The Capital City Minstrels (“CCM Delhi”) pop up a few times every year with classic songs like “He Never Failed Me Yet” or “Happy” bringing the house down. Being regulars at their shows, we are always on the lookout for CCM’s performances. We had shouted out about A Grand Night for Singing, CCM’s summer concert in a recent post. We attended the last show in this series that was staged at Kamani.

While CCM, the choir formed by professionals who are also music lovers, needs no intro, this was our first with their new conductor Alex Heetland. The repertoire for the concert was an eclectic collection of songs from various parts of the world. In fact listening to a choir twist to a Nepali song – “Romails Nepali Tihar” was a unique experience. We also loved the various moods that they captured throughout the evening. Be it spiritual or love or festival or happiness, all the numbers were nice and positive.

In fact, we loved the song “He Never failed Me Yet” and were super glad that they sang it again for encore.

The choir members keep changing and new singers keep getting inducted every season. But we have never been able to make that out – as a group they all are pros. In fact, they are holding auditions for fresh vocalists in August and once can walk in if interested.

The choir was ably supported by Nise Meruno on the keyboard and Bhairav Gupta on percussion. All in all it was a great team effort.

We are still not very accustomed to choir music in India. However, this genre has dropped its traditional trappings and has opened up to include even Bollywood numbers in its fold. If you are a music lover of any variety, you ought to give CCM a hearing. They would be back with concerts later this year in NCR and we’ll keep you posted on this. Meanwhile, you can have a quick experience here.

The Capital City Minstrels touched the right chords in A Grand Night for Singing and we hum along with them for that.