No confirmed birth date or place has surfaced for Ilan Smilan; he is a working Tel Aviv guitarist, producer and bandleader whose earliest documented credit is a 2006 self-released CD-R. That year he and his brother Asaf Smilan, on drums, formed Zvuloon Dub System, reportedly because, in their own account, they liked reggae and no band in Tel Aviv was playing it. The group started as a five-piece instrumental unit with a horn section, guitar, bass and drums, then grew to nine members with the addition of a vocalist and a keyboard player. From 2008 the brothers began recording with veteran Jamaican artists passing through Israel, starting with deejay Ranking Joe, a relationship that continued on the 2012 single "Weed Out / Going to Zion," credited to Cornell Campbell, Zvuloon Dub System and Ranking Joe together (Medtone Records, MTR-12-001).

The band's proper debut album, Freedom Time, followed on Medtone Records (MTR-CD-001), released in Israel on April 5, 2012, with Ilan and Asaf Smilan sharing production, engineering and mixing credit across all eleven tracks, including a reggae rework of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" and a closing feature from Ranking Joe on "Nah Give Up." The album built a following in Israel but, by the band's own account, failed to generate the international touring bookings they had expected, at a moment when Jamaican reggae acts touring Israel directly were also drawing audiences the band had hoped to reach. In response, Zvuloon Dub System sharpened the Ethiopian side of its sound: singer Gili Yalo, an Ethiopian-Israeli vocalist, took over the microphone and replaced English lyrics with original material and covers of 1970s Ethiopian classics sung in Amharic. That shift produced Anbessa Dub (Medtone Records, MTR-LP-002, 2014), featuring a guest vocal from Ethiopian singer Mahmoud Ahmed on "Ney Denun Tieshe" alongside Yaacov Lilay and Zemene Melesse; Ilan Smilan is credited on the release as lead guitarist, co-producer, co-engineer and co-mixer with his brother. The album earned the band its first North American tour, including a February 20, 2015 date at Vancouver's Chutzpah! Festival, an appearance at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, and a booking at Jamaica's Reggae Sumfest; over the years Zvuloon also opened for touring reggae acts including Don Carlos, Barrington Levy, Alpha Blondy and Groundation.

The same Ethiopian-music grounding fed directly into Smilan's second major project. In 2012, without ending Zvuloon Dub System, he co-founded the Hoodna Afrobeat Orchestra, a 12-to-14-piece Tel Aviv collective built around Afrobeat rhythm and a full horn section, serving as its guitarist, musical director, principal composer/arranger and the producer or co-producer of every album it has released. The orchestra's own catalog, from the 2013 debut EP No A.C through Let Go (2015), Ofel (2019), the 2021 EP Alem Alem and, in 2024, Tension with Ethio-jazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke, is documented in full in Hoodna Afrobeat Orchestra's own jazzprofiles.com profile rather than repeated here.

Smilan has kept several other projects running in parallel. In 2013, in a Tel Aviv Ethiopian restaurant, he joined keyboardist Roy Hermon, percussionist Oded Aloni and bassist Amir Sadot to form Tigris, a stripped-down Afro-Latin/psychedelic-pop quartet-turned-quintet that has released six records since 2014: the self-titled debut TIGRIS (2014), GOLD (2016), the Lightning and Pompido EPs (2018), HOP HOP (2022) and UTRY (2022), plus a 2019 collaborative LP, Vanrock, with Israeli producer Kalbata. In 2016 Smilan and Sadot founded a second, instrumental groove unit, Sababa 5, blending Middle Eastern psychedelia, funk and disco; Smilan plays guitar in the band and has produced or mixed most of its catalog of singles and albums since, including Aspan (2023) and its 2025 self-titled full-length. Through the 2010s he also produced and mixed a run of singles for veteran Jamaican vocalists released on Medtone Records: Anthony Selassie and Ranking Joe's "If It Wasn't For Jah / Politicians" (2016), Cornel Campbell's "My Roots Girl" (2017), U-Roy's "My Ethiopian Queen" (2017), Linval Thompson's "Fussing & Fighting" (2018) and Robert Dallas's "Bearer Of Bad News" (2018).

Outside his own bands, Smilan has worked as a session guitarist and arranger for other Israeli artists, including a co-arranging and guitar credit on four tracks of Liraz's 2020 Glitterbeat Records album Zan, an all-Persian-language record by the Israeli-Iranian singer and actress, and a guitar credit on the 2023 album Ertevé by TamaRadah on the Kame'a label.

Smilan's catalog sits outside straight-ahead jazz almost entirely: it runs through Jamaican-rooted reggae and dub (Zvuloon Dub System), Afrobeat and Ethiopian repertoire arranged for a full horn section (Hoodna Afrobeat Orchestra), Afro-Latin psychedelic pop (Tigris) and instrumental Middle Eastern funk and disco grooves (Sababa 5). As a guitarist his playing is rhythm-first, built on reggae and dub voicings that carry over recognizably into Hoodna's horn-driven Afrobeat charts and into Sababa 5's vintage session-musician-style riffing. His parallel career as a producer and engineer, especially the run of Medtone Records singles pairing veteran Jamaican vocalists like Cornel Campbell, U-Roy and Linval Thompson with Israeli backing musicians, places him among the connective figures of the Tel Aviv "groove scene" that Bandcamp Daily profiled in its history of the movement, alongside acts like Kutiman. His most direct connection to the jazz world is through Hoodna: as that band's composer, arranger and co-producer, he brought Ethio-jazz's founding figure, Mulatu Astatke, to Tel Aviv in 2023 to record Tension, pairing Astatke's vibraphone-led Ethio-jazz vocabulary with the orchestra's horn section under Smilan's direction and Neal Sugarman's co-production.