Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz was born in Brooklyn in 1975 to Polish and Egyptian parents, and the Sephardic half of that inheritance became the material he built a career out of. By the Jerusalem Jazz Festival's account he was pulling sound out of household objects and a three-stringed guitar by the age of two. The formal training came later and in three places: the Manhattan School of Music, the Rimon School of Music in Israel, and Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he took a Bachelor of Music in performance. Bass Player magazine ran a feature on him in its May 2000 issue, by which point he was already working steadily in New York.

His route into jazz ran through the downtown scene rather than the conservatory circuit, and specifically through John Zorn's Tzadik label, where he has appeared on more than 25 releases since 1999. The first was saxophonist Daniel Zamir's Satlah (Tzadik TZ 7139, 2000), with Blumenkranz on bass, darbuka, tapes and toys; the same band's Exodus (TZ 7149) came out of two nights at Tonic on November 15 and 16, 2000, and Children of Israel (TZ 7169) followed in 2002 from a June 5 session at Orange Music in New Jersey. In 2003 he took the bass chair in guitarist Jon Madof's trio Rashanim, whose self-titled Tzadik debut (TZ 7178) put him alongside drummer Mathias Künzli with Bill Laswell mixing, and he turned up on both Voices in the Wilderness and The Unknown Masada, volumes two and three of Zorn's Masada Anniversary Edition. Outside the Tzadik orbit he cut Chinatown (Not Two Records MW 753-2, 2003), a co-billed trio date with multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter and drummer Kevin Zubek, and Unbroken (Tick Tock TT001), recorded August 1, 2005 with tenor saxophonist Louis Belogenis and drummer Kenny Wollesen.

What changed his standing was the decision to bring the oud and the gimbri, the three-stringed Moroccan bass lute used in Gnawa ritual music, onto records where nobody expected them. Rashanim's Shalosh (Tzadik TZ 8112, 2006) credits him on double bass, electric bass, oud and gimbri across a single album. Percussionist Adam Rudolph's Dream Garden (Justin Time JTR 8537-2), recorded November 21 and 22, 2006, has him on acoustic bass and sintir, another name for the same instrument. From 2008 he was a member of Cyro Baptista's Banquet of the Spirits (Tzadik TZ 7624), sharing the arranging credit with Baptista, keyboardist Brian Marsella and drummer Tim Keiper. The producer's chair came next and stayed: he produced Rashanim's The Gathering (2009), Eyal Maoz's Edom on Hope and Destruction (2009), Aram Bajakian's Kef (2011), Pitom's Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes (2011), and Banquet of the Spirits' Caym: Book of Angels Volume 17 (Tzadik TZ 7388, 2011), the last of which also lists him as arranger and as playing oud, bass, gimbri and singing.

His own band arrived in 2012. Zorn commissioned him to make a volume of the Masada Book of Angels songbook, and Abraxas: Book of Angels Volume 19 (Tzadik TZ 8302, released July 31, 2012, recorded and mixed at Orange Music Sound Studios in March 2012) was the result: Blumenkranz on gimbri throughout, guitarists Aram Bajakian and Eyal Maoz, and Kenny Grohowski on drums, with Blumenkranz credited as producer and arranger. Reviewers treated it as one of the more physical entries in a long series, Sephardic and North African material driven at rock volume. The band kept the name Abraxas and made two more records: Psychomagia (Tzadik TZ 8313, recorded December 2 and 3, 2013), which Zorn produced himself and Bill Laswell mixed, and Gevurah (Tzadik TZ 5105), recorded and mixed in January 2016 and issued in May 2019 as volume five of The Book Beri'ah, Zorn's 11-CD Tzadik box (TZ5100, August 2018) in which a different band takes each of the Kabbalistic sefirot. Blumenkranz produced and arranged the Abraxas volume; he also plays on other volumes of the box, and on volume ten, Malkhut, performed by Trey Spruance's Secret Chiefs 3, he is credited on bass, oud and gimbri. Abraxas played the Masada Marathon at the Newport Jazz Festival on August 1, 2014.

The other long commitment is Yemen Blues, and it is a band membership rather than a guest slot. Singer Ravid Kahalani started the group with bassist Omer Avital; English Wikipedia dates that partnership to 2008, while the band's own site and its European press biography say 2010, counting from the first public performance in Marseille rather than from the writing sessions. Avital left in 2012, and Blumenkranz took the bass and oud chair. He has held it ever since. He is on the self-released Live., taped at the Zappa Club in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2012 and later reissued on streaming as Live in Tel Aviv; on Insaniya (Inzima Publishing, 2015) he is one of three arrangers credited across eight of the nine tracks, alongside percussionists Itamar Doari and Rony Iwryn, with Avital arranging only the fifth track and Bill Laswell producing; and he was in the 2019 touring group that played Kahalani's program on the Hebrew prayer Hallel. On Shabazi: A Tribute to the Poet (MDC, June 2023), eight settings of the seventeenth-century Yemenite poet Shalem Shabazi, and on Only Love Remains (Kartel Music Group, August 28, 2024), he is one of the four musicians the band now consists of, with Kahalani, Iwryn and drummer Dan Mayo. He co-produced Only Love Remains with the band.

Three more long associations run alongside those. He has held the bass chair in Jon Madof's Zion80, the large Afrobeat ensemble built on Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's melodies, since its 2013 Tzadik debut (TZ 8175) and through Adramelech: Book of Angels Volume 22 (2014) and Warriors (Chant Records, 2017), both of which put him in a horn-heavy band with trumpeter Frank London. For the London-based RareNoise label he recorded with the keyboard project Mumpbeak (2013), a session whose four bassists included Laswell and Tony Levin, and with Magnet Animals, the quartet with guitarist Todd Clouser and Eyal Maoz that made Butterfly Killer (2016) and Fake Dudes (2021). He appears on The Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma's A Playlist Without Borders (Masterworks, December 2013), and in March 2026 he played Big Ears in Knoxville in a duo with the Chinese guzheng player Wu Fei, on bass and oud.

Blumenkranz is the rare bassist whose signature instrument is not the bass. The gimbri, a fretless three-string lute with a skin-covered wooden body and a percussive attack, sits at the bottom of Abraxas's sound and gives the band its particular hardness: a repeating trance figure underneath two guitars playing at metal volume, which is why the group gets described as Jewish or Sephardic ritual music crossed with punk rock rather than as a jazz quartet. His oud playing serves the opposite function, supplying modal melody lines on records by Cyro Baptista, Haggai Cohen Milo and Jamie Saft. The other half of his reputation is not about playing at all. Since roughly 2009 he has produced and arranged as much as he has performed, on other people's Tzadik dates as well as his own, and John Zorn's decision to hand him a Book of Angels volume and then a volume of The Book Beri'ah to direct is the clearest measure of where he sits in that circle.