Yanni All Songs

[Bartolome Beacham]

Yanni continues to use the musical shorthand that he developed as a child,[7][8] blending jazz, classical, soft rock, and world music[5] to create predominantly instrumental works.[9] Although this genre of music was not well suited for commercial pop radio and music television,[4][10] Yanni received international recognition by producing concerts at historic monuments and by producing videos that were broadcast on public television.[10] His breakthrough concert, Live at the Acropolis, yielded the second best-selling music concert video of all time.[11][12][13] Additional historic sites for Yanni's concerts have included India's Taj Mahal, China's Forbidden City, the United Arab Emirates' Burj Khalifa,[14] Russia's Kremlin,[15] Puerto Rico's El Morro castle,[16] Lebanon's ancient city of Byblos,[17] Tunisia's Roman Theatre of Carthage,[18] India's Laxmi Vilas Palace,[19] the Egyptian pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza,[20][21] and the Amman Citadel.[22]

At least sixteen of Yanni's albums have peaked at No. 1 in Billboard's "Top New Age Album" category,[23] and two albums (Dare to Dream and In My Time) received Grammy Award nominations.[13] Yanni has performed in more than 30 countries on five continents,[24] and through late 2015 had performed live in concert before more than 5 million people and had accumulated more than 40 platinum and gold albums globally, with sales totaling over 25 million copies.[25][26] A longtime fundraiser for public television,[3][27] Yanni's compositions have been used on commercial television programs, especially for sporting events.[13][28][29] He has written film scores and the music for an award-winning British Airways television commercial.[28]

Yanni popularized the combination of electronic music synthesizers with a full symphony orchestra.[30] He has employed musicians of various nationalities and has incorporated a variety of exotic instruments[5] to create music that has been called an eclectic fusion of ethnic sounds.[7] Influenced by his encounters with cultures around the world,[27][31] Yanni has been called a "true global artist"[30] and his music is said to reflect his "one world, one people" philosophy.[27]

Yanni was born November 14, 1954, in Kalamata, Greece,[2] the son of a banker, Sotiri Chryssomallis,[32] and a homemaker, Felitsa (short for Triandafelitsa, which means "rose"[33]). He displayed musical talent at a young age, playing the piano at the age of 6.[2] His parents encouraged him to learn at his own pace and in his own way, without formal music training.[2] The self-taught musician continues to use the "musical shorthand" that he developed as a child, rather than employ traditional musical notation.[7][8]

In November 1972, Yanni moved from Greece to the United States to attend the University of Minnesota beginning in January 1973, majoring in psychology.[2] For a time he earned money by washing dishes at the student union.[35] Yanni later explained that learning English forced him to read each paragraph several times in what he called a slow and frustrating process, but which helped him memorize the material and do well on tests.[35] He received a B.A. degree in psychology in 1976.[13]

During his time as a student, Yanni played in a local rock band and continued to study piano and other keyboard instruments.[2] Upon graduating, when he dedicated himself exclusively to music for one full year and found he was the happiest he had ever been, he said he decided music would be his life's work.[35]

In 1977, Yanni joined the Minneapolis-based rock group Chameleon, performing with its founder, drummer Charlie Adams,[2][36] with whom he would work into the 2010s.[37] While in Minneapolis, Yanni also worked with choreographer Loyce Houlton to provide music for dance works produced by the Minnesota Dance Theatre.[38] After touring with Chameleon from 1980 to 1984,[37] Yanni moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of movie soundtrack work.[13][39]

Yanni gained visibility as the result of his November 1990 appearances in People magazine[41][42] and on The Oprah Winfrey Show with actress Linda Evans,[10][41] with whom he had been in a relationship since 1989.[28][43] However, high-visibility appearances on public television, best-selling records and videos, and overflow concerts earned him recognition beyond his relationship with Evans.[43]

Dare to Dream, released in 1992, was Yanni's first Grammy-nominated[13] album. It included "Aria," a song based on Lo Delibes' The Flower Duet (Lakm, 1883) and popularized by an award-winning[28] British Airways commercial. A second Grammy-nominated[13] album, In My Time, followed in 1993.

