"Jazz that people are moshing to": the Chopping Spree story

Chopping Spree are a five-piece band who came out of UBC mixing jazz fusion with indie rock and metal. Their lineup, established in late 2024, is saxophonist Kyler Young, guitarist Junny Chen, keyboardist Hayden Cohen, bassist Olivier Leclerc, and drummer Eddie Naranjo.

This Friday, January 9th, Chopping Spree will release their first album, Anemoia. The next night, they play an album release show at the Fox Cabaret presented by Infidels Jazz, with support from a like-minded band called (appropriately) Infidelity.

Chopping Spree recorded Anemoia last January at the studios of Hubcast Media, a broadcasting production company. Their bassist had only joined about a month prior, and their drummer was about to leave town and miss several formative shows. By the time everyone was back and settled, they had big shows to play and an identity to live up to.

Anemoia thus captures the key moment in Chopping Spree's history so far. This is the band's story as told to me through interviews with nine people, including all five current members.

Junny Chen, the exuberant guitarist with a Master of Puppets poster behind him during our videocall, was the biggest rock kid of the five. His family steered him away from drum lessons toward the piano, then to guitar; he went self-taught after encountering what he jokingly called "catatonic theory stuff".

Eddie Naranjo moved to Kitsilano from Spain with his family at age nine, then picked up the drums in school. He started as a rock kid as well but found jazz shortly after. "I got into jazz around when I was 14," he said, "and I applied to the VSO Jazz Combos program outside of school. I got in, and then I started playing in a small combo, and that's really when I started to fall in love with my instrument."

Right around the time of his high school graduation, Naranjo ended up meeting Chen, who was already at UBC for a Bachelor of Arts majoring in music. Naranjo and his Kitsilano Secondary friends had started a band called Reverend Ape; they soon recruited Chen to be their new guitarist-vocalist. (Reverend Ape remain active and released their own debut, a self-titled EP, in 2025.)

Chen joined the UBC Jazz Orchestra, directed by Ben Henriques. "A few months in, we're playing in the ensemble, and I'm like, wow, this is the best two hours of the school week for me," Chen said. "These guys are so talented, and I can be having the [worst] Tuesday, but I go to the ensemble rehearsals and all the problems go away, I'm so immersed in the music."

Naranjo was now himself at UBC for political science and history, and Chen wanted a friend in the Jazz Orchestra. "I ended up auditioning just because Junny told me to do it. It's the only music class I've taken at UBC," Naranjo said.

Hayden Cohen, who later became Chopping Spree's keyboardist but played bass in the Jazz Orchestra, dazzled his soon-to-be bandmates. Chen said he saw Cohen "just like, end of the rehearsal, shredding Dream Theater like crazy on the piano".

"It was super funny, because I saw him shredding Dream Theater on his bass, and I was like, what?" Naranjo said.

"So Junny and I were like, definitely, let's do something cool with this guy."

I asked Cohen, a music composition student at UBC, about Dream Theater. "That was a very pivotal band in my upbringing," he said, "and kind of why I was able to do stuff. Because I had started listening to their music when I had started teaching at a studio in high school, and that was during covid. I was pretty miserable in high school, and I picked up this music, and I started transcribing a lot of it by ear. It led me through a huge gateway of learning and writing and reading music that I had never done before."

Unlike Chen and Naranjo, who had played in Reverend Ape together for a few years, Cohen was inexperienced as a performer. "I had never played in a proper gigging band by any means before Chopping Spree," he said. "And I had never really written for bands either, so it was very new to me."

"So we had," Chen said, "me, Eddie, Hayden, and Romano, he was our first bassist."

Romano Canderan had previously been in a short-lived band with Naranjo; his drummer friend called him again to join this new project, where he met Chen and Cohen. He was a great genre fit. "Metal is what initially got me into music, and jazz is what carried that passion forward," Canderan told me via Instagram.

"After the first practice," Chen said, "we were like, yeah, that was cool, but we could really use another weapon here, you know?"

"We were kind of thinking like, we need a horn player for this to work," Cohen said.

