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CONCERT A few members of Chennai’s music community came together to pay a musical tribute to the King of Pop. HUDSTIN FERNANDEZ

It was an evening where a couple of well known musicians from the city and a few from Bangalore had got together to express their heartfelt tribute to the King of Pop by playing their own versions of his songs. There was more than just singing for the audience that evening with some inspiring video clips and pictures of Jackson and a couple of dances. The audience that showed up for the show was a mixture of college students and a majority of middle aged and elderly folk.

Performances

The programme began with a group of girls from Stella Maris who danced to a medley of MJ’s most famous songs and the crowd was filled with enthusiasm by the time they finished. Following them, a group of doctors led by Dr. Yohan on the saxophone played two instrumental numbers from the “Jackson 5” days of which one was titled “I’ll be there”. Next up were a group comprising children and a few middle-aged singers and instrumentalists. They started off singing MJ’s “The Lost children”. The next number that they performed was “They don’t really care about us”, getting the crowd to clap to the beat of the song.

Later, Kamal Singh and Abhijeet Tambe of the band Lounge Piranha from Bangalore took stage performing “Man in the mirror” in their own style of music and guitar effects. Then came the band Fish Food with well known acts in the music scene Ritesh and Jitesh Dharmaraj on vocals and bass respectively. They covered “I want you back, Billie Jean” and “ABC” from Jackson 5. They got the audience pumped up with their own version of the songs. Soon after which, Saroop of Unwind Center presented a couple of videos on how Micheal Jackson influenced Indian cinema. The videos showed popular Bollywood and Telugu actors imitating MJ’s style of dancing on screen. Saroop also called upon Jerry, the head of music in the American International School, on stage to sing the American national anthem since MJ was of American origin.

Moving music

Soon after that the stage was taken over by Subject to Change, a well known acoustic and accapella band in city comprising well known musicians like Benny Dayal, Toby on acoustic guitar and Tibu on the bass. They started with “Human Nature” followed by a medley of MJ’s most popular numbers after which they performed “The Earth song”, brilliantly sung by Benny Dayal with so much feel. The final act for the day was Saroop’s. With his acoustic guitar, he played and sang “Ben” which MJ had written for a movie about a mouse. All the musicians were called upon stage to sing the two last songs “We are the world” and “Heal the world”. The audience too joined in and one could feel the entire auditorium pouring out their feelings for the loss of the King of Pop.

Hudstin is a Visual Communications student at Loyola and a drummer.

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