Chilly Gonzales

NEVER STOP

As a musical genius, myth builder, composer, educator, record breaker and vaudevillian performer, if there is one common element that pervades the music of Chilly Gonzales, it is sheer tenacity. Born Jason Beck, at 46 years old and with countless records and collaborations in his wake, he still navigates music and performance like it’s some poorly assembled toy to be stripped down to its most basic elements and rearranged into new forms that are either formally crude or sublime. Even when Gonzales is at his most cartoonishly zany, there’s an unmistakable glimmer of humanity winking through the provocation.

1972 to 1994

Born into a family of Montreal-based Ashkenazi Jews, Jason Beck’s music education begins at an early age. While older brother and future film composer Christophe takes piano lessons, at age 3, Beck’s grandfather sits him at the family piano in an attempt to endear him to what Beck will describe, in a 2016 Red Bull Music Academy lecture, as “some outdated ideas about European superiority,” preaching composers like Mozart as gods that lord above low American culture. MTV and MuchMusic awaken the Beck brothers to the incendiary appeal of pop music.

After Beck’s family moves to Toronto, Jason and Christophe attend Crescent School, an independent elementary and secondary boys school Beck describes in a 2015 CBC Music interview as having “a progressive music department.”

As he’ll recount in a 2011 interview with The Word, around the same time, he became conscious “that I had no taste” and “I’d listen to a lot of musician-y music like classical and jazz, and analyze the structures, just like a toy. And I wasn’t afraid to break the toy and go on to another one.”

Beck is accepted into McGill University’s music composition program, and returns to Montreal studying classical academics before switching to jazz performance. He co-authors several musicals with his brother and starts performing in piano bars.

1995 to 1998

Beck’s songwriting aspirations are blessed with industry validation and promptly squashed. After forming Son with Dave Szigeti, Anthony Mitchell and Simon Craig, Beck records and self-produces a debut called Thriller. Like the bastard love child of Faith No More and Ben Folds Five, it’s a funkinflected burst of alternative soft rock, and it thrusts the group into a major label bidding war for post-grunge profitability. Steve Jordan, a budding Warner Music Canada A&R exec, makes Son his first signing; the label reissues Thriller.

At an informal, weed-fuelled basement jam session with Dominic Salole and Spin the Susan’s Rebecca Gould, Beck meets Merrill Nisker, who’d recently released an album called Fancypants Hoodlum.

“I said to [Gould], ‘Let’s start an all-girl band,’ and she said to me, ‘Well, my next-door neighbour is really talented and he’s got rehearsal space in his basement and I have a crush on this guy, and I’d like to invite him also, just come and jam with us,’” Nisker will tell Red Bull Music Academy in a 2016 instalment of animated series The Junction. “I was really angry about it, because I wanted an all-girl band. So I walked in the room and I don’t even think I said hi. We just started to yell things and sing things at each other that were obviously coming from our musical frustration, our sexual frustration.”

The group form the Shit — a sexed-up no-wave quartet that provokes most of its members to adopt pseudonyms: Beck becomes Chilly Gonzales, Gould becomes Sticky Henderson, Nisker becomes Peaches and Salole becomes Mocky, although Gonzales continues to perform as Son Beck with Son.

After Craig and Mitchell depart Son, Gonzales and Szigeti set about recording a new album in a fully equipped L.A. recording studio with Christophe Beck. A gloomy, downtempo concept record titled Wolfstein, it’s a stylistic about-face, the story of a man who begins transforming into a wolf after hitting one with his car. It’s far from the cash harbinger Warner saw in Thriller, and receives negligible promotional support upon its 1997 release.

Sticky and Gonzales start dating; they split up, and so do the Shit, but Peaches and Gonzales continue in another short-lived group with guitarist Szigeti (later Taylor Savvy) called Feedom. Around this time, Gonzales meets Leslie Feist through Dan Kurtz, of Noah’s Arkweld, and connects her with Peaches, her future collaborator and roommate.

After Warner reluctantly releases Wolfstein, Beck and Peaches tour Europe for two months. In Stuart Berman’s Broken Social Scene history This Book Is Broken, Feist explains, “they literally backpacked through Europe. But in their backpack, Gonzo had a CDJ [turntable-style CD player] and a couple of CD folders with Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, Kraftwerk — all this amazing, different stuff — and Peaches had the MC505 Groovebox, and I don’t think at that point she had made a beat yet. They’d arrive in a city, look for some hipsters, and say, ‘Hey, what’s a really cool bar you guys hang out at?’ They’d go there and play in the corner — these three-hour noise sculptures, free-form stuff. When they played in Berlin, they played the Kitty-Yo bar — they didn’t know Kitty-Yo was also a label. This guy Raik Hölzel basically signs Gonzo on the spot.”

