Leonid & Friends

About Leonid & Friends

Leonid & Friends started as the most unlikely success story in modern music — a Russian sound engineer named Leonid Vorobyev uploading Chicago covers to YouTube in 2014. Not tribute band covers where everyone's trying too hard. These were obsessively accurate recreations that made people check if the original band had somehow reunited without telling anyone.

Vorobyev had spent decades as a session musician and studio engineer in Moscow, studying American horn-driven rock and funk like it was a doctoral thesis. When he finally posted his covers of Chicago classics, the Internet did its thing. Within months, the videos had millions of views and caught the attention of Chicago's actual founding members. Lee Loughnane and Robert Lamm showed up in the comments essentially saying "who are these people and how are they doing this."

The sound was that precise. Vorobyev didn't just nail the arrangements — he captured the room tone, the horn punch, the specific compression on the guitars. It was forensic. He assembled a rotating cast of Moscow's best session players, many of whom had been grinding away in Russian pop and jazz scenes for years. Singer Serge Tiagniryadno brought the grit. The horn section brought credentials from orchestras and big bands most people have never heard of.

They kept uploading covers while playing shows across Russia, then Europe. By 2018 they were touring American theaters, selling out rooms full of boomers who wanted to hear Chicago songs played by people who actually cared about playing them right. Not ironic. Not nostalgic in a sad way. Just technically ferocious and clearly loving the material.

The thing that separated them from typical tribute bands was the decision to write originals. Their first album of original material dropped in 2020, with Transatlantic marking the moment they stopped being a YouTube phenomenon and became an actual band. The title track sounded like peak Chicago in 1974 — horn stabs, electric piano, that specific kind of sophisticated funk that used to dominate FM radio. Keep It Real and Night Life followed the same template. Love Song leaned into the ballad side without getting schmaltzy. Golden brought more of that brass-heavy groove.

These weren't covers or pastiches. They were new songs written in a language most American bands forgot how to speak decades ago. The albums did well enough that they kept making them, kept touring, kept expanding beyond the "remember Chicago?" audience into people who just wanted to hear horns and actual arrangements.

They're still based in Moscow, still touring internationally when geopolitics allows. Vorobyev remains the architect, recording and mixing everything himself. They've become the weird answer to a question nobody asked: what if someone in Russia kept the 1970s horn band tradition alive while everyone else moved on.

Their shows are tight ensembles with real musicians, not backing tracks. People tend to stand closer than usual, watching the band rather than phones. Energy is deliberate and hypnotic rather than frantic. The crowd rewards restraint.

Known for Transatlantic, Keep It Real, Night Life, Love Song, Golden

See Leonid & Friends Live