Itamar Borochov grew up in Jaffa in a musical family — his father is composer and arranger Yisrael Borochov, and his brother Avri is a professional double bassist who still turns up on his records. He started on guitar, teaching himself blues after watching The Blues Brothers as a kid, before switching to trumpet and finding his real models in Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis, later adding Clark Terry, Kenny Dorham, Lee Morgan, Booker Little, and Wynton Marsalis to that lineage, along with Ben Webster's tone and the modal language of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He came up playing in local Tel Aviv ensembles, including one called Funk Hapoalim, and worked as a studio musician for artists including Efrat Gosh and Knesiyat Hasechel, before moving to New York in 2007 to study at The New School and attend Barry Harris's weekly jazz workshops.

In 2010 he joined Omer Avital's Yemen Blues, recording several albums with the band as both a studio and performing musician. That grounding in Yemenite and Arabic musical language stuck: he now plays a custom Monette four-valve quarter-tone trumpet, built specifically so he can bend the horn into maqam, the microtonal modes at the center of Arabic and Sephardic music, without leaving jazz vocabulary behind.

His own discography has grown steadily since — Outset (Real Bird), Boomerang (2016, Laborie Jazz — his father, composer/arranger Yisrael Borochov, guests on vocals on one track), and Blue Nights (2018, Laborie Jazz — featuring the Moroccan Gnawa ensemble Innov Gnawa as guests on one track), the last of which picked up five-star reviews from DownBeat and UK Vibe and landed on AllMusic's best-of-2019 lists for World Music. In between, he won the 2020 Rising Stars Jazz Award (European edition), presented to him in February 2021 by vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater; American saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins won the U.S. edition the same year. In 2021 he was commissioned to write "Emergence," a suite for the Brazos Valley Symphony.

His fourth album, Arba (Greenleaf Music, catalog GRE-CD-1103), came out on September 8, 2023, recorded over two days in April 2022 at Brooklyn's Big Orange Sheep studio with a quartet of Rob Clearfield (piano), Rick Rosato (bass), and Jay Sawyer (drums), produced by Grammy-winning producer Matt Pierson with trumpeter and Greenleaf Music founder Dave Douglas as executive producer; brother Avri Borochov guests on oud on one track. It marked a first for him: the record features his own singing voice on several tracks, not just his trumpet.

Borochov's signature is the custom quarter-tone trumpet itself: an instrument built to let him play Arabic and Sephardic maqam modes, the microtonal scales at the heart of the music he grew up around, inside a jazz trumpet vocabulary shaped by Armstrong, Ellington, Miles Davis, and the hard-bop lineage running through Clark Terry, Kenny Dorham, and Lee Morgan. His time in Omer Avital's Yemen Blues put that Yemenite and Arabic grounding on a bandstand early in his career, and it has stayed the throughline of his own records since, from the still largely instrumental Outset and Boomerang through Blue Nights's crossover recognition to Arba's addition of his own voice.