Grace Notes

At 14, Ponnudorai was good enough to win a national TV talent contest, playing an instrumental rendition of Killing Me Softly. But despite this early success, he had no thoughts of becoming a professional musician until lack of money stymied his desire to read English literature at university. At a loose end, and with the family having moved to Kuala Lumpur, he persuaded his mother to let him earn a few ringgits by playing a couple of hours a night at a bar where one of the older Ponnudorai boys was a regular. "That was 1979," Ponnudorai says. "I walked into that bar and I haven't walked out of a bar since."

His next dozen years were spent in cover bands, trading on Top 40 hits and rock standards and occasionally touring to Singapore or Indonesia, but returning to the same smoky rooms in Kuala Lumpur. They were colorful times. "Malaysia was in the middle of a massive timber boom in the 1980s, and the timber graders were licensed to carry weapons because they were carrying huge sums of money around with them," he says. "But many of the timber graders were also gangsters. You would have to play the same song several times a night, otherwise a gangster would say, 'Why don't you give me some face?' and show you the bulge under his shirt. My record for Careless Whisper is 17 times in a row."

This is how he may have continued, a jobbing musician in a seedy netherworld, were it not for an epiphanic injury in 1992. His friend fell asleep at the wheel of a car and ran off the road, sending Ponnudorai, a passenger, headfirst through the window. Initially, he appeared miraculously unscathed and was sent home with a head full of stitches. But days later, he was unable to fret guitar chords or walk a straight line. Fresh tests revealed a massive blood clot covering an entire side of his brain, just waiting to rupture, and he was rushed into surgery. Against medical predictions he survived, but the experience left him emotionally transformed. "Things that were so important—success, recognition, accolades—suddenly didn't matter anymore," he says. "And as a byproduct of my heightened awareness after the accident, I started listening to music—really listening to it. That's when I started appreciating songs like Five Hundred Miles. There are lots of songs that many people don't think about, but they are very good songs."

In coaxing the inner beauty out of moribund folk-song fodder like Five Hundred Miles or Fire and Rain, which he performs with spellbinding verve, Ponnudorai drew on the vast musical vocabulary amassed during his barroom years, and used it to execute the material with arresting freshness. His new solo act emerged in 2000; effortlessly spanning genres and periods, and quoting songs within songs, it is perfectly attuned to ears raised on unfettered sampling, but beneath the complexity is the sincerity of a man celebrating all that is musical and the simple fact of being alive. This is the combination that lures the cognoscenti to Harry's. To date, A.-and-R. representatives from major labels have not been among them. In fact, Right on Time, Ponnudorai's blinding first album (of mostly covers but with a couple of originals), was only released in 2005, produced and paid for by a friend, the Italian blues guitarist Enrico Crivellaro. Available only online—except for the half-dozen copies Ponnudorai carries around in his bag—it hasn't sold in significant numbers. Neither Crivellaro nor Ponnudorai have sufficient resources to promote it, nor is Ponnudorai of an MTV-friendly age.

In Ponnudorai's circle of friends and family members, the only person untroubled by his lack of fame is the man himself. Since his accident, he has been content simply to make a living. "It took me a while to figure it out," he says, "but as long as I can play, I'll be a happy man." And so it happens that this remarkable musician will perform at Harry's this weekend, while most of the drinkers have their backs to the stage. It doesn't matter if 10 people are listening or 10,000. His music ascends like a prayer or a thanksgiving, an end in itself.