Eli Bennett
Eli Bennett (born March 9, 1989) is a Canadian jazz saxophonist and film composer. He has a Juno Award nomination and won a Leo Award for Best Musical Score for Believe: The True Story of Real Bearded Santas. He and his wife, violinist Rosemary Siemens, perform as the instrumental duo SaxAndViolin, and they played at The Vatican in 2019.
Bennett grew up in Vancouver, the son of composer and musician Daryl Bennett. He started on alto sax at 11, switched to tenor at 13, and often played at Vancouver’s Yale blues bar. In 2006 he joined the Gibson/Baldwin Grammy Jazz Band and performed at Grammy events with legendary players. He was also part of the Gibson/Baldwin Grammy Jazz Combo in 2007, sharing the stage with Phil Woods and James Moody. He opened for Herbie Hancock at Telluride and for McCoy Tyner at the Ottawa Jazz Festival, where he won the CBC Galaxie Rising Star Award.
He earned a scholarship to Humber College in Toronto, studying with Pat LaBarbara and Kirk McDonald and sharing stages with top musicians. After graduating in 2011, he returned to Vancouver to work with his father on film scores, including Nash, The Exhibition, Take Back Your Power, and Human Harvest.
His score for Believe earned the 2018 Leo Award for Best Musical Score in a Feature Length Documentary and a SOCAN Foundation Award. He also contributed music to Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.
Bennett released his debut album Breakthrough in 2014 (re released in 2016). It earned a Western Canadian Music Award nomination for Best Jazz Album, and he was nominated for the TD Grand Jazz Award at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2015. In 2018 he received a Juno nomination for Sweat, with Five Alarm Funk.
In 2020, SaxAndViolin released Can't Help Falling in Love (Instrumental Love Songs), Vol. 1. The album reached No. 3 on the Canadian iTunes Pop Chart, and their instrumental cover of "You Say" won the Covenant Award for Instrumental Song of the Year.
Bennett started his own publishing company, Eli Bennett Publishing, in 2012 and released an eBook of Chris Potter Plays Acapella Solo Standards. He has played a Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone since 2007 and uses D’Addario reeds. He proposed to Siemens during a 2017 concert, and they married later that year. Their son Theodore Parker Bennett was born in 2018.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:11 (CET).