Yann Benoist

Early life

Yann Benoist was born in Dinan, Brittany. At age 8 his parents enrolled him in a music academy. They bought him his first guitar when he was eleven and he started learning to play with friends and different teachers.

Career

When Benoist was 18 he started playing and singing with some local bands in Brittany and Normandy.

During 1975 he worked with the Switzerland duet Richard et Samuel. The next year, he learned for a while with Pierre Cullaz (famous sessionman from the sixties ) in Paris.

By the end of the seventies he was a member of the Francis Bourrec quartet. They won the first prize at La Défense Jazz Festival in 1978. That same year he got a certificate from the Berklee College of Music.

Since then he has worked on stage or sessions for commercials, TV movies, TV shows, and musical comedies, with numerous French stars such as Renaud, Gilbert Becaud, Serge Lama, Patricia Kaas, Mireille Mathieu, Richard Bohringer, Jean Guidoni, Sylvie Vartan, Sheila (singer), Hugues Aufray, Jean-Luc Lahaye, Julien Clerc, Patrick Hernandez, Nancy Holloway, Sacha Distel, Murray Head, Maurane, Marie Myriam, Francis Cabrel, Smain, Dorothée, Gilles Servat, William Sheller, Jacques Loussier, and Michel Legrand.

In 1983 he was a member of Space, with Didier Marouani, for the first big tour organized in the USSR. They performed 21 concerts in Moscow's Olympic Stadium, Leningrad's Saint-Petersburg Sports and Concert Complex and Kiev's Palace of Sports for about 600,000 people, and in 1992 they performed the first concert authorized on the Red Square in Moscow, for 360,000 people.

In 1989 and 2002 he was musical director for Shiela at the Olympia. In 2011 he was conductor for Joel Prevost at the Alhambra.

He is a composer for APM Music and Universal Publishing.

As a leader

As a sideman

Videos

As a leader

As a sideman

Composer

including  :Gilbert Bécaud B+B(je t'appartiens) Composer Yann Benoist Lyrics Pierre Delanoë / Manny Curtis

Movie TV scores