........Forty-seven years later, I began to hear about concerts that made me think of that organist again: tours featuring Roy Orbison, Frank Zappa, Amy Winehouse, classical pianist Glenn Gould, Maria Callas, Buddy Holly, Whitney Houston and heavy metal belter Ronnie James Dio.
All of the performers had one defining commonality: They were dead.
And yet they were all back on the tour circuit, or would be soon, in hologram form, thanks to a new crop of companies that were putting Hollywood-style digital re-creations of famous musicians onstage............
After Tupac, Textor kept busy with his next project: a Michael Jackson hologram that performed a previously unreleased track at the Billboard Music Awards in 2014.
He’s also been involved with holograms of Elvis and Abba — in 2020, there will be an Abba hologram tour, though all the members of Abba are very much alive.
Still, Textor was looking well beyond the musical performance aspect of holograms, or digital humans, which was his preferred term. He was about to introduce a venture that would pit boxing’s greatest from any era — Muhammad Ali vs. Mike Tyson, for example — and believes the possibilities of a star’s digital likeness could mean that “..............