Cohen thought of his friend Kyler Young, a saxophonist whom he knew from a composition class and from the Jazz Orchestra. Young was a band kid through and through. In addition to being a Semiahmoo Secondary grad who learned from Kevin Lee, Dagan Lowe, and the Proznick family, he'd taken elementary band under one of the most renowned local band directors in recent years: Sunnyside Elementary's Susan Hagen.

"I remember just getting a call," Young said. "I think I was taking a shower or something, and [Cohen] called me three times. I'm like, what does this guy want? I picked up, and he’s like, do you want to join a jazz fusion band? And I'm like, sure, I have nothing else to do with my summer. Yeah, that was the start of it. Then I got to know Junny and Eddie a lot more."

"We didn't play a lot of shows around that time. It took a lot to just get the band going and figure out what we actually wanted to do. Looking back at those first couple shows, we were playing a lot of Japanese jazz fusion and a lot of cover music, but there was definitely something between us where we all really enjoyed playing with each other."

The band's two earliest shows still discoverable on social media took place in July 2024. First was July 4th at Koerner's on campus, presented by the UBC-based Blank Vinyl Project. Next was July 11th at Red Gate on a bill with Chen Baker – their comrades in UBC's rise through the jazz scene – and Nikola Tosic's band Super K.

Later that same month, Canderan moved back to his home city of Kelowna for personal reasons. He left the band without any beef. "I haven't seen them since I moved," Canderan said. "Whenever I find myself in Vancouver again, I absolutely want to go to their shows."

The Blank Vinyl Project booked Chopping Spree again, this time for a Battle of the Bands at the Biltmore Cabaret. The band scrambled to fill their bass chair. When the school year started up again, they found someone via the student-run UBC Jazz Club, which regularly presents jams and shows on campus.

Geoff Petines was in his first year at UBC. He and the Chopping Spree members "met at the first jam I ever went to," he told me via Instagram.

Petines did an audition in a Blank Vinyl Project practice room. "I was standing right next to the kit, and I remember afterwards when they told me I got the gig, I left that basement covered in sweat with my ears ringing like crazy. I couldn't have been happier." With Petines, Chopping Spree played Blank Vinyl's Battle of the Bands on October 9th plus a show at Bully's in November.

Across their interviews with me, many band members overlapped on naming their musical influences: the prolific jam-rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Japanese fusion artists like Casiopea and Masayoshi Takanaka, Dream Theater, and then perhaps classic fusion acts like the Mahavishnu Orchestra or Weather Report.

Petines' interests readily fell under jazz: to me he cited Jaco, Marcus Miller, and Hadrien Feraud as influences. "I laugh at it now," he said, "but it was only after that aforementioned audition in the basement ended that they were like, oh, by the way, we love prog metal."

It was thus that once again, the band and their bassist parted ways after a short time. "My sound just didn't match their sound, and that's fine, but it meant that what I was looking for was probably different from what they were looking for," Petines said.

Everyone was on the same page. "After a few shows, it was a bit of a creative difference. He was thinking more like traditional jazz fusion," Naranjo said.

"I think he noticed that Chopping Spree was turning into something a little different. There's no hard feelings there either," Young said, comparing it to Canderan's departure. "He’s a tremendous bass player as well."

Petines has subbed for the band twice since: at Tyrant Studios on April 12th, 2025 opening for Balkan Shmalkan, and at the Painted Ship a week later on April 19th alongside a touring band from Denmark, Caper Clowns.

Chopping Spree would find yet another bassist within a month; his first show took place as the band hurtled toward the recording of Anemoia, forging their identity.

Olivier Leclerc went to Capilano University's jazz program, where his peers included Mackenzie Tran, Casey Thomas-Burns, and Tess Meckling. However, he said, he was "through and through a rock guy and a funk guy, and didn't know anything about jazz" before CapU.

Leclerc has played in a rock band called Felisha and the Jazz Rejects for about three years. Through this band, he shared bills with Reverend Ape and met Chen and Naranjo.

One of Leclerc's bandmates, Eissen Lewey Panganiban, was a CapU jazz guitarist and had already heard Chopping Spree live by fall 2024. "He was telling me about this band," Leclerc said. "He’s like, they're doing jazz, but people were moshing to it, and it was rock and it was heavy and it was sick. And I was like, oh, that sounds up my alley, that's cool."

