Yitzhak Yedid was born in Jerusalem in 1971 to a Syrian-Jewish father and an Iraqi-Jewish mother. His father sang as an amateur cantor in synagogue in the Aleppo tradition, so the Baqashot and the Piyyutim, the Sephardi and Mizrahi liturgical repertoires with their own modal systems and microtonal inflections, were the first music in the house. Piano lessons started at seven. The jazz came later, on top of a childhood already spent inside maqamat-based song.

He took a piano degree with honours at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem, where his composition and piano teacher was Vyacheslav Ganelin, who had led the Ganelin Trio, the best known free jazz group in the Soviet Union, from the early 1970s until he emigrated to Israel in 1987 and joined the faculty in Jerusalem. In 1997 and 1998 Yedid studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston with Ran Blake and Paul Bley. Ganelin, Blake and Bley are three of the least orthodox pianists of their generation, and the shape of Yedid's career is legible from that list alone.

Back in Israel he began a decade of sustained writing and recording. Between 1999 and 2009 he composed nine large-scale works and released eight albums, distributed by Challenge Records International and issued on the Between The Lines imprint. They are chamber records rather than jazz-trio records: Myth Of The Cave (2003) for clarinet, bass and piano, cut in Frankfurt in October 2002; Passions & Prayers (2006), a sextet in homage to Jerusalem with French horn and trombone; Reflections Upon Six Images (2006), recorded in Vienna; Since My Soul Loved (2009) for strings and piano; and the solo Through The Window Of Marc Chagall (2010). The bassist Ora Boasson Horev plays on six of them, the longest-running partnership in his catalogue.

Two of those albums put the central question on the sleeve. Oud Bass Piano Trio. Suite In Five Movements (2008), composed in Jerusalem in 2005, is written for Mikhail Maroun's oud, Boasson Horev's bass and Yedid's piano as one continuous suite. Arabic Violin Bass Piano Trio - Suite In Four Movements (2012) does the same work with Sami Kheshaiboun playing Arabic violin, its movements carrying titles like "Taqsim, Dedicated To The Day Of Tomorrow" and "The High Priest's Whispered Prayer On Yom Kippur As He Leaves The Holy Of Hollies." Yedid afterwards took the same question into a doctorate at Monash University in Melbourne, on methods of integrating the materials of Arabic music into contemporary Western composition.

Running beside the written work is a duo. In 1999 the Ethiopian saxophonist and singer Abate Berihun arrived in Israel from Addis Ababa, where he had played eight years of nightly hotel sets and toured Europe with his own band, and found none of it transferred. Moshe Bar-Yuda of the TOMER organisation brought him to the musicologist and radio presenter Shlomo Israeli, who introduced him to Yedid. After two rehearsals they recorded five tracks. The duo took the name Ras Dashen, after the highest mountain in Ethiopia, in the Semien range where Ethiopian Jews defended themselves against persecution between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their album, recorded in Tel Aviv and issued on the Israeli label MCI with Fentahon Malessa on krar, works four qenet modes of Ethiopian tradition, Anchi Hoye, Bati, Tezeta and Ambassel, and was rated among the best Israeli jazz albums of its year.

In 2006 Yedid served as one of two credited consultants on Jazz In Jerusalem Project. Birth Of The Local Standard (The Eighth Note), a compilation built on the proposal that Hebrew songs should function as a standards repertoire the way the American songbook does, and played "K'She Or Dolek Be Chalonech" solo on it. Alon Yavnai appears on the same record.

He moved to Australia in 2007 and has stayed, lecturing in composition and piano at the Queensland Conservatorium at Griffith University while returning to Jerusalem several times a year. The awards run across both countries: the Israel Prime Minister's Prize for Composers in 2007, first prize in the commission competition at the 17th International Harp Contest in 2008, the Landau Prize for Performing Arts in 2009, a residency at the Judith Wright Centre in Brisbane in 2010, ACUM awards in 2013, 2016 and 2019, and a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship worth A$160,000 across 2018 and 2019.

In 2020 he won the Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music for Kiddushim Ve' Killulim, a package valued at over CAD $200,000 including CAD $50,000 in cash. The jury called the work "brilliant, creative, dramatic, slyly humorous and unquestionably Jewish." Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne under Lorraine Vaillancourt recorded his prize work, released by Analekta on New Jewish Music, Vol. 3 - Azrieli Music Prizes on 1 October 2021, where it carries the title Kadosh Kadosh and Cursed.

The duo did not end when he left. Ras Dashen released V'ahavta ("and thou shalt love") on 21 May 2021, eight original settings of scripture texts shaped by the melodies of the kesim, the priests of the Ethiopian Jewish community. Ahead of him is the largest commission of his career: the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has programmed his oratorio The Valley Of The Dry Bones for Saturday 5 June 2027, conducted by Eugene Ughetti, with the MSO Chorus, The Consort of Melbourne, and the Wiradjuri writer Stan Grant as narrator, built on Ezekiel's vision of a valley of bones told to live again.

Yedid writes through-composed large forms and improvises inside them, which places him closer to Third Stream than to any jazz idiom with a rhythm section behind it. Three sources feed the music and none of them is decorative. The first is Sephardi and Mizrahi liturgy, specifically the Aleppo Baqashot and Piyyutim he grew up hearing his father sing, with the modal contours and microtonalities that go with them. The second is Arabic art music: maqam structure, taqsim as a formal device, and instruments played by their own tradition's specialists rather than imitated, which is why the oud and Arabic violin trios are cast with Mikhail Maroun and Sami Kheshaiboun. The third is free improvisation, inherited directly from Ganelin in Jerusalem and from Ran Blake and Paul Bley in Boston.

He names Bela Bartok and Arnold Schoenberg as compositional influences, which fits the way his suites treat folk and liturgical material as structural rather than as colour. Movement titles are frequently pictorial and often unsparing, from "Hallucinatory Dance Of A Drunken Klezmer Player" to "Image Of A Homeless Holocaust Survivor On The Streets Of Tel Aviv."