Doron Raphaeli was born in Jerusalem on July 1, 1965, and grew up there, graduating from the high school of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. He began performing professionally at fifteen, and from 1983 to 1986 served as a drummer and performer in the Nahal Band, the Israel Defense Forces' military entertainment troupe. After his service he spent several years in the United States, studying at the Drummers Collective in New York and playing with local Latin, jazz, and fusion ensembles.

In 1988 he co-founded the Minuette Jazz Quartet in Tel Aviv with guitarist Menachem Zibziner, saxophonist and clarinetist Nitzan Ein Habar, and bassist Itai Shimron. The quartet performed at festivals and venues through 2000 and recorded at least three albums: First Dance, taped live in October 1989 at Tel Aviv's Gal-Kol Studios and released in 1990 on MCI Records; Patricio's Story, released in 1993 on NMC Records; and Eternal River (1995), documented only in Hebrew-language sources with no Discogs listing or other independent trace found. Both First Dance and Patricio's Story are verified at the Discogs release level, with Raphaeli credited on drums and percussion on both. Across the same years he also drummed in Atraf, a Latin-rock band that scored a run of Hebrew-language hits in the 1990s ("Ani VeShula BaChatzer," "Mango Banana U'Melon," "Yom Sababa," "Inbal," among others); Atraf reunited with its original lineup plus new members in 2017.

Two further one-off jazz sessions round out the Minuette years, neither catalogued on Discogs. In July 1996, guitarist Zibziner assembled a single ten-hour studio date called The Night Before at Gal-Kol Studio, pairing his own electric guitar with saxophonist Gilad Atzmon (not yet the London-based figure he would soon become), bassist Yaron Stavi, and Raphaeli on drums; the session, recorded live to DAT with almost no overdubbing, closed with a reading of Miles Davis's "Nardis." Two years later, in August 1998, visiting American saxophonist Jay Rodriguez sat in with a Minuette lineup of Zibziner, Shimron, and Raphaeli for a live date at Tel Aviv's Camelot club, released as Minuette with Jay. Raphaeli's connection to the Atzmon/Stavi circle runs deeper still: Discogs credits him on drums (and, on one release, as executive producer) for two further jazz-billed MCI Records sessions from the mid-1990s, both centered on Atzmon: Spiel Acid Jazz (1995, with Atzmon on saxophone, lyrics, and arrangement, trombonist Avi Lebovich, and trumpeter Avraham Felder) and Both Sides (1995, credited to the Spiel Acid Jazz Band, with Atzmon on saxophones and clarinet and Stavi on bass). A third mid-1990s jazz credit, drums on the Zohar Kahila Septet's Experimental Latin-Jazz (1993, MCI Records), is also independently verified at the Discogs release level.

Alongside this jazz thread, Raphaeli built a long, separate career as one of Israel's busiest session drummers and producers, credited on Discogs across nearly three decades on recordings by a wide range of mainstream Israeli pop and rock artists, including Yehuda Poliker, Ilanit, Dana International, Gidi Gov, Shaike Levy, and Miki Gavrielov. He has taught drumming and percussion at the Rimon School of Music since 1994, and in 1997 founded Tararam, a rhythm-and-movement ensemble that later expanded into the children's show franchise Tararam Kids, developed with screenwriter Avi Rosenblum. Tararam has performed internationally, including at Israeli President Shimon Peres's 80th-birthday celebration, the 2004 Athens Olympics, an Expo event in Germany, and a TEDx talk in Tel Aviv.

From 2011 on, Raphaeli issued a run of releases under his own name outside the jazz-combo format. Horse of Passion (2011, High Fidelity), credited to the Doron Raphaeli Trio, is described in his own Hebrew-language biography as original material in a Latin, African, and Israeli jazz style; its full credited lineup includes pianist and keyboardist Hod Moshonov, saxophonist Nitzan Ein Habar (his old Minuette bandmate), trombonist Avi Lebovich, percussionist Chen "Pepe" Meir, and vocalists Chava Meshasha and Ran Levy (who also plays bass guitar). Beit Aba (2016) drew on his Jerusalem family's Kurdish and Bukharan roots alongside jazz and rock influences, and HaMafteach ("The Key," 2019) is a set of songs written during his recovery from cancer. In 2022, per Hebrew-language sources, he released music with singer Moran Baron under the name BlackSmith, described as original material in a Nu Jazz style; this credit was not independently corroborated beyond that reporting (see doron-raphaeli_notes.md). A further Hebrew-language song album, Whole Half, followed in 2024.

Raphaeli's more recent public work has moved between music and advocacy. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he organized and released a roughly twenty-musician cover version of Natan Alterman's poem-song "Siyum" as a protest over the treatment of working artists during the shutdown, drawing performers from Atraf, the band Chipka, and the HaMafteach project, along with musicians Yair Sitwi and Amir Amrami and his own daughter, Eden Raphaeli. In 2021 he released a single with Eden, a cover of "Ahava Yomiyomit" ("Everyday Love," written by Tirtza Atar and first performed by Yehudit Ravitz), the same year he spoke publicly about his father's mistreatment at a Jerusalem nursing home. On February 7, 2024, he released "Yashar BaEinayim" ("Straight in the Eyes") with Daniel Weiss, a young musician from Kibbutz Be'eri who survived the October 7, 2023 attack and lost both parents in it; the pair have since performed together as "From Jerusalem to Be'eri," a program combining Israeli standards, original songs, and personal testimony.

To the broader Israeli public, Raphaeli is likely best known as the founder of Tararam and as a first-call session drummer and producer across pop, rock, and Latin-inflected recordings spanning nearly forty years. But a genuine, sustained jazz identity runs through that same career: the Minuette Jazz Quartet he co-founded in 1988 kept performing for twelve years, and Discogs independently verifies him on drums across jazz-billed sessions tagged, in the labels' own metadata, Fusion (Minuette, Horse of Passion), Post Bop (the Zohar Kahila Septet), and Acid Jazz, Bop, and Hard Bop (the two Atzmon-led Spiel sessions). That range, spanning small-group post-bop, Latin jazz, and the London-scene-adjacent acid-jazz movement of the mid-1990s, plus a Nu Jazz-billed 2022 project, points to a working drummer moving fluently between jazz subgenres rather than a specialist in any single one of them, consistent with a career built as much on session versatility as on a fixed stylistic identity.