LOS ANGELES – Yanni has entertained millions on stages of all sizes. During the 2012 “An Evening with Yanni” tour, LD Bud Horowitz again turned to Delicate Productions Inc. to help with gear and talent for the tour’s North America run. This marked the 24th year that Yanni and Delicate have worked together.
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LOS ANGELES – Yanni has entertained millions on stages of all sizes. From clubs, theaters and arenas to legendary dates at the Acropolis in Greece, the Taj Mahal in India or in China’s Forbidden City, he has created a memory at every turn.
That experience continued during the 2012 run of “An Evening with Yanni” shows that took 16 musicians and 50 or so crew through North America, South America, Eastern Europe, China, Russia, the Middle East, Panama and Puerto Rico. “Basically all over the map,” says lighting director Bud Horowitz. “It’s been a busy two years.”
What makes this tour challenging in its own way is that fans are experiencing the show at smaller venues, so Horowitz had to be more careful about the lighting design, programming and implementation for this tour.
“Yanni’s arena’s tours were large, lighting-wise. It was well over 200 moving lights, well over 100 conventional lights. Making this a very intricate show musically and the lighting followed in terms of cues and timing.
“You’d shoot yourself in the foot to try to transition that into a theater situation,” he continues, “where you can’t put up that much lighting gear and you don’t want to get over the top production-wise. So, it really became a matter of coming up with a lighting plot that would provide enough variation and accenting to the music while keeping it reasonable in terms of the amount of gear.”
Keeping it reasonable, he explains, including equipment selection. “When you have fixtures, those fixtures are doing double, triple and quintuple duty. So, if something is used for one thing, you don’t have another light or set of lights to come in and do the next move. You’ve got to re-task everything constantly.”
Once he had the programming done, Horowitz turned to Los Angeles-based Delicate Productions, Inc. (DPI) to help with gear and talent for the tour’s North America run.
DPI’s support of the “An Evening with Yanni” tour marks the 24th year the two have worked together.
“We first got the call to work with Yanni in December of 1988,” recalls DPI’s Smoother Smyth. “David ‘Gurn’ Kaniski was the lighting designer and they were playing the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. We provided both audio and lighting for that show. It wasn’t long after, we were out on extensive tours with them.”
DPI provided audio and video gear to support the tour until the Yanni team purchased their own audio gear. In the mid-90s, when Peter Morse was Yanni’s LD, Delicate provided a large video IMAG system.
As looks and gear have evolved over the years, and so have the requests from Yanni’s production team. In 1988, the lighting specifications included bars of Par 64 instruments, Lekos, Cyc Lights and a fog machine. Then the call came for Vari*Lite VL5s and VL6s, Studio Color, Cyberlights and Martin MAC 2000s.
For this tour, DPI supplied Vari*Lite VL3500 wash and VL3000 spot fixtures, a handful of Martin MAC 700 and 2000 Profile E fixtures, 66 ETC Source Four PAR and 19 Source Four Lekos in three different degrees. “The Vari*Lites were the workhorses of the whole system,” Horowitz says.
Horowitz uses a Road Hog Full Boar lighting console with a Playback Wing, supplied by Delicate. “As the person who ends up programming 80 percent of the shows I would rather do it than bring in a programmer, I don’t have time to learn a new console,” he says. “I do so many show where I have hours and not days to program, so I tend to go with an operating system that I am most comfortable on. So, I spec’d it because I like working on it and knew that Delicate had one ready to go.”
Other DPI supplied gear included two Havebase Base Hazer Pros, one ETC 48×2.4 Sensor Rack, one ETC 24×2.4 Sensor Rack, one ProPower LPD 5 Socapex rack and five ETC Response DMX Rack Mount Optospliters.
Horowitz, who has been on almost every Yanni tour since 1997, appreciates knowing DPI is there to help him during the domestic runs. “I’ve known the guys at Delicate for close to 30 years,” he says. “They are a family oriented lighting vendor. I don’t feel like I’m talking to a large conglomerate office. They’ve always been great with pricing, customer care and the people they send out to work with me.”
Sending the right people, he says, is important for a tour like this where pros are at work. “Smoother and Meegan are good at matching personalities, which is at least half of it,” he says. “Not just with me, but with the people on tour. They know the demeanor of the people out here and that’s so important because of all the time that we spend together.”
It is also helpful that Delicate and Yanni have such a longstanding relationship. “There’s so much trust between all of us,” he says. “Delicate takes care of us and we know that if we need something they’ll be right there.”
