Sometimes, musicians can get through a show on the strength of their reputation alone, even if it isn’t their best day on stage. Leslie Lewis isn’t one of them. Not by a long shot. Performing in Chennai after “so long that he doesn’t quite remember” when he played here last, one half of the iconic ‘Colonial Cousins’ sounded so fresh that it seemed like we were back in the Summer of ‘96. Yes, ‘96 and not ‘69, because that’s when the Colonial Cousins made that oh-so-awesome audio cassette that gave us ‘Krishna’, ‘Indian Rain’ and ‘Teri Meri Aankhon Mein’.
It’s strange that the Mellow Circle picked Lewis, who’s more attuned to doing the bar, club and indie music circuit these days, to perform at their annual fundraiser —Magic of Music 3 — at the swanky Lady Andal auditorium. Lesle, now a very venerable 52, started off slowly towards the business end of the show, and it was immediately apparent that he was playing to his strengths. Where most musicians would have saved their best (and best-known) songs for last, he chose to begin his set with ‘Krishna’ - and personally, it sounded just as good, without the services of Hariharan’s rather classic touch. Despite not being gifted with an expansive vocal range, Lewis managed just fine, sounding crisp and extremely cool, given his age.
The crest gradually reached a trough as Lesle quickly ran through a few of his lesser known solo tracks - Tere Bina and Saawariya Calling were among them. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was singing in Hindi, but as Lesle put it, ‘we may never know the reason why!’ Sensing the drop in pace, Lewis quickly turned to a few crowd-rousing covers like Stevie Wonder’s Superstition and CCR’s Cotton Fields.
Before Lesle took the stage and made it look like an episode out of Coke Studio (we would have knocked off the branding but just ‘studio’ wouldn’t have made anyone think of the show on MTV), the Mellow Circle choir sang their hearts out. Conducted by Augustine Paul, the amateur choristers sung with a lot of heart and spirit - what they lacked in technical expertise, they made up by wearing large smiles and generally having a blast on stage. While Neil Diamond’s ‘I’m a Believer’ was soothing, their version of Ilaiyaraja’s ‘Kodai Kaala Kaatre’ wasn’t quite up there.
Eventually, the largely mixed (age, not language) audience, who were planted firmly in their seats despite the best vocal machinations of the Mellow Circle choir, did Lesle the courtesy of getting to their feet as he played ‘Sa Ni Dha Pa’.
It’s important to end on a high, which is why Lesle chose to finish the concert with Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’, joined by the Mellow Circle’s adult and kids choirs for vocal support. Blame it on the mics or blame it on having sung a long concert, the choir wasn’t loud enough to finish with a bang.
But we can’t blame them, nor did the crowd - after all, everyone in the audience knew someone in the choir - we can safely say that they ended on a mellow note!