

Here Benoit finally gets to offer up his original symphonic compositions on a full album. In recent years, Benoit has branched out as a composer and conductor, leading the Asia America Orchestra and its younger Youth Orchestra, performing some of his original pieces and conducting other orchestras.


His best contemporary-jazz pieces demonstrate a gorgeous tone and symphonic scope on the piano, and that talent is spotlighted on a larger scale on Orchestral Stories, which is not a jazz album by any definition. David Benoit has long been a pianist whose harmonic and rhythmic flourishes were more in the tradition of classicists like Vince Guaraldi, whose mantle he inherited, as well as Dave Brubeck and Bill Evans, to whom Benoit dedicated an album.