Son make demos for a third album, but it is never released and Warner drops the band. In 2013, Gonzales will tell The Globe and Mail the experience left him “traumatized.”

1999 to 2004

Beck moves to Berlin and becomes Chilly Gonzales full time. In a 2011 interview with The Word, he’ll explain that, “One of the biggest problems was that I felt I had to suppress a lot of real character traits, like my egomania, the part of me

that could seem arrogant but is really just a precise confidence in one certain thing I can do. I ended up acting like all the other indie rockers, and I hated myself for doing so. Saying whatever everyone else says, like ‘you know, I do what I do for myself and if everyone likes it, it’s a bonus’ — stuff I don’t believe now and didn’t believe back then. A Hungarian Jew with a Cuban name is impossible, in a way, but I like the impossibility of it.”

Shortly after she creates a six-track EP called Lovertits, Peaches joins Gonzo in Berlin and, after landing a one-night gig, gets signed to Kitty-Yo. Gonzales enlists Peaches to help him record a single, and promptly releases “Let’s Groove Again,” a nocturnal dance floor track that shuffles between dark, distorted bass and narcotic drifts, later appearing on his 1999 O.P. Original Prankster EP and his fulllength debut Gonzales Über Alles in 2000.

Gonzales stages a press conference announcing his plan to “relinquish [his] Canadianness” and campaign for President of the Berlin Underground, simultaneously challenging Berlin techno figure Alec Empire to run in opposition, at government press headquarters the Bundespresshaus. Flanked by a team of supporters, over the course of the conference, an audience of press and the general public witness Gonzales beatboxing through his opposition’s rebuttal, endure an English-to-(terrible)-Franco-Denglisch translation of Gonzales’s question period responses from “campaign manager” Mocky, and follow Gonzales out to a manic piano solo in the building’s atrium while the press walk out. He campaigns harder on 2002’s Presidential Suite

while declaring “I wanna be loved and hated in equal amounts.”

In 2002, Pulp invite Chilly Gonzales to play with them at the Eden Project in Cornwall and Gonzo meets Jarvis Cocker backstage. In a 2015 interview with Independent, Gonzales will reflect on the encounter: “Once in a while, I go insane on stage — and that night, I pulled one of those tantrums, screaming and complaining and having a meltdown, partly for the enjoyment of the audience. I also had a bunch of rappers from east London hanging out with me; after I left, they stayed on in my backstage area and trashed it completely before trashing Pulp’s tour van. And this was the first time he was getting to know me! For the next few months I ended up chasing Jarvis around, trying to apologize.”

Back in Toronto, Feist self-produces seven songs she dubs The Red Demos, then departs to tour Europe with Chilly Gonzales. They begin recording new versions of her Red Demos

at Studios Ferber in Paris. In May 2004, Feist releases the results on Let It Die, earning three Juno Award nominations in 2005 and another in 2006. Chilly Gonzales is credited for arranging the majority of the tracks, as well as co-writing “Gatekeeper,” “One Evening” and “Leisure Suite,” and co-producing the album alongside Renaud Letang.

Recordings of Gonzo’s instrumental piano sessions from Studios Ferber are released as

Solo Piano, and its “16 piano themes for left hand accompaniment and right hand melody” receive much acclaim as well as comparisons to the works of Erik Satie. It remains the bestselling work in his entire catalogue.

Out of nowhere, Chilly Gonzales announces his retirement. In a 2010 interview with

Dummy, Gonzo will say “It was a fun part to play — the retiring entertainer. I set up a roast. I brought Peaches, Mocky, Feist — my crew from that time. There was a massive picture of me. We all sat around the table and they gave me a roasting. I then fled and moved to Paris. A new place to take advantage of — a clean break! Oh, and I’m still retired.”

“Once in a while, I go insane on stage — I pulled one of those tantrums, screaming and having a meltdown, partly for the enjoyment of the audience.”

2005 to 2007

In June 2005, he appears on Jamie Lidell’s Multiply, produced by Mocky, and the next year he sets up permanent residence in Paris and helps Feist produce 2007’s The Reminder, alongside Mocky, Letang and Ben Mink. It is nominated for four Grammy Awards and wins five Junos.

2008

In early 2008, Gonzales signs to Mercury Records; that spring, Soft Power marks a return to the soft rock direction of Son’s Thriller without the alt-rock, all filtered through Bee Gees and Billy Joel. It receives some positive reviews, but it is commercially rejected; Chilly Gonzales’s official website dubs it “The misunderstood masterpiece.” In a 2011 interview with The Word, Gonzales will say that “After the Soft Power feeling of dilution, it was about re-establishing the two most important aspects of me: musical genius and crazy competitive guy.”

