Music rendered without the distraction of instruments is stark, powerful and clear! Well, there are eyebrows raised. To the uninitiated, a cappella music refers to vocal music, either solo or choral, sung without instruments. A cappella genre thrives on vocal feats of singers who blend harmonies through beat box and vocal percussion, like the band, Chord 7.
The Kochi-based band has veered from the norm to experiment with a cappella genre. Their song, A Cappella Bliss, was released recently featuring singer Ranjini Jose. Mella Mella, in a cappella style, is from Tamil film Maayavan and, originally composed by the putative Tamil music director, Ghibran.
Chord 7 was conceived by two sound engineers, Tony Daniel and James Paul and has seven members, hinting at ‘7’ in the band name. Tony says they wanted to do a cover version of a Tamil song, “We liked this song and contacted Ghibran who was happy to let us do a cappella version.” A cappella version has been mixed by Hentry Kuruvila, assistant to A.R. Rahman. “Hentry said that he wanted to hear a rough version and we sent him a rough pre–recording which he liked and then he went ahead”, says Tony.
About challenges of making the current video song, Tony opened up: “If this was one of our own compositions, we could have done anything but this was composed by a great name and we did not want the melody of the song to be lost in any way since no musical instruments have been used at all except human vocals.”
Others part of the video are Anish Bruce, Shiju Mathew, James Paul, Anish Pappachan and Jibu John. All belong to different states in the country, united by their love for music. The first song from the band was a two-minute melodious mix of three old devotionals sung by K..J. .Yesudas.
