Music, Style & Culture

Chilly Gonzales: There Are No Boundaries

Gonzales certainly doesn’t do things by halves

“You guys know Leslie Feist? I made her.” Chilly Gonzales does not shy away from grandiose statements. Indeed, this is just the kind of egocentrism you’d expect from a man who self-styles himself “the sad musical genius”. As a rapping, piano-playing, Grammy-nominated producer - not to mention renowned electro collaborator and creator of acclaimed indie film Ivory Tower - Gonzales has carved out something of a niche for himself. “The great thing about inventing your own universe, as I have, is that you can control it exactly as you want,” he tells me before his Piano Talk Show at Glasgow’s ABC2, one of only two UK dates on his latest European tour. “I’m not like anybody else. People are reaching for the thesaurus trying to figure out some kind of combination of what I do, trying to get it all in there.”

The reality is that Gonzales can’t be pigeonholed. He just won’t fit. Instead, he’s adopted his own world view, the autocratically termed “Gonzpiration”. It’s a state of mind, he explains, whereby you make your own success by raising reality to meet expectations. Which is exactly what Gonzales did when he broke the Guinness World Record for longest piano solo - a staggering 27 hours. “I had made an album that didn’t really work, and I kind of lost my way. The expectations and reality just weren’t there, so I raised reality up. I wanted to change the subject so that the thing people were talking about wasn’t my weird failure of an album, but this world record. It had to be something extreme.”

Gonzales certainly doesn’t do things by halves. Gonzpiration officially began when unknown musician Jason Charles Beck legally - and somewhat spontaneously - changed his name to Chilly Gonzales. “I was playing in a club in Berlin and this guy said I looked like I should be called Chilly Gonzales. I laughed but then I thought, a Mexican-sounding name is about as far away as you can get from a Hungarian-Jew from Canada. It had come to a point where music wasn’t just a full-time job anymore, it had taken over my life. The name change was a nice way to commit to the transformation, to say, ‘This is who I am now’. I am Chilly Gonzales 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Jason Beck is dead.”

There he goes again with his big, bold statements. Doesn’t that kind of bluntness upset his family? “Y’know, my mother and father created this identity crisis, not me. They made a strategic mistake in naming me. They called me Michelle Andre, a French name, then three days later they changed it. My mother still insists on calling me Jason but my father, whose name is John, calls me up and says, ‘Hey Gonzo, it’s Jonzo’. So that’s how he deals with it.”

Gonzales is not willing to compromise - not for his family, and not for his audience tonight. When a man at the back talks drunkenly to his friend, Chilly stops abruptly: “Excuse me, shut the fuck up. I’m playing.” Later, he asks the crowd, “Do you like rap music?” and gets a murmur in response (most are probably here on the back of Gonzales’ critically-acclaimed Solo Piano record). “You all need to get with it. We live in a rap universe. If you don’t like rap music, you’ll probably hate this, and you’re probably racist,” he says, before launching into ‘The Grudge’, a song about his run-in with rapper Drake. Apparently Drake used Gonzales’ music on a mix-tape but didn’t credit him. When he met him, he was nonchalant about the matter, prompting Gonzales to lament, “It’s so unfair you can get fucked in the anus by someone famous because you’re nameless”.

In ‘Never Stop’, Gonzales accurately refers to himself as “a piano-playing Larry David”. Like Larry, he basks in uncomfortable satire and cringeworthy scenarios. His are stories of a man wronged, and they don’t always make for easy listening. Why, he asks us, is he not better known since ‘Never Stop’ was chosen by Apple to launch the iPad? “People need to associate Chilly Gonzales with the iPad. I AM the iPad,” he says, before shamelessly pulling out an iPad and holding it next to his smiling face, teeth gleaming. He’s just as talented as Larry at making comedy out of misery. Laughter comes thick and fast; the lyric-free piano melodies are the only time the audience get a chance to give their creased-up faces a rest. Gonzales’ anecdotes give the show the feel of a party; we are the guests huddled round the piano, hanging onto his every word. For tonight, Glasgow’s normally grungy ABC2 venue has been transformed into an intimate living room setting with low-lighting and leather sofas. Fittingly, Gonzales saunters onstage wearing a tartan dressing gown and slippers. All that’s missing is a whisky on the rocks perched atop his grand piano - but as Gonzales confides backstage, he finds his relaxation from other means. “I don’t drink. There’s no alcohol in my rider. Just rolling papers. Long ones.”

