September 12, 2015 editorial: comments

Holliday’s Holiday Holograms

From the “Now that’s pretty cool” department comes news that a holographic version of Billie Holliday, the iconic jazz singer who died in 1959, will be performing on a regular basis at New York’s Apollo Theater starting around Thanksgiving. According to the New York Times, a company called Hologram USA has teamed up with the Apollo to produce Holliday’s holiday-season “appearances."

Holliday, or should I say Holliday’s hologram, will only be singing part of the time. The rest of the time she’ll be talking to the audience about the Apollo’s rich history, and somehow, taking questions from them. (Now that, I’d really like to see.) This could be the most significant holographic performance since Princess Leia’s rendition of “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi” in the original Star Wars movie.

Back on earth, Hologram USA and the Apollo have a series of holographic performances planned, including one by the late James Brown. If they want to make the holographic James Brown as accurate as possible, he will have to point at various band members during the performance to indicate that he’s fining them for various onstage rule infractions.

If you’ve read this column before, you might be figuring that this is the point at which I go on a rant about how holograms are taking away the jobs of real performers, but don’t worry, this isn’t going to be one of those editorials. Actually, the idea of watching a hologram singing on stage puts a new twist on the term “live performance,” but is nevertheless intriguing. I’d pay good money to see such a show. What about you?

Holograms may be all flash and no substance, but the same can’t be said of the Audient ID14 USB audio interface. Made by the British company known for its consoles, it’s built like a tank, and features excellent mic pres for a $299 unit. We published our review of it this week, which you can check out here. If you haven’t already guessed, we liked the unit a lot.

Have a great week.