Full band, no instruments

By Jerry Fink

Friday, Oct. 10, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Seven New Yorkers were captured on a video singing a cappella last year in a Paris subway. The clip landed on YouTube and helped launch a group’s career.

“I wish it was our idea,” says Roger Thomas of Naturally 7. “But this French executive said, ‘You guys can sing anywhere. Just go down into the subway and start singing.’ And we did.”

Two cameras caught the singers and the crowd’s reaction — skeptical at first, then gradually drawn into the harmony and the rhythm of the moment.

“Little did we know that millions and millions of viewers from every corner of the world would see it and be blown away,” Thomas says.

Among those blown away were producers for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” who put the group on the show this year. And Michael Buble hired them to be his opening act on his national tour — which began almost a year ago and ends Dec. 5 at Madison Square Garden.

“With Michael Buble, we’re performing in front of a half a million people,” Thomas says from a tour stop in Raleigh, N.C. “That’s pretty serious.”

Naturally 7 takes a couple of days off from the tour to open for Jay Leno on Friday and Saturday at the Mirage.

Don’t be surprised if the singers steal the show. Everywhere they go audiences are amazed by what they do — using their voices to create the sounds of musical instruments that accompany their vocals. They call it “vocal play.”

“We created a second video, ‘Wall of Sound,’ to explain vocal play,” Thomas says. “By definition, a cappella is singing without instruments. Vocal play is our voices becoming the instruments.”

Naturally 7 has been doing a cappella shows for about 10 years. Musically, it runs the gamut from inspirational to pop and rap.

Thomas and his brother sang traditional a cappella in church in the Bronx.

“As the arrangements became more and more complex, we added more (singers). We stopped at seven, because we thought that was the last number that people could conceive of us as being a group,” Thomas says. “We had a desire to be unique, to keep evolving.

“We wanted to surprise and to shock, and so little by little we started adding the vocal instruments. Why not do what the bass guitar does? The same with the horns and the harmonicas and all sorts of things.”

They knew they were onto something when they performed “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and won a national a cappella competition in 1999. The competition led to engagements, mostly on college campuses.

“Sometimes we were doing 220 shows a year,” he says. “We were fighting just to get home.”

Naturally 7 released its first independent recording, “Non-fiction,” in 2000 and its first major-label recording, “What Is It?”, in 2003. The group began touring Europe. While in Paris the singers made the video that made them internationally famous after years of struggling.

“It came out really good,” Thomas says. “People are so much into reality now, they want to see what really happens in a situation like that. Today so many people are faking what they are singing. On this video people get to see us warm up the audience, turn them from cold to hot right there on the train.”