Ravid Kahalani was born in 1978 to a Yemenite Jewish family in Elon Moreh. He grew up attending a Yemenite synagogue and briefly studying with a Yemenite rabbi, dropped out of school at 15, and spent five years finding his own musical direction.

In 2010 he founded Yemen Blues with bassist Omer Avital, already profiled on jazzprofiles.com, assembling a supergroup of musicians from New York, Israel, and Uruguay. The band fuses Yemenite, North African, and Middle Eastern music with American funk and R&B, centered on Kahalani's vocals (in Hebrew, Arabic, French, and English) and his playing on the gimbri, a North African guitar-like instrument. He also appeared as a featured performer on Amir Bresler's House of Arches (2022), another Israeli artist already profiled here.

Yemen Blues released their self-titled debut in 2011, followed by a live album in 2013, Insaniya (2015), Shabazi: A Tribute to the Poet (2023), and Only Love Remains (2024).

Kahalani's music sits in world music and funk rather than jazz proper, but its founding partnership with a jazz bassist and its cast of jazz-trained collaborators keep it in orbit around the genre. The sound draws on Yemenite Jewish musical tradition fused with North African, Middle Eastern, and American funk/R&B influences.