Yemen Blues is not a jazz band, and it has never claimed to be one. It is a Yemenite and West African music project with a jazz rhythm section inside it, built by a singer who did not come out of the jazz world and a bassist who did. Singer Ravid Kahalani, born in 1978 to a Yemenite Jewish family in Elon Moreh, had spent the mid-2000s singing with the Idan Raichel Project and with Serbian multi-instrumentalist Misko Plavi's international band. Bassist Omer Avital had spent the 1990s leading a piano-less quartet at Smalls in Greenwich Village and had gone home to Israel from 2003 to 2006 specifically to study oud and Arabic music theory. English Wikipedia dates their partnership to 2008: Kahalani founded the band with Avital that year, then spent roughly two years writing and rehearsing material between New York and Tel Aviv before playing anything in public.

The public debut came in Marseille in 2010, at the Babel Med Music trade festival, with the group expanded to nine pieces. The set did what showcase sets are supposed to do and almost never do: it produced a touring calendar. Within a year Yemen Blues had tracks on the Womex trade fair's own sampler (The Womeximizer 10, Piranha WOMEX AG) and on Babel Med's Ecoute Le Monde! Listen To The World! compilation, both 2010, and by 2011 was on the Ethno Port Poznan and TFF Rudolstadt festival compilations as well. The band played Le Poisson Rouge in New York in 2011 and the Luminato festival in Toronto on June 14 of the same year, and appeared at globalFEST in New York in January 2012. Note that the band's own website and its European press biography both date the founding to 2010 rather than 2008, dating the band from the Marseille debut instead of from the writing sessions. Neither the band's material nor any press account found gives a 2009 founding.

The self-titled debut followed in 2011, and its billing is worth reading closely. Discogs files the master as Yemen Blues By Ravid Kahalani, with Avital credited as bass, oud, arranger and music director rather than as a co-billed leader. It came out in Israel on four imprints at once, Lev Group Media, Globalev World Of Music, Inzima Publishing and The Eighth Note, in a digisleeve with an eight-panel insert. The band on it was the Marseille nine-piece plus guests: Itamar Doari and Rony Iwryn on the two percussion chairs, Itamar Borochov on trumpet, Avi Lebovich on trombone, Hadar Noiberg on flute, Hilla Epstein on cello and Galia Hai on viola, with Tamir Muskat of Balkan Beat Box mixing and Iwryn editing. Kahalani wrote the music and the lyrics and shared the arranging with Avital. The ten tracks run from the opening "Wamid" through the title track and "Baraca" to the bonus "At Va'a Ani," moving between Hebrew, Arabic, French and invented syllables.

Then the founding partnership ended. Avital left in 2012 to concentrate on his own projects, and the New York bassist and oud player Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, a fixture of John Zorn's Tzadik circle, took the chair. The changeover is audible on the band's first live document, cut at the Zappa Club in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2012 with a ten-piece group and no Avital on stage, though the arrangements still carry his name. Self-released on a limited CD as Live. in 2013, it later reappeared on streaming through the New York label Chant Records in January 2018 as Live in Tel Aviv. That band added Rafi Malkiel on trombone, Matan Chapnizki on saxophone, Salit Lahav on flute, Keren Tenenbaum on viola and Daniel Iwryn on a second bass, and gave over a full track each to a percussion solo and a duet.

Insaniya (2015) is the record that put the band on jazz-press radar rather than world-music radar, and it did so partly through its producer. Bill Laswell took the chair, recording and mixing between Kitcha Studios and his own Orange Music Sound Studio in West Orange, New Jersey, with Robert Musso, Oz Fritz and James Dellatacoma engineering and Michael Fossenkemper mastering at TurtleTone in New York. Kahalani composed all nine tracks; the arranging was collective, with Doari, Iwryn and Blumenkranz each credited on tracks 1 to 5 and 7 to 9, Borochov credited across the record, and Avital arranging track 5 alongside conductor Tom Cohen, who also orchestrated it. It is the band's most guest-heavy album: Franco-Malian rapper Oxmo Puccino wrote and delivered the lyric on "Satisfaction," the Yemenite-Israeli singer Zion Golan is featured on "Ma'ahla Asalam," the Sahrawi singer Mariem Hassan is on "Tonight I'll Be Pretty," and Tomas Doncker plays guitar on "Beautality." DownBeat reviewed it in December 2016, with Izzy Yellen calling it an intense and moving journey through tight horn lines, charismatic vocals and layers of instrumentation.

The years after Insaniya took the band away from a fixed roster and toward projects. In 2019 it toured a program built on the Hebrew prayer Hallel, with a lineup of Kahalani, the Yemeni oud player Ahmed Al-Shaiba, Iwryn, Blumenkranz, Navid Kandelousi, Yoed Nir, Salit Lahav, Jonathan Voltzok on trombone, Asa Kook and the American drummer Nikki Glaspie. Shabazi: A Tribute to the Poet arrived in June 2023 on the French label MDC (MDC033), eight settings of texts by Shalem Shabazi, the seventeenth-century Yemenite rabbi and poet, mixed again by Tamir Muskat. Only Love Remains followed on August 28, 2024 on Kartel Music Group (YBI001LP), eleven tracks made by booking a studio for two weeks with almost nothing written and co-produced by the band with Blumenkranz. The album is dedicated to Al-Shaiba, who was killed in a car accident in New York at 32. The group now works as a quartet: Kahalani, Blumenkranz, Iwryn and drummer Dan Mayo. In 2024 the PAARD venue in The Hague cancelled a Yemen Blues concert after threats from pro-Palestinian groups.

The band's raw material is the Yemenite Jewish liturgical and folk repertoire Kahalani grew up singing in synagogue, and its method is to run that material through a rhythm section rather than through an ensemble of traditional players. What sits underneath the chant is funk and West African groove, with the North African gimbri, a three-string bass lute, as the pivot instrument. What sits on top, at least through 2015, was an unusual front line for a groove band: trumpet and trombone alongside cello, viola and flute, so the horn and string writing does the work a keyboard would normally do. Kahalani sings in Hebrew, Arabic, French and syllables of no language at all, and has said plainly that he treats language as a tool and picks whichever one fits the melody. The jazz element is real but structural rather than stylistic: it lives in the improvised solo space, in the arranging credits shared around the band, and in the fact that the people filling those chairs, Omer Avital, Itamar Doari, Itamar Borochov, Avi Lebovich and Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, came out of the Smalls, Razdaz and Tzadik scenes and hold jazz careers outside the band. Discogs files the debut as Jazz and Fusion and the recent albums as Contemporary and Avant-garde Jazz; DownBeat has reviewed the band; SFJAZZ has carried a Yemen Blues set on demand. WNYC's description is a fair summary of what the records actually sound like: Moroccan trance, Arab and Bedouin folk, and Western funk and rock, built into a high-energy dance set.