Biography
Bennett Salvay is a music composer from Los Angeles, California. Throughout his eclectic career Salvay has always gone the extra mile to locate the emotional crux.
A native of the Los Angeles suburb of Encino, Salvay began studying piano at age 7. But it was less the formal rigor of study than free-form improvisation – “Figuring out the things I heard in my head,” as he puts it – that caused him to fall in love with making music.
At 13 he formed a pop-rock band and began playing at high-profile L.A. venues. The experience would ultimately serve a vital function in his career.
He soon found himself touring the Great White North as the pianist for British blues artist Long John Baldry. After returning to school, he was again tempted away, but this time for good. A gig opened up at Paramount Studios, working for famed TV producer Garry Marshall’s company.
In the mid-’80s he wrote and conducted his first orchestral film score, for the AFI short When the Bough Breaks, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. “It was the greatest feeling I ever had, holding a baton and hearing this sound in front of me,” he remembers. “It was just thrilling. I thought, ‘I have to keep doing this.’”
Next came a lengthy period of all-consuming TV work with Miller-Boyett Productions, crafting theme songs and underscore for the company’s string of hit comedy series, including Full House, Family Matters, Perfect Strangers and numerous others.
The remainder of the decade afforded him work scoring independent films (Nature of the Beast, Love Stinks, Rites of Passage), hour-long dramas (Providence, Early Edition) and contributing arrangements (and occasional keyboards) to records by such artists as Everclear, Mötley Crüe, Rob Zombie and Fastball, as well as contemporary projects for icons Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé (for whom he arranged and conducted an orchestral version of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” a standout track on the cult anthology disc Lounge-a-Palooza).
2000 saw him conceive the score for horror film Jeepers Creepers, and his inventive music proved indispensable to the suspenseful flick’s mood.
Searching for new sounds and emotional impact to accommodate the feature’s mixture of outright terror and ghoulish whimsy, Salvay began by assembling a 60-piece string orchestra for a sampling session. He gathered an array of new colors for his palette before he began writing.
His score for the 2006 drama Peaceful Warrior earned similar plaudits. The feature, co-starring Nick Nolte, required inspirational themes of great symphonic sweep; many fans of the film have credited Salvay’s soaring cues for the production’s emotional impact. “Fantastic work … Truly epic stuff, and one of the best scores of '06 in my mind,” reads one YouTube review.
More work on dramatic TV followed – on series like Boomtown, Windfall and J.J. Abrams’ What About Brian? Not long thereafter, Salvay was summoned by Emmy-winning composer W.G. “Snuffy” Walden (who’d first hired him on Early Edition) to work on the score for fledgling TV drama Friday Night Lights.
Bennett Salvay’s career has had tremendous breadth, but the wildly divergent projects he’s undertaken are united by his always inventive approach to sound cultivation and a never-ending search for the emotional heart of the piece. “I’m always seeking new ways to do things,” he says. “That’s what keeps the process as exciting now as it was when I first picked up a baton.”
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