Biography
Benoît is a Canadian composer and musician born in Montréal Québec and is schooled in both French and English. Despite being nurtured in the fundamentals of European, French, and Canadian music, Benoit was drawn to the African-influenced idioms of the Americas, including: jazz, blues, funk, soul, gospel, salsa, samba, etc. Benoît moved to the United States to immerse himself in this music, and quickly became a top-call "gigging" bassist on the South Florida scene while he concurrently earned a Bachelor's degree in Studio Music & Jazz at the University of Miami. After graduation, he relocated to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of working as a recording and touring musician at a world-class level. Soon after arriving in LA, he was invited to be a student teacher at the prestigious University of Southern California (USC) Thornton School of Music, where he received his Master's Degree in Jazz Bass Performance.
Almost immediately after graduating from USC, Benoît was invited to tour with the legendary "Genius of Soul" Ray Charles. During several years of supporting Ray, Benoît traveled to over 40 countries on 4 continents performing on concert stage, broadcast and film alongside the giant of Jazz and Soul music.
Benoît's tour of duty time with "The Genius" included the recording of "A Romantic Evening With Ray Charles", now a collector's item.
After touring with other artists such as Eddie Harris, Barbara Morrison and Marisela, Benoît decided to make a change and focus on his composing and arranging talents. He returned to school yet again to study orchestration and composition at the UCLA Film Scoring Program. Soon after completing this program he was selected to participate in the prestigious ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop where he forged relationships that would move his career forward very rapidly. His various talents as an orchestrator, copyist, musician and orchestra contractor gave him the opportunity to work on such scores as "Mimic", "Scream 2", "Big Daddy" and "Lethal Weapon 4". Benoît was given the opportunity to unite all of his musical and organizational talents on "Pokémon: The First Movie". He filled numerous roles on the project including lead orchestrator, conductor, contractor, supervising copyist, MIDI recordist, as well as composing original music for the score. This led to his participation in the same capacity on the two Pokémon movie sequels that would follow.
With his talents honed and his reputation fortified Benoît continued to work with acclaimed film and TV directors such as Keenan Ivory Wayans, Darren Star and Barry Levinson. His orchestrations have been part of hit movies such as “Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny”, "The Day After Tomorrow", “The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)”, "Failure to Launch", "Scary Movie 2" as well as the TV show “Scrubs”. As a composer, Benoît has scored the award-winning cult-film “Jimmy and Judy” starring Edward Furlong, the romantic comedy “Jelly” starring Natasha Lyonne and the long awaited Sci-Fi sequel “Screamers: The Hunting”. In the world of video games Benoît has contributed arrangements and orchestrations to “Transformers: The Game”, “Jaws Unleashed” and the video game concert series “Video Games Live” (VGL). In 2009 he was invited to speak at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) as a guest panelist. Click below for details.
Also in 2009, he was interviewed by European media magazine "Inter-Activities" regarding his score for “Screamers: The Hunting”.
Benoît has music studios in Canada and in Hollywood, California.