Elton John in Sydney in November during his recent Australian tour. Photo: Mark Metcalfe, Getty Images
It’s not entirely unusual for Elton John to turn up in O.C. doing something special during the annual NAMM convention, although it has been a decade since the ever-touring icon made his splashiest appearance related to the massive gathering of music merchants at the Anaheim Convention Center.
Back in 2003, at what was then the Arrowhead Pond, he was the focus of a Yamaha-sponsored, career-spanning tribute concert bolstered by several other legends (Ray Charles, Brian Wilson, Randy Newman) and a number of then-emerging upstarts (Norah Jones, John Mayer, Rufus Wainwright). They all joined in on “Crocodile Rock” to finish — and wound up raising $330,000 for music education charities in the process.
Now Sir Elton, 65, is staging another NAMM-adjacent event, this time to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Yamaha, whose pianos he’s pounded for decades. On Jan. 25, he will perform with a 70-piece orchestra inside Disney California Adventure’s 2,000-capacity Hyperion Theater, normally host to the Aladdin show.
But, in a sense, he actually will be playing simultaneously at various venues across the globe.
As Elton taps out his famous melodies on a Yamaha Disklavier, an innovative instrument that can replicate key strokes and pedal functions with uncanny finesse, his performance will be reproduced at various remote locations in real time via Yamaha’s DisklavierTV and RemoteLive technology, while the orchestra will be seen and heard via monitors. (Those other spots will be revealed soon. The event also will be streamed online.)
“I’m constantly astonished by the inventive skills and versatility of the Yamaha team,” Elton said in a statement released Tuesday. “Not only have they built all my touring pianos for the past 20 years, as well as the wonderful Million Dollar Piano that resides at Caesars Palace, but they’ve also now perfected the RemoteLive technology, which means that effectively, I can perform the concert live in Anaheim on January 25, live across the Internet and also live in venues worldwide – all at the same time!”
Can you get in? Doubtful, unless you’re either a Yamaha dealer or a well-connected NAMM attendee. We hope to see this for ourselves during our usual coverage of performances and star-sightings amid the convention.
In other Elton news: Expect to hear about special events tied to the 40th anniversary of the release of his 1973 double-LP Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (still high on the list of his finest efforts) and look for a new studio set at some point this year. In April, he returns to the Colosseum in Vegas for another season of the Million Dollar Piano show, which will be shot for DVD release later in 2013.
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Elton John to play Disney’s Hyperion Theater is a post from: Soundcheck