Brass Transit

From Toronto bars to a filmed theatre gig

Tony Carlucci had spent his working life as a trumpet player behind other people — Corey Hart, Percy Sledge, Paul Anka, the Drifters, Sam and Dave, the Fabulous Thunderbirds — when he put Brass Transit together to play the Chicago catalogue with a full horn line. The band's own account dates the founding to 2008; Carlucci, talking to Gary James for Classic Bands, put it a year later and was blunt about how little was intended by it: 'It was sort of a fun thing, playing around bars in the Toronto area.'

The step up was accidental. A soundman filming one of the group's early theatre bookings offered to help them produce proper video, and the footage did what a bar residency could not — it got the act in front of the people who book theatres. Carlucci drew on the Toronto session pool rather than the tribute circuit, and that is still the distinguishing feature of the band: these are players whose day job is other people's records, doing a repertory show on the side.

The eight-piece format was never negotiable. Chicago's records are built on three horns over a rock rhythm section with several singers, and there is no way to fake that with fewer bodies. The band has carried eight musicians since the start.

The lineup and the method

The current group is Carlucci on trumpet and leading the band, Ian Jutsun on lead vocals, Phil Poppa on saxophones, Doug Gibson on trombone, Don Breithaupt on keyboards, Silvio Simone on guitar, Jay Speziale on bass and Paul DeLong on drums, with almost everyone singing. The credentials are not decorative: Breithaupt is an Emmy winner and Juno nominee who also leads Monkey House and has written books on seventies pop; DeLong is a Juno winner who taught at Humber College for more than three decades; Jutsun has been nominated at the Smooth Jazz Awards and appeared in Bombay Dreams. The chairs do turn over — when the Detroit Symphony billed the band in June 2019, the guitarist was Bob McAlpine.

The working rule is fidelity rather than interpretation. Carlucci has described the approach as 'note for note, all the tunes', staying 'true to the original recording, true to the institution of all the original arrangements'. That is a harder discipline than it sounds for a horn band, because Chicago's charts are dense, the vocal parts are stacked three deep, and the arrangements shift substantially between the brass-heavy early albums and the ballads that carried the group through the 1980s.

Chicago's own camp is aware of the act. Carlucci has said the original band's drummer made contact, that the members who saw the material liked it, and that Chicago's songwriters collect royalties whenever Brass Transit play a venue that reports its setlists.

The records came late

For most of its existence Brass Transit was a live proposition with nothing to sell but a ticket. The recorded catalogue only began in December 2022 with a single of 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas', followed in 2023 by 'Last Time This Time' and 'Me and the Snowstorm and You'.

The albums arrived in 2024: a self-titled record and Brass Transit II: The Symphony Sessions, released alongside a horn-section reading of Metallica's 'Nothing Else Matters'. The conceit of the debut is worth spelling out, because it is not a Chicago covers album. The band took rock songs by other seventies acts and re-recorded them with horns, arranged in Chicago's style — the tribute applied as a method rather than to a repertoire. The Symphony Sessions documents the orchestral version of the show.

Working with orchestras

The symphony bookings have become a substantial part of the business. Breithaupt and Lou Pomanti — a Michael Bublé collaborator — wrote original orchestral charts around the existing arrangements, adding strings, woodwinds and French horns without displacing the horn line. Carlucci's description of the constraint is straightforward: 'The meat of Chicago is the big fat brass sound', and the orchestra is there as what he called an augmented auditory experience rather than a replacement.

The dates read like a pops subscription series. Bob Bernhardt conducted the band with the Detroit Symphony at Orchestra Hall on 12 June 2019 and again with the Grand Rapids Symphony at DeVos Performance Hall on 1 April 2023, where tickets ran from $19 to $104; his verdict on the group was that 'they're pros: they know the style, notes, energy'. David Bui conducted the Vancouver Symphony date at the Orpheum on 19 January 2023, and Michael Avagliano led the Allentown Symphony Orchestra at Miller Symphony Hall on 12 July 2025.

Presenters have been publicly enthusiastic in a way that matters more than press for a band that sells to programmers: Paul Helfrich of the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance called it among the best concerts they had presented, Rob McAlear of the Edmonton Symphony described the group as seasoned professionals, and the Mississauga Symphony booking is reported by the band to have drawn five standing ovations.

Where the band stands in 2026

Carlucci has put the workload at 75 to 80 shows a year across corporate bookings, theatres of roughly 800 to 1,000 seats, and casino rooms in the United States and Canada. Ticket prices sit where that suggests — the Ottawa date at Meridian Theatres @ Centrepointe on 16 December 2023 was $41.50 to $61.50. Songkick logs 61 past events in the band's gigography.

The 2026 run has already taken in two nights at the South Point Showroom in Las Vegas on 16 and 17 May and the Appalachian Theatre in Boone, North Carolina on 30 July. Two dates are on sale through Ticketmaster: the Grand Ballroom at Bally's Atlantic City on 10 October at 8pm, and the Showroom at Turning Stone Resort Casino in Verona, New York on 23 October at 8pm, billed as Brass Transit: The Musical Legacy of Chicago.

The band's own calendar runs considerably longer, and mostly through Ontario theatres: the FirstOntario Arts Centre in Milton on 25 September, St Catharines on 3 October, the Empress Theatre in Vallejo, California on 17 October, the Strand in Hudson Falls, New York on 24 October, the Flato Markham Theatre on 13 November, Centre In The Square in Kitchener on 14 November, three nights at the Riviera Theatre in North Tonawanda from 19 to 21 November, the Sanderson Centre in Brantford on 5 December, the Village Theatre at Cherry Hill in Canton, Michigan on 11 December, and two New Year's Eve shows at the Suncoast Broadway Dinner Theater in Hudson, Florida.