Leonid & Friends: How the whim of a Moscow music producer created a Chicago cover band made of Russians (2024)

College is a learning process of compromise and cross-pollination. You learn about people whose lives have little in common with yours. You engage in conflicts you’ve never encountered and learn how to reach agreements. You’re all mashed together in tight spaces with others still growing into their minds, just like you.

That includes sharing and discovering music. I was never a big fan of Chicago. By 1976, they were very old news to me, a once-revolutionary sound in 1969 that had sort of run its course and lapsed into the dreaded zone where sheltered suburbanites felt safe – soft rock. Yecch.

But my roommate Tom f*cker loved them for all the original reasons they had been so compelling in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He was a high school bandie and he appreciated their musicianship and the complexity of their arrangements. And he loved horns.

So, I humored him when he played his Maynard Ferguson and Blood Sweat & Tears and Chicago just like he did me when I played my Steely Dan and Who and the latest rage – German electronica pioneers Kraftwerk. Yeah, when’s the last time you listened to them?

But, Chicago. Chicago was just so over by then. Their virtuoso lead guitarist Terry Kath had been neutered as the band was slowly being body-snatched by Peter Cetera’s sappy balladry. If you listened to a horn band it all, it was Earth Wind & Fire or maybe Tower of Power. At least they had a patina of coolness to them.

Then again, you know what? There were certain days when Tom would put on Chicago VI, the side with “Just You and Me”. And I never would’ve admitted this to my trendier musical friends. But I kinda dug it.

That’s where Chicago has remained in my consciousness in the four-plus decades since – in a corner with train sets and baseball cards and plastic helmet collections. Stuff I loved at one point or another but then outgrew.

Then, a couple of months ago, somebody posted a video of a large band playing a Chicago cover. It was “Beginnings,” one of the songs from the very first Chicago Transit Authority album my older brother brought home when I was 12.

And it wasn’t just a cover. It was perfect. Big, resonant brass sounds converging from different directions, intertwining and melding and emerging from the back sides of chords to find their own ways back together in the next verse. I put my Bose headphones on, and it was mesmerizing.

And it wasn’t just a band. It was a whole slew of Russians and Ukrainians, playing in a high-end studio in Moscow. The power horn section blasting away, a trumpet, sax and trombone. Four singers, one a guitarist who could turn all of Kath’s tricks, another a young woman with movie-star looks.

Some appeared to be in their 20s, others in their 60s. They even had a 10-piece string ensemble, most of whom looked like they were from some school for orchestral prodigies.

And they were all smiling large and playing their asses off.

The more I dug into their YouTube video files, the more astounded I became. Every song was better than the last. They even had an EW&F cover of “September” that practically blew my phones off.

Who were these guys? I needed to know.

Well, it’s a great story. They never intended to play for profit. But their little project, constructed on a lark five years ago by elder bass player Leonid Vorobyev, took off on social media so that they played a US tour last year and now are on their second.

The band is called Leonid & Friends and they will play Penn’s Peak in Jim Thorpe at 8 p.m. on Thursday. According to the band’s manager, Vorobyev’s son Roman, more than 1,000 patrons are expected at the picturesque mountaintop music hall, and ticket sales confirm it.

Leonid is a 64-year-old accomplished musician and sound engineer who knew a lot of Moscow’s best players through various projects – one of them that singer/guitarist I mentioned, 37-year-old Sergey Kashirin.

“What happened was spontaneous,” said Kashirin by phone on Wednesday from a tour stop in Cleveland, through interpreter Roman Vorobyev. “Leonid decided to make a sort of present to himself on his 60th birthday. He got his friends together, myself and other guys who are session musicians, to record a song from Chicago VIII, ‘Brand New Love Affair’.

“While we were recording it, we thought: Why not make a video, as well? It was nothing extravagant or fancy. Then, we put it out on YouTube with no expectations.”

The guts of the operation is the painstaking attention to each chart that Vorobyev transcribed himself from the original recordings. He had no help from Chicago. He had never even seen the band play. All he had was his own keen ear.

Everyone had fun. But Kashirin was as surprised as anyone at the response:

“After this first wave of admiration from the [online] audience, mostly in America but around the globe as well, people saying how much they loved the reproduction of sound and to watch the videos, we said: OK, we should do more.”

They have done more, many more. The Leonid & Friends YouTube cache includes more than a dozen Chicago songs, plus the dabbling with EW&F.

To say the result is astonishing doesn’t do it justice. You have to hear it to believe it. Each song is a rich, full treatment, clearly a labor of love from musicians not out for profit, only adoration of craft.

And while what’s left of the original Chicago is a pale facsimile – Kath accidentally shot himself to death playing with a handgun while drunk back in 1978, and most of the other band members have moved on, grown old and been replaced – Leonid & Friends treats the aged material with the devoted attention of a new love.

“You know, it’s kind of surprising for us,” said Kashirin. “Because in Russia, Chicago is known mostly by musicians. It’s never been a popular group for a general audience. Other people mainly aren’t aware of it.

“We were surprised that so many people enjoy Chicago’s music. And they were writing us from all over the planet. It was great to know that there was still the appreciation and demand.”

Kashirin has played guitar since he was a small boy and studied at an academy in the Moldavian town of Tiraspol. By chance, an instructor handed him a CD of Chicago half his life ago when he was just 18. He had been raised on straight-up rock bordered by Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater and Deep Purple:

“At first, it was kind of strange, on the jazz side, not pure rock. I had never heard it before.”

He was fascinated, eventually learned many of the songs and was ready to play them when friend Vorobyev had his impetuous idea.

What stands out about all the Leonid & Friends videos is the musicianship. There is no faking it in this group, no Auto-Tune, no simplistic workarounds of melody and harmony and rhythm. It’s all apparent in the video, from the disparate voices of Kashirin, Serge Tiagniryadno, Vasilii Akimov and the drop-dead-gorgeous Ksenia Buzina to the popping, rock-steady drumming of Igor Javad-Zade to the peppery trumpet of Andrey Zyl and all the filling horns that make that massive wall of sound. It makes you weep for the current elementary state of pop music where the instrumentalist takes a backseat to banal production.

“That’s a trend that’s happening worldwide in pop music,” said Kashirin when I asked. “But you still have the jazz and rock musicians who strive to develop their skills, who are exploring both the new and bringing back the old.

“In Russia, musicians have grown to a higher level because we’ve always looked to America’s best bands as the gods whose level we want to strive towards. We’ve been making progress.

“So, we have the hope, looking at the audiences who’ve come to see us in America, that there is still that fire and need for great quality of musicianship.”

Can Kashirin believe all that has occurred, especially the spontaneous bonding of American and Russian music lovers?

“It’s still sometimes hard to conceive what’s happening. It’s like being in a dream. There’s no real explanation to how this happened.”

But then, that’s the magic that can occur when people of even very different backgrounds congregate around music.

Kashirin particularly liked something original Chicago drummer Danny Seraphine said when he sat in with Leonid & Friends at their show on July 12 in St. Charles, Ill. He paraphrased:

“He said, ‘We don’t need any politicians to find a common language among ourselves. Because, whether you look here or overseas, it’s the same people who want to find peace, a future and happiness for their children.’

“So, it’s just an honor for us to contribute our share as ambassadors of peace – with music as the universal language. If we can do just a little bit of that, it’s definitely our duty.”