Courtesy of Leonid & Friends
Audio By Carbonatix
The following content is sponsored by AEG Presents Rocky Mountains.
Growing up in Siberia behind the Iron Curtain, multi-instrumentalist Leonid Vorobyev, founder and director of the cover band Leonid & Friends, had very little access to popular music. The first time Vorobyev heard the American rock band Chicago was through a friend’s home recording, so he didn’t actually find out who the band was until he got a copy of Chicago’s seventh album years later.
“I can recall the first time I held their vinyl in my hands was in January 1975,” Vorobyev says. “It was the first time I learned the musicians’ names and the names of the songs.
Because of that, maybe, Chicago VII is one of my favorite albums.” Fast-forward to 2014, when Vorobyev recorded a cover of Chicago’s “Brand New Love Affair” with some friends. A video of it went viral, eventually leading Vorobyev to create the cover band Leonid & Friends.
Now on its latest sold-out U.S. tour, the group will play two shows in Colorado this October: at the Paramount Theatre in Denver on Friday, October 17, and at Pikes Peak Center in Colorado Springs on Saturday, October 18.
As Vorobyev told Chicago trombonist and founding member Jimmy Pankow when they met a few years ago, Chicago’s feel-good music was like a ray of light during the darkness of his upbringing in the Soviet Union. “Chicago, for me, is like a book of fairy tales, with colorful pictures on every page,” Vorobyev says. “For me, it was a good mix of jazz, with the horn section, and rock, with the rhythm section and vocal harmonies.”
After working at a recording studio in Moscow for over twenty years, he had amassed a group of talented musician friends whom he could call on for a favor. So as a sixtieth birthday present to himself, he recruited them to help record a cover of a song from his youth, Chicago’s “Brand New Love Affair.” Coincidentally, someone at the studio had a camera and asked if he could record them jamming together.
Vorobyev never expected the resulting video to be viewed outside his circle of friends, but it made its way around the world, and even onto Chicago’s official website. It was so well received that the musicians decided to record another of Chicago’s songs, “Make Me Smile,” and Leonid & Friends took off from there.
The band embarked on its first U.S. tour in 2019, and even earned a seal of approval from Chicago founding member and keyboardist Robert Lamm when he attended the Leonid & Friends show in Los Angeles.
Courtesy of Leonid & Friends
The band now spends six months a year performing for fans across the globe, and Leonid & Friends videos have collectively received more than 50 million views. The group consists of Vorobyev and ten other musicians, including a large brass section and four vocalists. Vorobyev transcribes all of the songs they cover by ear and produces, mixes and masters their recordings.
Although Leonid & Friends began as a Chicago cover band, the members have since broadened their horizons. Says Vorobyev: “We have expanded because in our catalogue, we’ve covered so many hits and deep cuts from Chicago. So then we were like, ‘Which other bands are similar, with the big brass section and that ’70s feel?’”
In addition to three Chicago cover albums, Leonid & Friends also released Oldies But Goldies, covering songs from similar brass-forward bands such as Earth, Wind & Fire, Steely Dan and Tower of Power. According to Vorobyev, today’s tour set lists usually comprise about 50 to 60 percent Chicago covers, with the rest a mix of covers from that same era.
Recently, the band has added some new songs to the mix, thanks to vocalist Ksenia Buzina: “We have our brilliant Ksenia, and she’s a star in her own right,” Vorobyev notes. “Something Chicago didn’t have — a female vocalist. She comes with her songs, which are ‘Superstar,’ covered by the Carpenters, and an incredible version of ‘I Say a Little Prayer,’ from Burt Bacharach’s catalogue. We have a lot of fun stuff that really brings a variety of hits, but it’s all that golden era of music, where everybody can instantly remember the song.”
They’ve also introduced a new tradition, where at the end of every September, they add a new song for Buzina to sing for her birthday: “So the next song is with Ksenia. It’s a famous song that everybody knows, it’s iconic, and it has brass in it as well, at least in our arrangement. The rest you’ll have to wait and see on our YouTube channel, and we promise to play it live as well.”
Leonid & Friends will perform at Denver’s Paramount Theatre on Friday, October 17, at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $48.70. From there, the band will head to Colorado Springs to play Pikes Peak Center on Saturday, October 18, with the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs. Tickets for that show start at $46.75.
