Elad Levi was born in Ashkelon and started on the Moroccan musical tradition before he started on anything else. His instrument is the kamanja, the violin held upright on the knee and tuned to the Andalusian modes rather than the European ones, and he learned it from Yeshua Azoulay, the Andalusian violinist who was among the founding figures of the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra Ashdod and who is generally named as the finest Jewish player of the instrument of his generation. Levi also studied with Meir Elazar Attiah, Haim Biton, and Nino Biton. He was performing publicly while still young, and the line his own biographies draw is a straight one: from a childhood inside the repertoire to a career spent keeping it alive.

The orchestra his teacher helped build became his working life. Levi joined the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra Ashdod, rose to concertmaster, and took charge of its Young Ensemble. On July 27, 2022 the orchestra's board unanimously appointed him artistic director, a promotion he described as closing a circle: he had, in his words, grown up on the Andalusian orchestra and played in it for about a decade. Founded in Ashdod in the mid-1990s by roughly thirty musicians of Moroccan, Tunisian, and Russian background, the orchestra had by then filled out with younger Israeli players, and Levi's stated brief was to deepen its hold on the tradition while pushing it in front of audiences that had never heard it. He also runs two ensembles of his own, Jerusalem Tarab and Andaluches, the latter assembled from about a dozen young Jerusalem musicians whose backgrounds ranged from classical piano to jazz guitar to rock bass, and who converged on North African music from those separate directions. Andaluches toured Morocco early in 2019 and played the Inbal Dance Theater in Tel Aviv on July 29 that year with Levi on violin and in the director's chair. Beyond that he directs the ensemble of the Moroccan cantor Rabbi Haim Louk, founded Dialna as an international group devoted to Moroccan Jewish repertoire, heads the North African department at the Maqamat School of Eastern Music in Safed, where he teaches Moroccan-Andalusian violin and Foundations of Maghreb Music, and serves as artistic advisor to the Andalousies Atlantiques festival in Essaouira.

His route into jazz ran through Omer Avital, and it is older than most accounts suggest. After a collaboration at the first Piyyut Festival in 2008, Avital and the musician and educator Yair Harel founded the New Jerusalem Orchestra, an ensemble built to put top Israeli players from jazz and from the Andalusian, Middle Eastern, and Western traditions on the same stage. Levi was its kamanja player. The group was given the opening slot at the Israel Festival in May 2010, and the recording of that performance became its debut, the two-disc Ahavat 'Olamim, issued by the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University as the third title in its Contemporary Jewish Music series. The album was launched at a concert in the Beit Avi Chai courtyard in Jerusalem on September 21, 2011, with Rabbi Haim Louk singing and the Ben Zvi Institute Piyyut Ensemble alongside. Avital directed, arranged, wrote melodies, conducted, and played double bass; the horn chairs went to Daniel Zamir on saxophone and Avishai Cohen on trumpets, with the American tenor saxophonist Greg Tardy guesting on the record. Levi sat in that band as the one player carrying the Moroccan instrument.

He has kept a second line running through Israeli jazz ever since. He arranged much of the repertoire of the Yohai Cohen Quintet, the Moroccan Andalusian and chaabi group the oud player and singer Yohai Cohen formed in Australia in June 2017 with a jazz rhythm section behind him, and travelled to appear with them as special guest, including at WOMADelaide in 2019. That September he turned up as a guest on violin and kamanche on "Of The Albanian," a track on the pianist Asaf Karaso's KarasOrchestra Project, a record filed under Israeli jazz and jazz fusion. Two singles followed in 2021: "Ya L'yahud Ou L'muslimin" in September, credited jointly to 12 Tribes Music, Yohai Cohen, and Levi, and in December "Waalach Majiti A Lala," on which La Casbah and Cohen brought in Levi and the pianist Omri Mor as their two special guests. Between them, that June, he took the violin chair in Tarabass, the septet the double bassist and composer Hagai Bilitzky fronts, for the seventh Jerusalem Jazz Festival in the Israel Museum's Sculpture Garden under the artistic direction of Avishai Cohen. The Jerusalem Post, previewing the June 24, 2021 set, called him a feted Andalusian-leaning violinist. Levi stayed with the group for its album New Sound of the Middle East, released December 9, 2022, whose track "Naama" was picked up for Songlines magazine's Top of the World 186 compilation the following year.

The largest of these crossings came from the orchestra he now runs. Avital wrote a piece for the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra Ashdod for the Sea Jazz festival in Ashdod in 2024, an experience he described as knowing everybody in the room, like a Moroccan synagogue. Out of that came North African Dream, a four-movement work Avital composed on commission for the orchestra, with movements titled "Piyut / Father," "The Dream," "Oriental Melancholy," and "Return of the African Jew." It premiered at Ashdod's Meridiano Festival in June 2025 with the orchestra under Levi's artistic direction, then went out around the country: Elma in Zichron Yaakov on August 27, the Jerusalem YMCA on August 28, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art on August 29, with further dates in November 2025 and a United States tour planned for spring 2026. Avital has called Levi a close friend and a partner in the vision behind the piece, crediting him with a rare ability to hand North African tradition down a generation while staying committed to running it together with jazz, classical harmony, and rock. Levi's own programming says the same thing from the other side: his 2025 series "From West to East," touring Israel from May 16 to June 19, put Omri Mor, the Ethiopian-Israeli saxophonist Abatte Barihun, and a Moroccan singer playing rebab in front of the orchestra together, on the argument that all three repertoires run on pulse. Through the war years he has also kept the orchestra playing in hospitals, on army bases, and for evacuees, marking its thirtieth anniversary season under conditions that made even going ahead an open question. "As musicians, we miss playing for people who come to hear you," he told the Times of Israel.

Levi is a traditional-music specialist first, and the thing that makes him useful to jazz musicians is precisely that he has not diluted the tradition to get there. His instrument, the kamanja, is played upright and voiced through the Andalusian nubah rather than through anything Western, and his teaching post at Maqamat is in Maghreb music, not in improvisation as a jazz musician would recognise it. What he brings to a jazz bandstand is an authentic modal line and the authority to lead a section of players who can follow it. That is why the roles keep repeating: guest, arranger, section leader, artistic director. In the New Jerusalem Orchestra he was the Moroccan instrument in a room where Omer Avital wrote the charts; in Tarabass he is the violin voice inside Hagai Bilitzky's attempt to fold the double bass into Arabic orchestration without either side making concessions; in the Yohai Cohen Quintet he is the arranger who shapes what a jazz rhythm section plays underneath Moroccan chaabi. His own critical reputation is built on the tradition, not the crossover: the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival introduced him simply as the premiere kamanja player in Israel. But he is the rare figure in that world who keeps opening the door, and by 2025 he was commissioning jazz composers rather than merely accepting invitations from them.