"I was planning on trying to go see them, and then maybe a month or two later, they posted a thing on Instagram that said, we need a bass player. And since I already knew Junny and Eddie, I was like, I'll reach out for fun. This could be a thing for fun that I could do. And yeah, Junny took me out for pizza, we had a talk, I went to a rehearsal with them, and then that was that."

"I knew Oli already," Chen said. "Him and I have always gotten along. I've always thought he was super dope and slapped the bass like nobody did. I'd seen what he can do."

"I only knew this guy in a rock setting," Naranjo said, "but I knew he had some background in jazz. The first show we played with him was the first time this [band] felt totally complete."

That show was December 22nd, 2024 at Red Gate with Blue Rivera and – making Leclerc play a double shift – Felisha and the Jazz Rejects. Footage of Chopping Spree's set is on YouTube, thanks to Gordy Li.

Leclerc went all-out. "It was two completely different types of shows in the space of two hours. I had to get up there, and then with the Jazz Rejects, it's like more straight-ahead rock: you play the song, and that's how the song goes. And it had been a long time since I played any fusion music, especially super high-energy stuff where the bass is super active, so I was fried afterwards."

He also had to meet the band socially. "I'd learned all the music, we'd had a couple rehearsals, but on stage I still was like, I'm the bass player that just joined. But it was a lot of fun, and it was interesting to be playing songs like ‘Caravan’, or playing some Japanese fusion stuff, and getting the same reaction from the crowd as [when] I was playing heavy music in the other band."

To Cohen, Leclerc fit in right away. "What I remember about that show," Cohen said, "is the remarkable amount of time that was like... Oli being so shortly integrated into our group, and then practicing a couple times with us and putting on such a killer show with us. That was a phenomenal thing. That night in particular, I remember that was one of the coolest crowds that we had. That was really when we settled into the idea that like, this is jazz that people are moshing to."

Chen described the night as when the band had "finally come to fruition".

"That's the first show we did most of the songs that are on [Anemoia]," Naranjo said. "It's the first time we played them. And yeah, watching that video now is hilarious to me, just because we've changed them so much."

Chopping Spree ended their set with an amped-up jazz standard: "Caravan". The Juan Tizol / Duke Ellington tune appears as the last track on Anemoia, though it's not one of the two singles released as of this story's publication.

"I think we did ['Caravan'] at our very first show as a band," Young said. Indeed, when Leclerc's bandmate went to see them earlier on, "he was like, oh, that band is so sick, I moshed to ‘Caravan’, it was great," Leclerc said.

At Red Gate, they played three originals that made it to Anemoia: the softer jazz of "Two Rooms" (video time: 16:40), the metal-influenced "Portrait of Zahora" (22:10), and one resembling video game music called "Crayola" (29:11) which is out now as the album's first single.

"Crayola" has straightforward jazz harmony, alto saxophone as the lead voice, and bits of slap bass and wah-wah propelled by rhythm guitar strumming. Young leans into his parts with bite when appropriate, repeats a tense flat-nine with conviction, and takes it out with a poised cadenza. Chen's rocking guitar solo transports the arrangement back from a game soundtrack to an 80s jazz set.

After Leclerc's first show, Chopping Spree got set for a unique studio recording experience. Hubcast Media, founded by Young's father, Peter Young, had a studio in a rural area between the Surrey neighbourhoods of Port Kells and Clayton Heights. The band spent multiple days there in late January 2025, recording Anemoia and also throwing an in-studio performance for friends and family.

"I was starting to get to know the guys more," Leclerc said, "kind of realizing that it's just this wacky collection of dudes that all grew up in totally different ways. Everybody has different backgrounds of music they're into. So I'm just getting to know them, and then when we arrive to the studio, I'm still kind of like, this weekend will be cool because I'll finally be able to hang out with them. Like, we still hadn't really hung out."

Leclerc had the experience he was hoping for. "Our days were like 9 AM to 3 AM, so we would play all morning, eat some lunch, hang out, play all afternoon and evening, eat dinner, hang out; and then they had a fire pit, so from midnight to 3 AM, we were just chatting around the fire. So yeah, definitely when I left that, I was like, okay, cool, I can say that I'm a part of this now."

"The hang was great," Cohen said. "We all get along so well, and that's something that I've started to really not take for granted anymore."

