Devin Roth grew up on Canada's west coast, in and around the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia — the interior lake-and-mountain region that later gave two of his best-known compositions their titles, "Kettle River" and "Okanagan Mountain." He went east to study jazz piano formally at McGill University in Montreal, working under Juno Award-winning pianist Jeff Johnston and Juno Award-winning composer Christine Jensen, and graduated with a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Piano Performance.

From McGill he won a scholarship into the Jazz Composition program at the New England Conservatory in Boston, earning a Master of Music in 2012. His teachers there included bassists Dave Holland and Cecil McBee and pianist Fred Hersch — whose own career, including the students who passed through his studio, is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. NEC's own alumni reporting corroborates the timeline: Roth completed the M.M. in 2012 and relocated to Los Angeles shortly afterward to build a career scoring for picture. He later added a Certificate in Film Scoring from UCLA, formalizing the second half of a career that runs jazz composition and screen music in parallel rather than treating one as a detour from the other.

His debut jazz record as a leader, Childhood Places, is credited to the Devin Roth Sextet and gathers nine originals built around the landscapes of his upbringing — "The Quarry," "Kettle River," "Mountain Dream," and "Okanagan Mountain" among them — recorded with Derek Friesen on trumpet, Andrew Van Tassel on alto sax, Jon Kenney on trombone, Ehud Ettun on bass, and Steve Wilkinson on drums. It followed an earlier, more informal Bandcamp release, Devin Roth Big Band (2012), which collects big-band charts performed by his student ensembles at the time — the NEC Jazz Composers Orchestra and McGill Jazz One — rather than a dedicated studio session, a useful marker of how directly his conservatory training fed his early recorded output.

In parallel, Roth built a substantial career as a Los Angeles film and television composer, orchestrator, and score programmer. His entry point was working under multi-Oscar-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla and orchestrator Tim Davies as a MIDI programmer and orchestrator on Guillermo del Toro's animated feature The Book of Life. Subsequent screen credits include Hotel Transylvania 2, Crimson Peak, Pee-Wee's Big Holiday, Ice Age: Collision Course, The LEGO Ninjago Movie, the documentary Pandas, del Toro's Netflix series Trollhunters, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Empire. He orchestrated the nine new songs Matthew Sklar and Christopher Guardino wrote for the Emmy-nominated NBC special Elf: Buddy's Musical Christmas, and has separately collaborated with Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh.

Roth is also, distinctly, a working audio-software developer: he founded and serves as CEO of Existential Audio Inc., whose products include the widely used BlackHole virtual audio driver, the SwiftOSC framework, and the Flash Metro metronome app — a third career strand, alongside performing jazz pianist and film orchestrator, that few working jazz musicians can claim.

Roth's writing sits at the junction of three distinct trainings rather than a single lineage: the harmonic rigor of his NEC composition study under Fred Hersch, Dave Holland, and Cecil McBee; the programmatic, landscape-driven instinct that runs through Childhood Places, where each piece is tied to a specific place from his own life; and the orchestral fluency demanded by scoring alongside Gustavo Santaolalla and Tim Davies for animated feature films. He has described his own music as jazz inflected with rock and pop rather than straight-ahead post-bop, and that cinematic, genre-porous sensibility — comfortable moving between a sextet chart and a full orchestral cue — is arguably the throughline connecting his conservatory-trained jazz writing to his day job scoring for Hollywood.