When we last caught up with Yanni, the contemporary instrumental composer was still blushing about his dreamy romance with Linda Evans and ecstatic over the reception for his latest album and concert tour.
And as always, he was refreshingly upfront about the vast publicity Evans had afforded him; acknowledging her crucial role in his commercial success, and how it wasn’t a threat to his manhood at all.
“Yes, she has introduced me to the world, but it will be up to me to deliver,” he said.
Their story, then going on three years, was lovely, but behind it loomed an edgy uncertainty. Could it possibly last — this starry-eyed relationship between the older TV actress and her ambitious younger lover?
Or would it soon be just another tenuous Hollywood pairing, doomed to end as one eclipsed the other?
More than one year after our last chat with Yanni, we’re happy to report that all is well. Evans is still earnestly following him around the world as he tours; he’s still saying that her vivacious personality is an intoxicant like none other.
And musically, he’s now broadening his fan-base considerably — on his own. His latest album, In My Time, has been a Top 20 staple on the Billboard album chart since April, and his tour is doing sell-out business. He starts a two- show stand with a 50-piece orchestra at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts tonight.
“When a relationship works, it charges you, it gives you energy,” Yanni said in an interview with the Sun-Sentinel last week. “It doesn’t drain you.”
That Evans buoys him personally and professionally is hardly a news flash. The two have made numerous talk show appearances attesting to such. What is new is that lately Yanni has come to defend her just a little bit. As Evans has almost completely dropped out of show business (save for appearances in the audience at his concerts), Yanni has been explaining that “benefactor” is her chosen role at the moment.
“Linda is a very powerful and independent woman,” he said. “She has not devoted her life to me. She’s just enjoying my success, I think.”
As for her professional layoff, Yanni says Evans wants it that way.
“If you did nine years of Dynasty, I think you are done,” Yanni said of Evans’ exhausting 18-hour days on the set of the ABC series.
“She gets offers all the time. She doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do anymore. She doesn’t have to work. She works if she wants to work. Essentially she just doesn’t want to get up at five in the morning anymore and be glamorous. Now she gets up at 8 and goes swimming instead.”
It should not be surprising that Evans, 49, is, (like many women) enamored with the Greek-born, burgeoning superstar. At 38, Yanni is now the industry’s unofficial adult contemporary pin-up boy.
Michael Bolton may sell more records, and Kenny G. may get more radio play, but few music stars have made women swoon as this guy has. With his cascading black mane, piercing glances, devilish grin — all set against his stirring instrumental music — he is a romance novel come to life.
To that end the composer has just signed an unprecedented deal with The Home Shopping Network — a cable outlet ideally suited for the Yanni fan club. On Thursday the electronic retailer was to air his Tampa concert in its entirety (an HSN first) while simultaneously advertising the sale of his recordings.
The network has been expecting a record number of phone orders for Yanni’s new boxed set, containing the most recent of his nine albums — Dare To Dream, Reflection of Passions, and In My Time. The package will sell for $50, exclusively on Home Shopping. But wait, there’s more: The box also includes the music video for Dare To Dream, a framed photograph and a video interview with Yanni. Everything but a set of Ginsu Knives.
Not that anyone in the entertainment business is laughing at this marketing experiment. What better way to sell an album than to demonstrate it on TV directly? And what better way to sell music that’s not easily classified?
With his bold synthesizers, passionate piano and rich symphonic-pop orchestrations, Yanni was dubbed a New Age hero when Evans introduced him to the masses four years ago, but that’s hardly what he calls himself.
“Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain how people should look at it. I think when they listen to the music they understand what it is.
“New Age is a very small box. It was a term that was brought in by the music industry to classify music that is neither jazz, classical, pop or rock.
“They didn’t know what to call it or what to do with it. So they threw it all together under this one name.
“I like to call it ‘contemporary instrumental.’ The term is wider. It allows room for lateral movement. New Age is just another style that doesn’t quite encompass or represent this entire genre.”
Of this new success, Yanni says he remains unfazed. “You accomplish what you want to accomplish. I just don’t ever want to hurt anybody doing it.”
Yanni, (born Yanni Chryssomallis) says he comes upon his free sprit from his father, whose soft-spoken philosophies have guided him since childhood.
Among his favorites: Hatred enslaves you, love frees you.
“I have as many problems as the next person, but you don’t have to let this business take the best out of you. Life can end at any moment. The idea is to experience all you can and take responsibility for everything that happens to you.”
What probably will not happen for Yanni anytime soon is marriage. He says he and Evans don’t need to “sign a piece of paper.
“We don’t have anything against marriage. We have a mental commitment. When two people look into each other’s eyes, and know you’re the one for me, that’s what’s most important.”
The two divide their time between her Tacoma ranch, his family’s home in Greece and their two separate homes in Los Angeles.
“I’m not sure what I’m doing about my place in L.A. yet. I keep it now because that’s where my recording studio is.”
When his tour is finished at month’s end, he and Evans will head for Greece where they will finish out the summer. In September he’ll perform three concerts at the Acropolis in Athens.
“To perform right at the ancient theater under the Parthenon, where the ancient tragedies were performed — this is a dream for me.”
He says the show will also yield a live album — his next release.
Though he often cites Evans as the inspiration for some of his melodies, Yanni and she have no immediate plans to work together professionally — though they did once.
“I scored a TV movie of hers a couple years ago. But right now I’m so absorbed making my albums, anything else will have to wait.”
— Yanni, with his own 7-piece band and a locally-staffed 50-piece orchestra, performs at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW 5th Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Tickets are $27.50, $30, but both shows are sold out.
