The Platina began as a hired backing band and turned into one of the first ensembles in Israel built around original jazz composition. In 1971 the singer Arik Einstein asked drummer Aharon "Arale" Kaminski, a fixture of the small Tel Aviv jazz scene that met in private apartments and at the Bar Barim club, to assemble a group to back him on the road. Around the same time Kaminski happened to hear the saxophonist and flutist Roman Kunsman playing at the Soromlo club in Jerusalem and decided to build the band with him. Kunsman had arrived from the Soviet Union at the end of 1970 with a full career behind him: from 1963 to 1970 he led his own quartet in Leningrad, his piece "Loneliness" won a prize at the Second Leningrad Jazz Festival, and in 1967 the Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra performed his "Ray of Darkness" at the Moscow Jazz Festival. After he emigrated his name was struck from official Soviet jazz history and went unmentioned in Russia until the 1990s.

Kaminski and Kunsman filled out the first lineup with guitarist Yitzhak Klepter and the American bassist Paul Silver, and Einstein, who gave the band its name, took them out on the tour supporting his album Badeshe Etzel Avigdor. Almost immediately the group also began working on its own, under Kunsman's artistic direction: he wrote most of the original material and all of the arrangements. When Klepter left to join Acharit Hayamim and Silver returned to the United States, keyboardist Yaakov Nagar and bassist Alon Oleartchik came in, a lineup the newspaper Davar covered in January 1972 under Eli Mohar's headline "Platina is good material." Nagar's departure brought in Alona Turel, a pianist and arranger just back from studies in New York, and Nachum Perperkovich, another recent immigrant, who doubled on viola and melodica.

The band's first record, Live at the "Bar Barim" (Isradisc, 1973), caught the early quintet of Kunsman, Kaminski, Turel, Perperkovich and bassist Victor Fonarov working a jazz-funk and soul-jazz vein across long pieces like "Amen" and "Evangelist." Freedom (Isradisc, 1974) was a considerably more ambitious record: an extended Kunsman suite plus two other originals, cut at Tritone Sound Studios with Michael Tapuach producing, Lev Zabeginsky on bass, and Turel filling the corners with Mellotron, Synthi and a Fender fuzz-wah while Kaminski worked through berimbau, agogô, cabasa, cuica and gong. The reissue market and jazz-rock collectors have treated Freedom as the group's high point ever since.

Alongside their own records the Platina were the house band of choice for Israeli singers looking for something more harmonically adventurous than a standard pop backing. They played on records by Tiki Dayan, Esther Ofarim, Edna Goren and Dani Litani, appeared on the Israel Broadcasting Authority's Dorival Caymmi tribute O Mar (The Sea), and backed the American blues singer Memphis Slim. The best documented of these partnerships is Chava Alberstein and the Platina (CBS, July 1974), built out of a concert tour with Chava Alberstein that started in September 1973, was broken off by the Yom Kippur War, and resumed in January 1974 with a run of dates in outlying towns. Kunsman arranged most of the twelve tracks, with single arrangements by Turel, Nurit Hirsh and Misha Segal, and the album closes with Hannah Senesh's "Halicha LeKesariya."

Their furthest reach came in 1974. After opening for B.B. King on an Israeli date in the early 1970s, King's manager helped get the group onto the bill of the Newport Jazz Festival in the United States, and Ma'ariv marked the trip on June 7, 1974 with a piece headlined "Our quintet at Newport." Voice of America broadcasts carried their music further, and a twenty-minute documentary about the band, Platina (1974), survives in the Israeli Film Archive. In 1976 they recorded a third album around a long jazz reworking of Debussy's "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair," with Haim Kario on guitar, Bernie Senensky and Yakov Erich on keyboards and Ricky Manor singing, but the tapes went missing and the group broke up that year. The recordings resurfaced in 2001 and were finally issued by Mio Records in December 2003, a year after Kunsman's death in November 2002 at Beit Gamliel. Kaminski, Kunsman, Perperkovich and Oleartchik had reunited in the mid-1990s for concerts that produced Live '95, with Chen Zimbalista added on percussion.

The Platina's five years cover an unusually wide arc for such a short-lived band. They started as a jazz-rock backing unit for a pop singer, and the electric keyboards, fuzz and rock rhythm section never entirely left; Live at the "Bar Barim" sits closer to jazz-funk and soul-jazz than to anything else recorded in Israel at the time. Kunsman pulled them steadily toward composed, open-form writing, and by Freedom the group had absorbed the airy, reverberant textures then associated with ECM while keeping a hard-bop player's attack in the solos, with Middle Eastern melodic turns surfacing in the themes. The 1976 material goes further still into modal and post-bop territory, alternating Kunsman originals with a Debussy arrangement and standards like "Doxy" and "I Can't Get Started." Their influence on Israeli music ran well past the jazz audience: the band was a proving ground for Klepter and Oleartchik, both of whom became central figures in Israeli rock, and Kaminski and Perperkovich went on to long careers as arrangers and session players.