"We're going to burn up tonight," said the virtuoso musician and Emmy Award-winning composer. "We're here to celebrate the wonderment of music making. We're inspiring these amazing kids and we're inspiring the future."
The "amazing kids" that Wood referred to were local music students who joined him and his band on stage for an exhilarating concert that blended new twists on holiday classics with electrified orchestral versions of rock standards like The Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want and Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven. Matching the spirited music note-for-passionate-note was a big, bright and intense lightshow designed by Aaron Zimmermann of Proline Entertainment (Watertown, WI), that featured over 100 fixtures from Chauvet Professional.
For Wood, the concert was about more than making music. He was appearing in Sioux Falls for Electrify Your Strings!, an outreach programme he started to encourage students, parents and teachers to embrace new ideas and new technology in school music programs. The concert served as an opportunity for him to showcase the talents of students who had attended his three-day workshop, and as a fundraiser for local school bands and orchestras.
Zimmermann's powerful lightshow, with its intense aerial effects and fast moving fixtures, not only conveyed the spirit of Wood's music, it also underscored the evening's educational message of merging creative expression with technology. The LD and his lighting techs Paul Berger and Glenn Ottenbacher deployed 52 Rogue R2 Wash and 18 Legend 230SR Beam moving fixtures in their rig, as well as 45 COLORado 1 Solo zooming RGBW LED wash units.
(Jim Evans)
