David Benoit

DAVID BENOIT: ONE DREAM AT A TIME
by Marshall Bowden

David Benoit helped to create the current contemporary jazz sound, and certainly is responsible for the keyboard's central role in the music that has come to be known as "smooth jazz". His work is typically awash in strings and usually possesses a soft-focus quality that you either love or hate. Though he has studied piano from an early age and started working professionally at age 17, he later developed considerable skill as a composer and arranger.

At 20 Benoit was asked to play piano on the soundtrack of Robert Altman's Nashville, a career pick-me-up if ever there was one. He also scored a record deal during his first sessions backing up a sax player; the producer like his playing and offered him a recording contract. Some twenty-four years later Benoit has just released his twenty-second album, Fuzzy Logic. " I wanted to do something very funky and upbeat," says Benoit, "and I hadn't done a record like this in a long time. Actually, I don't know if I've ever done a record like this." For one thing, the strings Benoit has arranged and used on so many of his fourteen recordings for the GRP label are gone. The more lyrical tracks instead utilize woodwinds-French horn, saxophone, oboe, and the flute work of Tim Weisberg.

Though detractors might dismiss Benoit's work as "overproduced smooth jazz", there is no question that he is a talented musician, both as a player and a composer. Nor has he limited himself to jazz influenced music by any means. He's done considerable film scoring work and has recently been working on classical compositions and conducting symphonies across the world, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the London and Nuremberg symphonies. In addition, he is currently working on a Broadway musical about the life of film icon Marilyn Monroe.

David readily acknowledges the anti-smooth jazz attitude of many traditional jazz musicians and students. He himself says that he plays traditional jazz for fun. "..In getting into the traditional jazz world, some of them look at a lot of the smooth jazz guys and look down their noses at them" he stated in a recent interview. "And I don't blame them, because a lot of the smooth jazz guys get up on stage and they're not improvising; it's all worked out, it's more like a rock-and-roll show!" He also admits that the music business definitely has the emphasis on business these days, and that the GRP label isn't as creative as it once was. It seems that smooth jazz, like so many other forms of the music, started as an attempt by a small group of musicians to create a unique sound that they enjoyed playing and became another marketing vehicle for record companies looking for commercial success in a genre where commercial success wasn't necessarily part of the package. An example of this is Benoit's 1989 album Waiting for Spring. The album has a much more straight ahead jazz fell than Benoit had become known for, particularly on the gorgeous title track. Executives at GRP were skeptical, believing that Benoit should stick with a formula that worked, but they put the album out at his insistence. It was number one on the jazz charts for eight weeks.

In 1992 David released an album that was much closer to the traditional jazz trio format, the beautiful Letter to Evan, a tribute to the great pianist Bill Evans. On albums like these, you can hear that Benoit has chops and is able to play pretty much any style of music with ease and grace. Having played with artists as diverse as Alphonse Mouzon, Lainie Kazan, Melissa Manchester, and Lalo Schiffren, he emphatically echoes the words of Duke Ellington, who said there are only two kinds of music-good and bad.

Most recently Benoit has accepted a role as music director of the Asia America Symphony, a local symphony group, and started a youth symphony. He has also been working as a music educator across the country with the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation. The group helps keep school orchestras alive and provides funds for schools to purchase band instruments. Obviously, this is an important role in an era when the U.S. government has seen fit to support the arts even less than its normally weak attempts to do so. It's also good to think that someone with as wide a musical background as Benoit is actually interacting with kids, helping him or her to realize that there is a wide world of music out there, rather than over-emphasizing one "true" style of jazz as some other artists have done. In David's words: "[Music] was as much a part of a kid's education as soccer practice is now. There was a piano in every schoolroom. It was just part of growing up, learning to play an instrument. We've gotten so far away from that."

>>Review of Fuzzy Logic