In his most intense moments Gonzales reminds me of Dr. Terwilliker, the piano-obsessed quasi-dictator in the cult fantasy film The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T. (written by Dr. Seuss - if you haven’t seen it, watch it). Rocking back and forth on the piano stool, his fingers moving faster than the speed of light, he is utterly consumed by his art. But he’s not the only one. Throughout his brief but brilliant set, the crowd are putty in his hands - and my, he knows how to work them. Particularly amusing is the observation - demonstrated on the piano - that the famous beat underlying Dr Dre’s ‘Still D.R.E.’ is in fact a rip-off of the choral bars of Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’. Throwaway moments are opportunities for more entertainment: when a noisy hand-drier from a nearby bathroom cuts through the atmosphere of a heart-felt piano solo, Gonzales pauses and raises his arms into the air, miming along to the sound like a conductor. For his encore, he plays a song by stomping on the keys with his feet.

“I’m an audience-centric guy,” Gonzales tells me. “There’s no point in playing music unless there are people in front of you. The artist pleases himself - he’s a masturbator. The entertainer is a love-maker.” Interestingly, this is the concept behind Gonzales’ film project Ivory Tower, which he wrote and produced, and also stars in (of course) alongside his “musical family” Tiga, Peaches and Feist. “It’s about the battle between purism and selling out, between art and commerce - the question of whether you can make it to the top whilst maintaining your purity. In my opinion, you can’t live in the Ivory Tower of greatness, in the pure artistic zone, because that’s narcissistic. If you really are a pure artist then you literally don’t give a shit. The minute you sign a record deal or do a gig, you’re saying you give a shit - so why then do you act like you don’t give a shit? It’s a mixed message, it’s hypocritical and it’s insulting to your audience. We all know you give a shit. I really give a shit.”

Despite being “musically raped” by Drake (his words, not mine), Gonzales admits that his dream is to collaborate with a rapper. “I would drop everything to go and work with any successful rapper. If PharrelI Williams phoned me up right now and offered me some work, I would cancel the show tonight, no problem.” But what about your beloved audience? “Ha! You see, everything has its price. I just love rap.”

From a classically-trained background, how on earth did Gonzales end up at rap? “I want to be a man of my time, and rap is the only game in town at the moment. Of the music made today, I only listen to rap. What’s great about that style of music is that the people who succeed most are the best. In other genres, the best aren’t at the top. No one thinks that Kings of Leon are better than White Stripes, but Kings of Leon sell more records. It’s confusing: why is the good thing selling less than the mediocre thing? But you go into rap, and it’s Jay-Z, Kanye West, Drake, Lil Wayne at the top of their game, and these guys are the best. Rap is a meritocracy.”

Is the preoccupation with rap a rebellion against classical music, I wonder? “No. If you rebel against something it means you consider it a worthy enemy. I feel pity for classical music. It’s wallowing in a slow, painful death”. I suggest Gonzales takes it upon himself to save it. “Absolutely not. Classical music deserves to die. Sorry, but they have a bad attitude. They think the audience is too stupid to appreciate them, when actually they’re too stupid to see that they’re not interesting anymore. Jazz musicians are the same. They feel threatened and their reaction isn’t to change it, but to make it more conservative.”

And therein lies the issue. Conservatism and Gonzales will never mix. “With my musical talent, the best job for me would probably have been a musical professor, but I saw how they lived and I didn’t like it. Instead I applied the rap method of being a musician to me being a piano player. I called myself a musical genius and I started to enjoy that reputation.”

For Chilly Gonzales, the line between dreams and reality doesn’t exist. There are no boundaries. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

See 'Ivory Tower' at the Glasgow Film Theatre on 26th and 27th February. New single ‘You Can Dance’ is released 28th February.

Chilly Gonzales - You Can Dance (Radio Edit) by Big Dog Media