Brass band Lucky Chops performed a series of covers and original songs for upper school students and faculty in the athletic center today.

Based in New York, the band plays music they classify as “high energy brassy funk.” Since 2006, trombonist Josh Holcomb, trumpeter Joshua Gawel and sousaphonist Raphael Buyo have been interested in educating the public about music and inspiring student musicians to pursue their passions for music. Last year, they were joined by drummer Charles Sams and saxophonist Daro Behroozi. Lucky Chops gained popularity after fans began posting videos of their performances online; as of 2018, their YouTube channel has over 200 million total video views.

Lucky Chops was introduced by instrumental music teacher Chris Florio, who found the band through YouTube while watching a video of one of their performances. When the upper school orchestra went to New York’s Carnegie Hall last spring, Florio surprised the students with a performance by Lucky Chops.

“They totally exceeded all of my expectations and the group loved them,” Florio said of the band’s performance in New York. “It was just amazing. [I was] still following them and then found out that they were on this massive, national tour, playing almost every night. It just happened to be that this day, they were coming through our area.”

The band began with a medley of pop songs, which included Ariana Grande’s “Problem,” the melody punctuated by cheers from the crowd. After playing one more song, Holcomb spoke about the origins of Lucky Chops.

“We actually started out in our high school band class, just like many of you here today,” Holcomb said. “We’re going to play for you high school students, hopefully inspire you, hopefully get you a little bit pumped up.”

Following the self-introduction, the band played a song featuring a series of sousaphone solos. The higher-pitched sounds of the trumpet, trombone and saxophone enveloped the deep, emphatic noise of the sousaphone until they faded out to give prominence to the strong, steady beat of the drums. From there, the band built back up to playing all at once, starting from an intricate solo by Behroozi. The song ended with another sousaphone solo.

Holcomb then shared details about an 8-bit music video the band created for one of their most recent songs, “Temple of Boom,” and explained that the name of the song alluded to “Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom,” the movie on which the song was based. They then launched into the song, which had a tuneful chorus, a hearty beat and a drum solo, during when the other band members crowded around Sams and nodded encouragingly as he played. This was followed by a piercing trumpet solo that built up tension, leading back into the chorus.

After “Temple of Boom,” Holcomb provided a description of how the band manages to create entertaining songs without vocals.

“There are no words, so we have to make it catchy enough for you to recognize them and powerful enough where you can understand that ‘oh yeah, that’s kind of like the thing that the singer would do,’ but done on acoustic, brass instruments,” Holcomb said.

He then announced that the band was going to play a medley of covers, which he called a “supersong” comprised of a variety of different tunes. They began by playing a cover of “I’ll Fly Away,” a hymn composed in 1929, and wove in “Colors of the Wind” from the Disney movie “Pocahontas,” “Say You’ll Be There” by the Spice Girls, “Aerodynamic” by Daft Punk and “Heart of Glass” by Blondie, a post-punk song that was released in 1978. After the supersong, Behroozi discussed the composition with the audience and shared a few details about the origins of Lucky Chops’s music.

“That beat comes from the city of New Orleans, where some say a type of music called jazz was born,” Behroozi said. “We have a lot of influence from New Orleans. Many of the brass band styles in the U.S. actually come from the New Orleans brass band tradition. What we like to do is find a way to incorporate that into the style that we play so that we can go into songs like ‘Colors of the Wind’ or ‘Heart of Glass’ or even the Spice Girls.”

Behroozi elaborated on how Lucky Chops came to develop its distinct style and added that the band occasionally improvises during songs.

“What we did was draw from those influences as well as many other influences—pop music, rock music, dance music—and kind of fuse it all together,” said Behroozi. “We [also] do this thing called group interaction, where somebody will play an idea and somebody else will respond with a different idea. That gives us the option to do a lot of different things in the moment.”

Following another song, the band then took another break to tell the students more about how they began playing music together. Holcomb also emphasized that following one’s passion in life is important, encouraging students to do the same.

“We started playing in the subways of New York, the grimiest place you can imagine. We started hitting that place every week, multiple times a week, sweating through the summer, freezing through the winter,” Holcomb said. “We were going for it, truly, because we really had fun doing it. We’ve been able to transform our dream, our passion, into our job.  We agreed that life should be about finding your passion, finding what truly makes you happy and going for it one hundred percent, which is exactly what we did.”

For their last piece, the band performed a piece commonly played at football games with upper school jazz band members.

Many students were pleasantly surprised by the proficiency of the band.

“It amazed me to see the band take songs popular today and pack them into a jazz-like theme,” Shalini Rohra (9) said.

World history teacher Andrea Milius enjoyed the performance because it reminded her of her own experience with music; she was in her high school jazz band and the marching band in college, playing the clarinet and the baritone.

“It was cool to look at the student body and see everybody rocking out.” she said. “It made me miss being in band. I was like, ‘oh my god, I want to take my baritone out of my closet!’”

As part of their ongoing national tour, Lucky Chops will also perform once at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz later today and will hold two shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco as well as one show at the Observatory North Park in San Diego later this week.

Gallery • 6 Photos

Kathy Fang

Instrumental music teacher Chris Florio introduces Lucky Chops and speaks about the upper school orchestra's trip last spring to New York, where they were surprised by Florio with a performance by Lucky Chops. “They totally exceeded all of my expectations and the group loved them. It was just amazing. [I was] still following them, and then found out that they were on this massive, national tour, playing almost every night. It just happened to be that this day, they were coming through our area," Florio said.