2009

Gonzo announces an effort to break the world record for longest solo artist performance, explaining, “I believe music is part art, part athletics and this 27-hour concert will demonstrate both aspects.” Between the hours of 11:30 p.m. on Saturday May 16 and 3 a.m. on Monday May 18, Gonzales performs for 27 hours, three minutes, and 44 seconds at the Ciné 13 Théâtre in Paris, France, defeating the 2008 record set by Prasanna Gudi in India (26 hours, 12 minutes). Documented and adjudicated by an official Guinness judge, Gonzales performs some 300 songs, including originals, film scores and covers of Britney Spears and the Bee Gees. He’s allowed 30-second pauses between each song and a 15-minute break after each three-hour set. According to The Guardian, “Occasionally, Gonzales peppered things up — getting a shave, changing in and out of pyjamas and eating a bowl of cereal while he played.”

In a 2011 interview with The Word, Gonzales will say, “There were some hallucinations as of hour 24, forgetting where I was. I wanted to go one hour further than what I had announced. I thought that would be cool — that when I got to 27 and everyone was going crazy, I could still continue. I couldn’t though. My hands stopped playing by themselves.”

Drake samples “The Tourist” from Gonzo’s Solo Piano on “Outro” on his mixtape So Far Gone, but Gonzo is unaware until he’s asked about it in a November interview with Corduroy. “Really? Drake sampled me? I don’t know how I feel about that. I guess Canadians should be proud that they finally have a credible hip-hop personality, but I’m sorry, I’m just not a fan.”

2010

Gonzales and Feist hole up in a residential recording studio in the north-west Parisian suburb of La Frette-sur-Seine to record the followup to Feist’s The Reminder; Metals will be released in 2012. Gonzales appears as a piano stand-in for Eric Elmosnino in the title role of Serge Gainsbourg biopic Gainsbourg ( Vie héroïque), as well as in the lead role of Adam Traynor’s Ivory Tower, a chess comedy about two brothers, arranged around Chilly Gonzales’s album of the same name.

2011

Gonzales engages Drake regarding his use of “The Tourist,” and the two strike up a correspondence. Gonzo gets a call to perform alongside Drake at the 2011 Junos. The two open the gala’s broadcast with a skit incorporating clips from Snow’s “Informer” and Dolores Claman’s Hockey Night in Canada theme while addressing audience members like Shania Twain and Classified through song. Ivory Tower is also nominated for Best Electronic Album.

Following the broadcast, Drake invites Gonzales to come by the studio, and plays him material from an in-progress Take Care. Gonzales ends up recording the piano outro for “Marvin’s Room.”

Gonzales unleashes The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales, featuring arrangements by his brother Christophe; at the time, Gonzales claims it to be “the first-ever all-orchestral rap album,” calling it his “professional confessional,” revealing more of himself on these monologues than ever before.

2012 to 2013

After spending ten days alone in Paris’s Studio Pigalle, Gonzales unveils Solo Piano II, a 14-track album consisting of songs that made a short list from approximately 100 melodies written in past eight years. It is nominated for the 2013 Polaris Music Prize — an annual merit-based award for best Canadian album co-founded in 2006 by Steve Jordan (the former A&R executive who signed Son). Feist’s Metals takes home the prize.

Gonzales appears twice on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, providing keyboards on “Give Life Back to Music” and piano on “Within,” for which he also receives a writing credit — and subsequently, a 2014 Album of the Year Grammy Award.

2014 to 2018

In 2014 he releases Re-Introduction Etudes — an instructional collection of 24 songs for lapsed piano students. Together with radio station WDR 1Live, he begins a series of YouTube videos exploring the music theory underlying the success of contemporary pop hits under the title Pop Music Masterclass. In 2015, he anchors documentaries on “Classical Connections” (BBC) and “The History of Music” (Arte), and he launches a radio essay show called Music’s Cool on Apple Music Beats 1, an opportunity to go deep on the careers of pop stars and past collaborators.

On June 1, 2018, Gonzales announces the final instalment in his trilogy; Solo Piano III will arrive September 7. In a press release, Gonzales writes that the album arrives at “a more problematic inflection point,” describing the conclusion as “a mostly happy ending in C major, but there is more dissonance, tension and ambiguity along the way... The musical purity of Solo Piano III is not an antidote for our times, it is a reflection of all the beauty and ugliness around us.”