yehudit Ravitz in 1997, David Broza in 2002, and the 1993 debut of Achinoam Nini with Gil Dor. He has also worked with Esther Ofarim. The jazz work runs in parallel from the beginning rather than after it: 1989 alone produced both his flute on the singer Zvi Booms's Other Places (MCI Records) and his flute solo on "5.30 AM" from the guitarist Ofer Israeli's fusion date Clash (Jazzis Records), recorded at Eshel Studios in Tel Aviv between March and August of that year.

His first album under his own name was a set of children's songs, Shirei Ha'ir Ha'gdola ("Songs of the Big City"), written and arranged with Yael Salem and released in 2002. The first jazz record followed in 2006: Twists & Turns, cut at Clinton Studios in New York on February 24 and 25, 2005, and billed "Ilan Salem Featuring Kenny Werner," with Werner on piano, Johannes Weidenmueller on bass and Eitan Itzcovitch on drums. All nine pieces are Salem's. Wild followed on Avishai Cohen's Razdaz Recordz label in 2011, recorded across three days in June 2010 and January 2011 with Amos Hoffman on guitar and oud, Nitai Hershkovits on piano, Gilad Abro on bass and Amir Bresler on drums, with Cohen himself, Shai Maestro and Itamar Doari joining on the last two tracks. In 2011 he received the Prime Minister's Prize for Composers in the jazz category, Israel's principal composition award, given that year to six recipients across classical music and jazz.

The Razdaz association ran both ways. Salem plays alto flute on the title track of Cohen's Sensitive Hours (Helicon/RazDaz, 2008) and flute on "Si Kanamaya," and he holds the flute chair on two of Amos Hoffman's leader dates, Evolution (Sunnyside/Razdaz, 2008) on alto flute and Carving (Razdaz, 2010) on flute and alto flute. Sixteen years after the first of those, he is still in Cohen's horn section: he plays flutes on Brightlight (naïve, 2024), recorded between Nilento Studio in Gothenburg and Kicha Studios in Tel Aviv, alongside his eldest son, the Paris-based trumpeter Hillel Salem, on flugelhorn.

Elsewhere, issued on vinyl in October 2017 on his own AINOLA imprint, is the outlier in the catalog: a seven-piece set of his own writing played by a New York band of Theo Hill on piano, Weidenmueller again on bass, Kush Abadey on drums and Stacy Dillard on tenor saxophone, with Hillel Salem on trumpet and flugelhorn. Six years later he turned up in an entirely different room. The Tel Aviv label Raw Tapes put him on flute on one track of its Puzzles Vol. 5 compilation in 2023, and in 2026 the same label released Songs of the Willows, a reunion with Nitai Hershkovits fifteen years after Wild, with Hershkovits writing, producing and arranging the whole record, Barak Mori on bass, Daniel Dor on drums and Hillel Salem on trumpet. He also plays flute on the opening track of Yonatan Levy's Farewell Metro Boy, released the following week. At the 2026 Jerusalem Jazz Festival he led a sextet built for the occasion, writing for three horns and a rhythm section on the model of the classic hard bop front lines, with Hillel Salem on trumpet, Jonathan Yudkowitz on tenor, Omri Mor on piano, Gilad Abro on bass and Shai Zalman on drums.

Salem plays flute and alto flute as lead voices rather than as color, which in a scene with no other flute-led jazz catalog of comparable size has made him something close to a category of one in Israel. His writing is tuneful and unhurried, and on Twists & Turns it gave Kenny Werner nine originals of exactly the kind that reward a pianist who likes space. The music he brought to the 2026 Jerusalem Jazz Festival he described as a return to the deep roots of the idiom, naming Louis Armstrong, Horace Silver, Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk and scoring for three horns and rhythm the way the classic hard bop sextets did. Wild pulls the other way, toward Hebrew song, the oud, and the Middle Eastern rhythmic language of Avishai Cohen's own bands, and Songs of the Willows pulls further still, into a chamber-scaled meeting of classical writing and spiritual jazz. Away from jazz entirely, he has recorded Indo-jazz with the guitarist Yosi Levy and the Kolkata tabla player Bikram Ghosh, and guested on flute on three tracks of the Israeli progressive rock band Sympozion's Kundabuffer.