ST-DENIS
BIO
Roger has been a professional musician for over 30 years. He grew up in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains, and developed a strong interest in music at the age of eight when he learned how to play the piano. As his love of music grew, he continued taking a wide range of music courses throughout his High School, CEGEP and University years in Montréal and Ottawa.
Roger moved to Toronto in his early 20's. He worked as an assistant to visionary artist Paul Hoffert (Lighthouse) and as a music teacher until he was approached by a recording studio, which catered to the needs of Advertising Agencies, to be the music director and writer for TV and Radio ad campaigns. After winning awards and recognition in the industry, (two CLIO awards, CBC/Radio-Canada's Prix Marcel Blouin for “Best Recording of the Year”, and his song “Sous tout les Climats” being nominated as finalist for Les Jeux de la Francophonie) he opened his own recording facility L'Atelier Recording Studios and collaborated as music producer and composer on many different genre of album projects and TV/Film soundtracks. Now known as St-Denis Studios, the modern and fully equipped studio is used by both recording artists and TV/Film/Advertising Agency producers.
He has produced recording sessions for Céline Dion and Natasha St-Pier, arranged & produced albums for Robyn Hayle (Jazz), and several instrumental recording for Somerset Entertainment and Avalon Music as well as his own World/Jazz fusion album, “Moments of Freedom” after he was encouraged by Oscar Peterson to develop his material into a full-length production.
Roger has teamed up over the years with a few lyricists, namely with Andrew Sabiston (Napoleon -The Musical) with whom he has written the credits theme song for the children animated feature film “Franklin and the Turtle Lake Treasure”. Performers on St-Denis' soundtracks include Toots Thielemans, Kevin Breit, Carol Welsman, The Faith Chorale, Hugh Marsh, Kim & Jackie Richardson.
In 2014, he composed and produced the music score for the feature film “The Masked Saint” directed by Warren P. Sonoda and starring Diahann Carroll. He was nominated for Best Score for this original soundtrack at the Orlando International Film Festival where the film won for Best Picture. In 2015, Roger performed/produced the EP “Chansons Françaises”, a collection of “covers” of four well known songs of the French European répertoire and scored the animated short film “Men of Might – The Warrior King”
More recently he's written with Marc Jordan and has been involved as the French Vocal coach for Eleanor McCain “True North – The Canadian Songbook” and Catey Shaw's “Revolution” which was presented by Bono to France's president Emmanuel Macron as the soundtrack of the video for the RED foundation' fundraising campaign.
In 2017-18, he has been the lead session singer in both Volkswagen and Toyota broadcast commercials and is singing/writing/producing an English language collection of Adult contemporary songs to be released in 2019.