Yogev Shetrit is an Israeli drummer, composer, and bandleader whose music fuses North African, Gnawa, and Andalusian traditions drawn from his Moroccan-Jewish family heritage with contemporary jazz. Born in 1978, he grew up in a household that mixed his mother's love of Dave Brubeck with the family's Moroccan and Middle Eastern listening, and played his first paid gig at 16 or 17 on drums at a festival in his hometown of Beersheba, covering rock bands like Metallica and Pink Floyd. Friends later introduced him to jazz, and fusion drummers such as Dave Weckl and pianist Chick Corea pulled him toward the kit as a compositional instrument rather than a rock backbeat. He earned a BA in Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2000-2004), received the America-Israel Cultural Foundation's top award for jazz studies in 2003-2004, studied at the Drummers Collective in New York in 2005, and won a full scholarship to the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music for 2006-2007.

From 2003 to 2014, Shetrit was a founding member of Coolooloosh, a funk and hip-hop band that toured extensively through the United States, Canada, and Europe, including sets at the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Ottawa Bluesfest, the Calgary Folk Festival, and CMJ Music Marathon in New York, and an opening slot at the 2008 Maccabiah Games. The band's second album was recorded in Philadelphia with producer David Ivory, known for his work with The Roots and Erykah Badu.

In 2015 Shetrit formed his own trio to play original compositions, and in August 2016 he released his debut as bandleader and composer, New Path, an eleven-track instrumental record built on drums, percussion, piano, and flute, with Avri Borochov on bass and Gil Zohar on piano, plus guest turns from Omri Mor on piano and percussion, guitarist Yuval Gerstein, and saxophonist Ariel Levi. A live recording of the same book of material, Live AS IS!, followed in October 2019, drawn from concert performances that his own touring materials place at the Globus Jazz Festival in Jerusalem and Casa del Jazz in Rome (not independently verified per-date; see notes.md). His second studio album, Serenity, arrived in December 2019, again featuring Avri Borochov on bass alongside pianists Moshe Elmakias and Stav Goldberg, with guest musicians on kanun, violin, darbuka, and clarinet widening the record's Middle Eastern palette. The trio has since performed in more than 30 countries, including engagements at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (representing the Israeli Embassy), the International Panama Jazz Festival, the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat, the Jerusalem Jazz Festival, the Iowa City-based Polyrhythms Third Sunday Jazz Series, the Twin Cities Jazz Festival, the Delhi Jazz Festival, and repeat appearances (five as of his most recent album cycle) at the Jazz Bishkek Spring Festival in Kyrgyzstan, plus dates in Almaty and Tashkent.

His third studio album, Way of Tradition, was self-produced and released in May 2025, described by All About Jazz reviewer Anastasia Bogomolets as blending "jazz roots while weaving in all sorts of global influences" from Central Asian, Moroccan, and Andalusian traditions, with echoes of Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. The album's personnel lists Shetrit as composer, conductor, and drummer alongside pianist David Sheetrit and bassist Yonatan Cohen, with guest musicians on guitar, oud, and accordion; one track, "One for David," is a tribute to Sheetrit, and another, "Family First," began as an improvised melody sung by Shetrit's own daughter. Beyond performing, Shetrit has taught music for close to two decades, leading masterclasses and workshops on Moroccan and Gnawa rhythm internationally, and endorses Canopus Drums.

Shetrit's core musical idea is fusion built from his own family's soundtrack: North African and Gnawa rhythm, Andalusian melody carried over from his Moroccan-Jewish heritage, and Mediterranean and Jewish folk material, all voiced through a contemporary jazz trio format that leaves room for extended drum and percussion features. Coming up through rock (Metallica, Pink Floyd) before fusion drummers like Dave Weckl and pianists like Chick Corea redirected him toward jazz, he still treats the drum kit as a compositional voice rather than pure timekeeping, often layering percussion textures (bandir, karkabou, hand claps) recorded track by track in his own home studio. He describes his improvising as unconscious in the moment but built entirely on accumulated practice: "I try not to think, but I believe it's a process that is based on all the years of practice and experience." Across three studio albums his writing has moved gradually from funk- and drum-and-bass-inflected pieces on New Path toward a more overtly "world jazz" and Andalusian-Gnawa-forward sound on Serenity and Way of Tradition, with each record widening the folk-instrument palette (kanun, oud, accordion, darbuka) around the working jazz trio.