A 40-year-old man with a disorderly shock of brown hair, wearing a bathrobe and plush slippers walks onstage and seats himself at a grand piano. His name is Chilly Gonzales.
His name and getup might be pageantry, but Gonzales’ music is, simply put, the real deal. And with his piano playing he even lives up to his preferred moniker “musical genius.”
Over the past decade, the eclectic, underground Canadian performer has fronted an alt-rock band, released three rap electro-pop albums (which garnered him a loyal European following), collaborated with artists from Feist and Peaches to Jane Birkin and Charles Aznavour and has now released a second mesmerizing album of original compositions for piano. And the flourish: Gonzales holds the Guinness World Record for longest continuous piano concert (27 hours).
He’s a hard one to pin down, this rapping piano virtuoso, but as Gonzales — speaking from Europe where he has been based since 1998 — discusses his musical career, two things become clear: First, a lot of structured, deliberate thinking underpins his multifarious creative experimentation. Second, behind the alias and the showmanship, Gonzales (born Jason Charles Beck) is ultimately a musician in a lifelong partnership with the piano.
“My grandfather showed me the piano at around age three, and I was pretty much stuck on it since then,” Gonzales says, which conjures up the image of a toddler in a silk robe tickling the ivories. For the young player, though, there was no need for costume or character — the instrument was cover enough.
“I think it helped me escape from a lot of things I didn’t like, and so it became a reliable place for me to go and get lost in the music.”
As his skills improved, Gonzales’ form of escape came to mean even more.
“I would go and retreat into this world, and then later on I realized that people would essentially reward me for it and, you know, applaud,” he says. “It helped me earn my place in my family and in society.”
Though his home shifted from Montreal to Calgary to Toronto during his childhood, Gonzales retained a fixed residence at the piano bench. After completing his final three years of high school at Crescent School in North Toronto, Gonzales studied music at McGill and then returned to Toronto to forge ahead with his career. The early to mid ’90s Toronto music scene offered him one of those learning experiences that are memorable but not entirely successful.
“I consider my Toronto time really formative,” Gonzales says, “and it really played a huge role in my leaving Canada because I was very frustrated with the Toronto music scene then.”
On paper, things weren’t going badly. His alternative band, Son, signed a three-album deal with Warner Music Canada, and Gonzales slipped seamlessly into the local community, developing strong, lasting ties to fellow up-and-comers Feist, Peaches and Howie Beck — just a few members of his “musical family.”
As a practising artist, though, he felt neither appreciated nor encouraged.
“In the mid-’90s period it was very much the era of indie-rock, and the idea of being an entertainer was really verboten,” explains Gonzales. “You were supposed to be an accidental musician, and deep down I knew I wasn’t an accidental musician. I was a very purposeful musician and had been preparing for it my whole life, so it was hard for me to be in a world where the accidental musicians seemed to have a leg up.”
By the time Son parted ways with its label, Gonzales was ready to overhaul his whole approach to music.
“My time in Toronto signed to Warner was traumatic but very instructive,” he muses. “I was in denial about many of the superficial elements that make up a music career.”
What he needed to do, he figured, was move to Europe and become a rapper — not only in substance, but in style.
“I moved to Berlin in 1998, and I said, ‘OK, it’s about having an image and having a message and standing out from the crowd, and if music itself isn’t enough to differentiate me then I’m going to run headlong into this gig and decide to become larger than life.’ ”
Goodbye Jason Beck; hello Chilly Gonzales.
Back at the turn of the millennium, Canada’s loss was Europe’s gain. Gonzales signed with the independent German label Kitty-Yo (which also signed Peaches, who had transplanted to Berlin as well), and he thrived in the local avant-garde music scene, releasing low-fi hip hop and rap albums. After a few years spent establishing “the Chilly Gonzales brand,” he invited Feist across the pond.
“I brought her over to tour with me as Chilly Gonzales’ foil onstage. In that period, we began to sew the seeds of what became her album Let It Die, which was recorded in Paris around 2002 and 2003.”
The breakout 2004 Feist album was just one of many big-name writing, producing and recording credits that Gonzales has racked up. He calls them his “Where’s Waldo moments — where I end up rubbing up against the mainstream.”
It was during one such mainstream foray that Gonzales brought the piano into his works, which has now become the focal point of his career to date.
“I was in a phase where I was retired from touring, and I was learning about how music was produced in studios in Paris, working with all kinds of French artists like Jane Birkin and Charles Aznavour,” he says. “As a way to have creative venting, I would go off into a different room in the studio, while everyone was having lunch, and noodle on the piano.”
In 2004, that noodling became Solo Piano, an album of ethereal, minimal compositions that outsold all his previous works and earned him frequent comparisons to Erik Satie.
Now, Gonzales is on the road promoting his follow-up work, Solo Piano II, a set of neoclassical pop pieces, that is drawing praise and attention in equal measure. Although his current tour has him playing the part of Chilly Gonzales piano maestro, he is quick to reassure that he is as much a rapper as ever.
“The only way to make something like the piano survive is to approach it as a rapper. Without putting too fine a point on it, I’m sampling the feeling you would get from a chord progression in a Ravel piece, using the feeling of Erik Satie here, the feeling of Chopin there, the flourish that would be in a baroque piece. So I approach everything as a rapper, and that’s how my piano music ends up coming off a bit more acceptable than your average New Age tinkler or your jazz pianist or a classical guy.”