Live At The Acropolis - Yanni (1994)

Ideated from: I’ve been reading a lot of self-help type books lately, including Jon Acuff’s Soundtracks. He mentions multiple times in there how much he loves this record, so I figured what the hell.

When I was a kid, Yanni was kind of a punchline. It was something old folks listened to. It didn’t help that this particular concert was a staple of PBS pledge week Saturdays that would be on when all i wanted was my fix of Red Green or BBC rebroadcasts. I thought of Yanni in the same breath as a particular Pan Flute virtuoso.

But then i actually put this on and listened, and I’ll be damned. It’s quite good.

This music is pretty much what shows up in the dictionary when you look up “new age”: not as ambitious or complex as classical, not as harmonically lush as jazz, but more ambitious and harmonically detailed than most pop music.

What it is: Well-played, dramatic, and large in every possible way. He gets a full orchestra along with his quite talented band, to really lend voice to the drama he tries to create.

The music is pretty standard western tonality, but has tinges of Mediterranean and middle eastern music and some Latin flavor. Even when I thought of him as a punchline, I was impressed to learn that he had created his own musical notation language that he still uses.

I read that John Tesch was in his band at one point, which explains why a few of the passages here make me expect to hear Bob Costas introducing the NBA on NBC

I don’t know if I can agree with Jon Acuff that this is one of the best records ever made, but I did enjoy it much more than I thought I would, and yet again it’s proven that I should always re-examine determinations I made about art decades ago.