Eli Bennett grew up in a house full of music.
But it was the gold shine of his dad’s alto saxophone he played in high school that caught the 11-year-old boy’s eye.
It was just laying there, Bennett remembered, so he picked it up and started to play. It suited him just fine and he began to take lessons.
About a year on, Bennett heard his dad play a recording of the great American jazz saxophonist and composer Michael Brecker. It caught his ear. “I said, ‘Who’s that guy?’I want to sound exactly like him,’” he told his father, Darryl Bennett, the drummer for the Powder Blues.
The young Bennett practised regularly, showing off the instrument’s versatility with funk, pop and blues beats. He gained a reputation after his first professional gig at the age of 13 and later played at the Yale with his dad and with top acts such as Oscar Peterson and Nikki Yanofsky.
Along the way Bennett studied their style, trying to find out what made them tick. “There are so many artists and, to stand out, you have to do something different,” he said.
Bennett believes he’s captured that uniqueness in his debut album Breakthrough. Released last October, the work contains original instrumental tracks plus a John Coltrane cover.
It’s getting rave reviews. It is up for a Western Canadian Music Award in September for best jazz recording of the year along with the A/B Trio, Jill Barber, Paul Keeling, The Writers’ Guild and Tyler Hornby.
And on Friday, he starts a series of solo shows in Vancouver before launching the Breakthrough tour with his quartet on June 20 at the Italian Cultural Centre, during the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. The quartet will also stop in Calgary, Medicine Hat, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal for their jazz fests before wrapping up July 12 in London.
On tour, they will play songs from the Breakthrough album “but there’s a lot of room to have fun, too, and really explore and improv,” the 26-year-old said. “It keeps it interesting. There’s probably not going to be a single show that’s the same.”
A PoCo resident since 2007 and a Conn-Selmer endorsing artist, Bennett said his full-time job is composing for TV and film — sometimes with his dad.
He has received Leo award nominations for his scores with Remedy (animation), Reset (short drama), Escape Act (short drama) and Nash (feature documentary). Last year, they worked on Take Back Your Power, a documentary about smart metres that won Documentary of the Year at the Leos.
The duo also composed for The Exhibition, which documentarian Damon Vignale won an International Emmy Award in New York last fall for best arts programming; the film was about the backlash an artist received while trying to mount a large-scale painting exhibition of the victims of Port Coquitlam serial murder Robert Pickton.
• Breakthrough can be purchased via amazon.ca or iTunes Canada.