The band dug in to get good live takes of fresh material. "‘Koi Fish’," Chen said, "the [take] that we were happy with and submitted to distribution platforms, that was take 40," Chen said, laughing.

"The structure was very loose when we came in, and we ended up doing, I think, 40 takes of it, and it was ridiculous," Naranjo said.

On December 12th, the band released "Koi Fish" as Anemoia's second single.

"That one was hugely inspired by ‘Don't Let the World Pass You By’ by Jean-Luc Ponty", Cohen said. The main rhythms of the Ponty track's riffs roughly match "Koi Fish", as does the use of distorted electric guitar and hot synth. However, Chopping Spree have no constant figure like the triplet guitar strumming in Ponty's arrangement; they all move together from section to section, into and out of the drum solo.

Naranjo said, "I feel like [our] whole album, it captures the band of that exact moment so well: as soon as Oli joined, finally feeling like it's like a band. We're taking a direction, but it's still a bit uncertain where we're going. The album ended up... it was all the early tunes that we have. It's not super cohesive, but I think it captures it perfectly, how we were at that time."

Right after the Anemoia sessions, Naranjo's academic life took him away from the band for six months. He traveled via a study program to his home country, Spain. "Personally, I was really scared about going abroad and restarting my whole life for a few months, basically, when we had this whole exciting project going on with the band," Naranjo said.

The five asked Colm McIntosh to join as an interim drummer. "I had just transferred to the UBC school of music and started to play in the UBC Jazz [Orchestra] with them in September, so we got talking and they asked me to come aboard until Eddie got back," McIntosh told me on Instagram. "It was lots of fun learning the covers and Eddie's parts. We had a chance before he left to sit down together and jam through the songs."

The first show of McIntosh's stint was on February 19th playing the band set for the Gander Jam, a free-flowing session at LanaLou's created by Mike WT Allen and Cordelia Donovan. Occuring twice monthly, the Gander Jam is the spiritual successor to the late Cole Ediger's Hip-Hopalypse at Calabash Bistro.

Cohen had already taken to the Gander Jam like a duck to water. "I've met so many people in the scene through there. That's how I met people like Mike, people like Cordelia and Nikko [Whitworth, bassist] and Max [Ley, drummer], people who are important to me and musicians who I really respect as well. I turned both 19 and 20 going to the Gander Jam, so that was really cool."

Allen was working with Tim Reinert of Infidels Jazz on releasing an album by his band Space Elevator and throwing a November release show at the Rickshaw Theatre. Reinert first learned of Chopping Spree through Allen; however, he told me via email, his "phone was blowing up about them not long after" regardless. Chopping Spree would later open for Space Elevator at the Rickshaw. (My disclosure: though I no longer do client work for Infidels as of 2026, I did throughout all of 2025.)

Reinert also booked Chopping Spree for an October 16th Infidels show at Hero's Welcome, where they would sell out two sets with no opening act or support. However, the band would have to cover some ground before they got there. At Grey Lab on March 24th, Chopping Spree supported the American math-rock band Stereosity alongside Pseudovision and Girlsnails. That night, Chen and the band befriended LA-based drummer and sound engineer Julian Tallman-Rogantini, who later mixed and mastered Anemoia.

Back at Grey Lab on June 18th, Chopping Spree shared a bill with the indie-rock band Lizzy Dissolved and the now-defunct jazz-pop band Ramen Fog. By this time, Naranjo's absence was shaping what they played, encouraging them to put off debuting new material.

"That was a interesting period for the band," Young said, "because it was getting to the point where Eddie had been gone for a good amount of time. We made an agreement between us that we didn't want to write a lot of new music while he was gone. We want it to always be really collaborative, and we always want to work together."

Fortunately, Leclerc and McIntosh hit it off as a bass-drums duo. "After the first rehearsal with [Leclerc], it felt like we had been playing together for years," McIntosh said.

"It was an interesting experience playing with Colm because it almost... I was more used to him," Leclerc said, noting that he hadn't had much time yet playing with Naranjo. "After six months of playing with Colm, like, yeah, this is how this band feels, and this is how the drummer is, and this is how I'll play with the drummer."

