Headline July15,2012 / "Yanni: We destroy the young"

"YANNI: WE DESTROY THE YOUNG!"

He read all of Freud by the time he was 16, "wanting to know who we are and why we are here?" For the faithfuls, all this inward gazing is manifest in Yanni's concert monologues, delivered he says, because "I want to give them an attitude about life." Invariably, thr ticket buying faithful roar approval at pronouncements like this one, from what fans refer to as his Gandhi speech: "I truly believe greatness in all of us. Don't let anyone talk us out of our truth!"

"So you see a very big wave in this country toward what's inside. I think there is a tendency for a large part of the society to try and understand themselves." In march, 1989 he called his friend and fellow Greek George Veras. "Yorgo, I want to go on TV and I've got to break through." He wanted to film a live performance for spots to promote his tour. They went to Dallas with an absurd $40,000 budget, shot some footage, and soon Yanni took his place amid the collagen creams and Ginsu knives. To his reckord company's initial chagrin, the spots hyped Yanni, not his albums. But after they aired, his first tour sold out. Of his unorthodox but canny marketing, he says, "That's what art is. You just do it. Put it out there and see how many people respond to it."

Out on the hustings, he has been ----if we might borrow a phrase from fellow seeker Shirley Maclaine: "dancing in the light." Yanni is the world's heart throb as a white garbed stage presence in boots and billowing sleeves, he materializes in a swirling mist of atomized mineral water.In performance, he is an impassioned keyboardist who can lay a solid claim to a place in the Kathleen Turner ring of Nibelungen hair tossing. The PBS special was the chrysalis from which Yanni emerged godlike, bathed in golden light, in the very shadow of Parthenon.

He performed at the ancient Herod Atticus amphitheater with his band and London's Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra and filmed the nighttime concert amid the dramatically lit ruins with fourteen video cameras. Well, what about........Does he listen to other music? "Rarely. Most of the stuff is boring. There hasn't been any music for a long long time! Nothing!"  He then goes pensive for a moment.

Only recently, he is coming off one of those ascetic interludes, and says he feels his age more. "Being famous" he muses."Being famous. it's oxymoron isn't it?" "It's one thing to be poor and dream of being rich. It's another thing to get your dream and be unhappy!" He then goes on to stare at the approaching dusk. "Hey, I have been in that scary part of town!"  The genius, the sage and the mortal are merging!

Thanks as ever to !WOW! for this super post. Hope you all loved it! Good night and God bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless