Yaani, that name takes me to my college days. His name hasn’t been in our conversations for several years and all of a sudden I get a mail from a friend of mine saying “Yanni is playing in town tomorrow. Are you interested?”. Of course I was interested but wasn’t sure if my wife would like. Somehow I thought she called his music as airplane music but a few emails back and forth and I discovered that she likes Yanni too…apparently Kenny G happened to be her airplane guy :)

It was a warm Saturday evening and we headed out for the concert. After some of my usual clumsiness, we were headed to our seats. The concert started 20 mins late, but it was a jaw dropping start. Never listened to Yaani live before…this was a meticulous mix of music, art and technology. Though I couldn’t understand most of the songs, I just enjoyed the music. His violinists were just unbelievable. I loved their solo stints during at various times during concert. Almost towards the end of the concert, someone from Peru in Yaani’s troop played harp. That was the first time I’ve seen someone play harp, but that brought back some memories of instruments I’ve seen in Poompuhar museum (near Tanjore).

Ancient Tamils represented stringed instruments as Yazh(யாழ்). There were may varieties of Yazh and I remembered seeing something similar to harp. So did some research on internet (this time on bing, not on google) and found that my recollection was indeed correct. Here is some information about Yazh in Tamil culture.

And, the concert ended with a nice piece of music named storm. Yes we were stormed by music for few hours in concert and for a few hours after that.