"It never felt like I was there to copy and replace Eddie," McIntosh said. "I was welcomed and appreciated, and [was] another member of the band, while I was there."

McIntosh's final date as interim drummer was the first Infidels Jazz show the band played, but the last one to be booked: "Jazz Fusion Freakout" at the Pearl opposite the Cowboy Bebop Bebop Band on August 10th.

On August 30th, Tyrant Studios presented Chopping Spree; the show was promoted as Naranjo's big return. The band wore distinctive robe costumes and sent out Naranjo on a rookie lap of sorts; he played a drum solo before the other members took the stage.

Leclerc, who ordered the robes they wore at this show, remembers the night fondly for how the band's goofy side came through. "We walked out, we're all in these robes, we're all in our socks, and we're at Tyrant, which is, you know, everyone there is looking pretty nice. These idiots were on stage. So it was fun and it kind of definitely... I think that was probably the moment where the silliness of it all was very cemented. But then we're playing metal arrangements of songs like ‘Spain’ and intermingling that with our own stuff, and it's just all over the place."

At Hero's Welcome – as shown by Thomas James in a story for Gigpit's The Groundhog editorial series – Chopping Spree won over all ages of the jazz scene while providing a place for their current fans and family to witness them in peak form.

"We had our usual group of really close friends who loved it and were up front," Chen said. "We had some parents there who our friends and family invited. We had some Hero’s regular-goers and, like, some older fellows. It was cool to see all of them enjoy the show. It was so special to see rarely any phones in sight and just people enjoying the music."

"We were very... I was a bit nervous," Cohen said. "But then the day before, we get messaged by [Reinert], and he’s like, we're about to sell out, and I'm getting messages, and so we were like, wow. Okay. Yeah, that was a amazing show."

As the months of the calendar turned, I noticed how many Infidels shows Chopping Spree were playing: August at the Pearl, October at Hero's, November opening for Space Elevator, and now two more coming – the release show this weekend, then an opening set for Toronto band The Free Label at the Hollywood Theatre in February. These are on top of other presenters' shows: CITR and Discorder's Shindig 2025, as reported by Jenni Nguyen for The Ubyssey, and a Halloween bill with Empanadas Ilegales and Devours at the Pearl.

I asked Reinert how he felt about the frequency. "It's definitely not my normal way of doing things," he said, "but at the end of the day, listening to what the audience wants usually works out pretty well. It was a bit of a risk, but as soon as I saw the way that the Pearl crowd responded to them, those worries went away."

"Our regular Infidels audiences have really responded well to what the band has been doing, and Chopping Spree has been bringing new audiences to the jazz scene here, which is pretty great. So the relationship feels it's been a win-win for both the band and for us."

"It's been really great to see this band get rewarded for working its ass off to put something new out there."

Chopping Spree's members generally agree on what they imagine each other's roles to be. Everyone cited Young as the numbers guy who handled payouts and often settled with venues. They talked about getting Leclerc involved on an assortment of tasks as he, and they, emerged from a hectic 2025.

"Me personally, I took charge on doing the social media and most of the communications with people," Naranjo said. (He was the first to respond to me.) "And then Junny, who's super out-there, he's definitely a huge extrovert. He takes a lot of charge, just spreading our band, like word of mouth."

"He's just like a ball of energy," Leclerc said about Chen. "He loves that. Yeah, that's his thing, so we just send him off: we tear down his stuff and we’re like, yeah, you go do this thing and get people excited."

"I love bringing the energy to the live shows that we play," Chen said, "because it reciprocates like crazy with the crowd, man. If they can't see that you're having fun, it's hard for them to do the same, you know?"

The band pointed to Cohen as the top compositional instigator, and indeed, the majority of tracks on Anemoia start with his keyboard playing. (He sings a lead vocal on one, too.) But then they sum it up as a collective effort; they deny that the band has any one frontman, they each do bits of business, and they share a bedrock of spending time together as friends.

A band can only rise as high as its members agree to prioritize it. Chopping Spree, through at least three lineup interruptions and recording dates that fell early in their development, wrangled that challenge in outstanding fashion: they all bought in. For more than a year now, everyone decided to make this band priority number one. That's how they ended up on deck for an album release show at the Fox Cabaret, having already been the youth jazz scene's defining band of 2025.