Saturday, November 13 2010

MICHAEL Jackson may be gone but his music lives on. DAVID WHETSTONE talks to a man making sure of that.

ANYONE thinking of forming a tribute band is playing with fire, it seems to me. All those fans who know everything there is to know about the real thing will be watching critically.

They will expect nothing less than exactitude. Fall short and they may tell you where to stick your tribute. Even if your chosen subject never quite scaled the dizzy heights, you are running a risk. But paying tribute to Michael Jackson would seem to be, at the very least, ambitious. Saxophonist Vamsi Tadepalli concedes that “it’s a big bite to chew”. But his Michael Jackson band, Who’s Bad, performed 18 gigs in this country in February and March and impressed a lot of punters, many of whom had also seen the British Jackson tribute show Thriller Live.

Not all were impressed but the reviewer from The Independent declared it “the closest you will get now to seeing Michael Jackson live”. Although a little ambiguous, that does sound like praise and probably explains why the show is now on a 30-date tour which brings it to The Journal Tyne Theatre tonight. Vamsi tells me he assembled the band in 2003 when he was graduating from the University of North Carolina where he had studied jazz.

“I’d always been a fan of Michael Jackson’s music and had grown up around it,” he recalls. “It was kind of hard to avoid, I guess. But as a music major, I realised that there were a lot of layers to his music and levels of sophistication that you don’t often hear on a pop album. “That’s what made me wonder why there wasn’t a tribute band to Michael.” Maybe they were deterred by the sheer scale of the task. Such a distinctive and global star merits the full treatment, necessitating expenditure and risk.

But perhaps there was another reason. “When we first started playing Michael’s music he was facing all those allegations,” says Vamsi. The media was full of what he might or might not have done and he wasn’t the most popular person in the States. “But it made me want to do it even more, to prove to people that the music was still good.”

The music was always the thing and originally it was going to be the only thing insists Vamsi: “When I was putting the band together I was thinking musically and the look wasn’t important.

“At first I was even auditioning female vocalists because I needed people who could hit the high notes. But the response I was getting, even from female vocalists, was that this wasn’t the best thing to do.” Vamsi then “got lucky” with vocalists Taalib York and Joseph Bell who were similarly steeped in Michael Jackson’s music and could recreate the sound, the moves and the look. Suddenly, with the sound coming right, the appearance of the band and its act started to become important too.

The first gigs in 2004 were a success and since then Who’s Bad has performed in Germany, France, Mexico and even China where venues included the Hangzhou People’s Hall and the Chengsha Red Stadium.

Vamsi says: “We have always had a great, positive response. My favourite thing is seeing the people who were the sceptics out there, people standing with arms crossed because they’ve gone with friends who are Michael Jackson fans and they don’t necessarily like him, starting to loosen up.

“By the time the show ends they have realised that every song that comes along is really good. That’s my favourite art –converting people.”

Since Michael Jackson only died last year, Who’s Bad cannot be accused of ghoulishly cashing in. Vamsi says they became an outlet for people who wanted to mourn and he wasn’t about to argue. It’s hard to make a living as a jazz musician. Paying homage to Michael Jackson, on the other hand, seems to get the bills paid.