Yossi Fine (born Joseph Thomas Fine) was born on December 7, 1964, in Paris, to a West Indian vocalist mother and an Israeli guitarist father. He started guitar at four, and by his mid-teens was an in-demand session bassist in Israel. In 1985 he moved to New York, where he spent six years, through 1991, as a regular player in the Gil Evans Orchestra — a genuine and significant jazz credential, given Evans's stature as an arranger and longtime Miles Davis collaborator — and worked in the same period alongside pianist Kenny Kirkland and guitarist John Scofield. In 1991 he received a reported Grammy nomination for his instrumental composition on guitarist Stanley Jordan's album Cornucopia (this claim is sourced only to Fine's own promotional materials and could not be independently confirmed against a Recording Academy source).

He returned to Israel in 1995 to work as a record producer, and around 1997–2000 formed Ex-Centric Sound System, a world/reggae/funk band with drummer Michael Avgil and three Ghanaian vocalists. His production and session work since spans a wide range: Israeli hip-hop group Hadag Nahash (winning Israel's ACUM Producer of the Year award in 2005, per his own bio, not independently confirmed), the band Khalas, Moroccan Gnawa musician Hassan Hakmoun, and — independently verified via a Haaretz account of the sessions — bass on David Bowie's 1995 album Outside, at the invitation of Bowie and Brian Eno. In 2011 he recorded and toured with Avila, a band assembled to back reggae and ska pioneer Ernest Ranglin. He has more recently served as artistic director of Israel's Red Sea Jazz Festival, curating its program, and in September 2026 performed at Jerusalem's Hullegeb Israeli-Ethiopian Arts Festival alongside Abate Berihun and oud player Yair Dalal.

Fine's own promotional materials describe him first as a "bassist, guitarist, and producer" working across "world, reggae, funk, and jazz" — jazz is one thread among several, not the lead one, and the larger share of his documented career sits outside jazz proper (world/reggae/funk bandleading, Israeli hip-hop production, art-rock session work, Gnawa collaboration). His inclusion here rests on real, substantial jazz credentials rather than a single passing credit: six years as a regular member of the Gil Evans Orchestra, direct work alongside Kenny Kirkland and John Scofield in that same period, and — a current, ongoing institutional role — his position as artistic director of the Red Sea Jazz Festival, Israel's flagship jazz festival, which places him in an active, leading position within the Israeli jazz scene even though his own performing catalogue is genre-crossing rather than straight-ahead jazz.