Yanni

Lately I've been tripping over some old favourite Yanni songs of mine.
I didn't have much of a Yanni collection out here, but then a week back I got myself a RealRhapsody subscription, and since then its been an amazing journey into some childhood favourite artists. RealRhapsody, for those who haven't heard about it, is this amazing software which, for a modest subscription, lets you play any song streaming from its huge database of almost all songs/artists with pretty good sound quality. Its somewhat like Raaga is to Hindi/Tamil, only it spans all languages, genres...

Coming back to Yanni, what I like best about him is the way he gets the best out of both classical and popular music with his compositions. He's easily one of the most talented contemporary composers. What befuddled me was when I read somewhere that he is a completely self-taught musician and was never taught music formally ever in his life! Woah.. thats some natural talent.. ain't that amazing..

My personal favourite album of his is In The Mirror. All my favourite songs are in that album - In the Mirror, Love for Life, One Man's Dream, End of August...
But my favourite Yanni song was, till a short while age, unnamed. I never knew the name of the track, just had it on MP3 and it was called Track04.mp3. Thanks to RL, I finally found out the name of the song, its November Sky, from the album If I could tell you.

I tend to like his piano-based pieces more than the orchestra ones, though the latter has more mass appeal, songs like Santorini, Within Attraction, Aria. Two songs from the Live at Acropolis album that I dote are Keys to Imagination and Nostalgia, which can be categorized as midway between piano-based and orchestra-based. Even now the violin towards the end of Nostalgia gives me the goosebumps..

Here's some general trivia that I found about Yanni:
- His Live at the Acropolis was the #2 top selling music video of all time. I'm wondering which is #1, is it Pulse? is it Alchemy? Woodstock? ... anyone knows?
- As I said before, Yanni it seems is a completely self-taught musician. Hard though it is to believe, he cannot read or write music. According to wikipedia, he composes his pieces in a shorthand form of his own devising.
- In his childhood he dreamt of being a Olympic swimmer.
- Initially he started with playing rock-n-roll and even had a rock band back in college.
- He got his BA in Psychology from University of Minnesota.
- Despite not becoming a Psychologist, he is credited with preventing atleast one suicide with his music.