David Benoit

David Benoit is a jazz pianist, composer and conductor, born in Bakersfield, California in 1953. Benoit grew up in The South Bay of Los Angeles. He studied piano at age 13 with Marya Cressy Wright and continued his training with Abraham Fr

David Benoit is a jazz pianist, composer and conductor, born in Bakersfield, California in 1953. Benoit grew up in The South Bay of Los Angeles. He studied piano at age 13 with Marya Cressy Wright and continued his training with Abraham Fraser, who was the pianist for Arturo Toscaninni. He focused on theory and composition at El Camino College, studying orchestration with Donald Nelligan, and later took film scoring classes taught by Donald Ray at UCLA. His education in music conducting began with Heiichiro Ohyama, assistant conductor of the L.A. Philharmonic, and continued with Jan Robertson, head of the conducting department at UCLA. He is currently studying conducting with Jeffrey Schindler, Music Director for the UC Santa Barbara symphony orchestra.

His career as a contemporary jazz pianist began in 1977 and includes 23 solo recordings over the past 25 years. Many of these, including his 1987 GRP Records debut Freedom At Midnight and its Grammy nominated 1988 follow-up Every Step Of The Way, are considered influential classics in the genre, which came to be known as Smooth Jazz. Among his other Grammy nominations are those for Best Instrumental Composition (for “Dad’s Room,” from 1999’s Professional Dreamer) and Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance (for the GRP All-Star Big Band). Combining two of the musical loves of his life, he recorded 1996’s American Landscape with The London Symphony Orchestra. He was voted Keyboardist of the Year for 2000 and 2001 by the Oasis Smooth Jazz Awards, and is currently in the Top Ten on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Chart with Fuzzy Logic, which spawned the recent #1 hit instrumental single “Snap!”