Yanni's breakthrough[5][7] concert, Live at the Acropolis, was filmed in September 1993 at the 2,000-year-old Herodes Atticus Theater at the Acropolis of Athens, an album, VHS and Laserdisc being released in 1994.[13] Acropolis was Yanni's first live album, and used his core band with a full sixty piece orchestra,[13] the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra which was arranged and conducted by Iranian-American musician Shahrdad Rohani.[44][45]

Without financial backing, Yanni risked $2 million of his personal fortune in the Acropolis production[5] in a strategy to boost his artistic profile and open new markets for his music.[7] The resulting video was broadcast on PBS and became one of its most popular programs ever, seen in 65 countries by half a billion people.[13][46] It became the second best-selling music concert video of all time (after Michael Jackson's Thriller[12]), selling more than 7 million copies worldwide.[11][13]

In March 1997, Yanni became one of the few Western artists permitted to perform and record at the Taj Mahal in India.[47] Yanni followed in May 1997 with performances at the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, becoming the first Western artist in modern times permitted to perform at the historic site.[47] Live broadcasts of the two concerts were seen by 100 million television viewers throughout the world.[48] The two events formed the live album and video, Tribute, released in November 1997.[47]

After negotiating the demands of gaining permission to perform at the Taj Mahal and Forbidden City in 1997, breaking up with Linda Evans in early 1998, and completing a long world tour later in 1998, Yanni halted his music career.[10][49] Yanni later related that he had become depressed, and returned to Greece to live with his parents for three months before traveling the world.[10] He didn't do an interview for two years, later explaining, "I traveled. I wanted to see other people's ideas of life, get out of the American dream."[10]

In 2000, after the two-year hiatus, Yanni released If I Could Tell You, his first studio album in seven years. The album sold 55,000 copies in its first week and landed at No. 20 on the Billboard charts, his highest debut to date.[10] Yanni described the album as more of an even-tempered "listening" album, less dramatic than the live concert albums Live at the Acropolis or Tribute.[50] He explained that he himself created all the album's sounds, including apparent vocalizations, through the manipulation of sound in his studio.[50]

The music in Yanni's 2003 album Ethnicity represented many of the world's cultures, Yanni saying it uses ethnicity to reflect the color and beauty of a multicultural society.[51] The album was released near the publication date of Yanni's autobiography, Yanni in Words.[51] On October 23, 2003, Yanni performed a keyboard instrumental version of The Star-Spangled Banner before Game 5 of the 2003 World Series.[52]

For the first time in his career, Yanni brought vocalists to the forefront in the Ric Wake collaboration Yanni Voices, the artist's first studio album in six years.[53] PBS broadcast video of a November 2008 Voices Acapulco concert weeks before the album's March 24, 2009 release by Walt Disney Records' Disney Pearl Imprint, the album release preceding a tour produced by Pearl's Buena Vista Concerts division.[53]

The album Mexicanisimo, released in November of Mexico's bicentennial year 2010, was a tribute to that country through Yanni's collaborative interpretation of its folk music.[54] It involved collaboration with singer-songwriter Pepe Aguilar and singer-actress Lucero.[54]

The Truth of Touch album was released in February 2011, Yanni's first studio album of new material since Ethnicity eight years earlier.[13] Truth of Touch's varied content reflected contemporary instrumental, electronic, and cinematic influences, and crossed over into popular, new age, and world music.[56] Though Yanni said that Truth of Touch was started by experimenting with new sound designs,[11] Allmusic's James Christopher Monger said that the album shows Yanni returning to his instrumental roots, and should appeal to fans of his music from the mid-1990s.[57] Three of fifteen tracks on the predominantly instrumental album included vocals from respective Yanni Voices vocalists.[57]

In April 2012, Yanni released the Live at El Morro, Puerto Rico live album CD and DVD which were recorded and filmed at two outdoor concerts on December 16 and 17, 2011 on the grounds of the Castillo (Fort) San Felipe del Morro ("El Morro"), a UNESCO World Heritage Site in San Juan, Puerto Rico.[58] The recorded concerts were broadcast on PBS beginning in March 2012, the production constituting Yanni's tenth collaboration with that organization.[58]

Yanni performed again in China in the February 9, 2013, CCTV Spring Festival Gala (annual audience 700 million[59]) with Chinese zither artist Chang Jing[60][61] in what was the first year that CCTV had invited foreign artists to perform.[59] For the performance, Yanni released a single "East Meets West" which was a mashup of his several famous songs (Santorini, North Shore of Matsushima) together with a solo part performed on Chinese zither.

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