Some facts about Chilly Gonzales: the self-proclaimed musical genius isn’t overly precious about his place in the world. He knows most people don’t have a clue who he is: a classically trained pianist with a subversive twist, as evidenced by his most recent album, Solo Piano II. He's Feist’s longtime friend and collaborator, pushing her outside the lines. He's the piano man in Drake's hip-hop club hits. And Gonzales is comfortable with this cult following — for now.
But scratch at the surface of all the things that make him “strange” and you’ll find a complex and charismatic figure who just wants to give classical music a Rap 101 makeover. Totally normal, right? Over Skype, Gonzales discusses false virtuosity, classical robots and hip-hop's warm embrace.
The last time I saw you play, I was astounded. I’ve never seen anyone interact with the piano like that.
I’m trying to be a man of my time on the piano and bring it into our modern era and treat it as the modern piece of iconography that it deserves to be treated, and mistreated as.
I like the concept of the mistreating as well. Your brain seems to gather all of these components, but then you take them apart as well.
I do have a bit of a building block approach. When I call myself a musical genius, it’s also to say that I’m not particularly involved in the idea of taste. I hear a style of music and I hear what makes it that style. I hear what kind of chords and progressions, what kinds of rhythmic combination, what kinds of attitudes make it in a certain way so that it sounds like jazz, so that it sounds like bossa nova or it sounds like baroque or it sounds like electronic music or it sounds like rap. I don’t really see a taste difference.
When people say, "Wow, you go from style-to-style," well, that’s just because I see them all as equally valid in a way and I don’t try to break down the borders between styles. On the contrary, it’s by respecting them and sometimes by pointing out the rules that make them what they are, that render them ridiculous. I’m perhaps making fun of them, but never in a million years would I be interested or capable of breaking down the barriers between styles. They exist for a reason. And I not only respect those rules, but I disrespect those rules.
I’ve read interviews with you where you refer to classical music as condescending. Do you think it’s actually the music, or the audiences who have adopted it as upper crust and snobby?
No, it’s the artists, the people who play it. It’s not the music or the audience. The audience is always innocent. The music itself is dope. The music is fantastic! I listen to classical music almost non-stop, with a healthy dose of rap put in there, but other than that, I’m pretty much only listening to European classical music from 1750–1920.
The problem is with the people who play it. They’re not really condescending. That’s just a pose. I went to music school at McGill, so I know a lot of these people. I’m not going to paint them all with one brush, but a large number of them are like scared little children who feel like the audience has rejected them. As happens when you have a crush on someone, and you realize they’re not into you, you then want to act like you weren’t into them to save yourself the embarrassment of having invested yourself and that you didn’t succeed in your goal of getting that person to crush back on you.
That’s what happened: the audience lost interest and they kept saying, "Oh, well, we don’t need the audience. They have bad taste. All they like is the Lady Gaga, all they like is the South Park, all they like is the Rick Ross."
I think you can respect the tradition of classical music and, at the same time, respect where people are at today. I want to be a man of my time. It was clear to me that I would not be happy staying in the ivory tower forever and saying, "Oh, the audience is wrong." The audience is right, the classical musicians are wrong. And that’s why they have to live on government money and have no audience. Their fault.
Is there an element of madman in your genius?
Not really. I’m pretty conservative, you know. I take the rules of music pretty seriously as I mentioned, I’m not really out to bust any barriers. I’m just out to present an example of a modern-day entertainer. I’m very audience-oriented, so I guess in that way I’m very conservative. I really do believe the audience is always right, and the few missteps I’ve made in my career I blame entirely on myself. I could never say, "Oh, I was misunderstood." It’s all on the artist.
No, I don’t see myself as a madman at all. I’m able to get to a very intense place personally onstage, which some people could think is a bit of a madman, but it’s a switch I can slowly turn on and wait for the music to reach a kind of tipping point and then I’m kind of there.
I think a lot of people consider you a rebel. They can see the talent, but they don’t know what to do with you.
You know, I’m called Chilly Gonzales, I wear a bathrobe and slippers onstage, I have a Guinness World Record for playing 27 hours. I understand that a lot of those elements, right there without any information, it would be tempting to just say, "Oh, he’s crazy!" In one sense I’m trying to differentiate myself from the world that I’m in, but my secret is that I just took a page out of the rapper’s handbook and applied it to non-rap music.
Everything I just described, it’s no big deal in the rap world. Slightly ridiculous clothes that become your trademark, doing ridiculous things to brand yourself in a certain way; my entire approach to my career is basically Rap 101. It just happens I’m in the world of classic or jazz or indie rock or electronic, all of which are decidedly non-rap in their approach, where ambition is taboo and drawing attention to yourself is somehow considered a no-no, and authenticity is supposedly something you spell with a capital "A."
Has the rap world embraced you?
Absolutely! I’ve been pretty regularly working with the great Canadian singer and rapper Drake, who used some of my music on a mixtape of his several years ago. And later on we actually ended up getting into the studio with him on the opening routine of when he hosted the Junos. Working with him has been a real honour, because he’s a truly NBA-level rapper, I would say.
It confirmed everything I thought about the rap world: it’s very serious, musically speaking. To work with Drake is not to suddenly find one’s self in the middle of a rap video. It’s just as serious and musical and musically ambitious as working with any of the other singers or instrumentalists I’ve worked with ... I have some songs in the fire right now potentially for his next album, and I think it’s been great to see the hip-hop heads showing up at my concerts in North America. I think they understand that when I play the piano there is kind of a constant rap beat playing in my mind.
You’ve talked about creating “false virtuosity,” like an actor always creating his own parts, such as Woody Allen. But doesn’t that defeat the mythology you’ve built around yourself?
But that is being a virtuoso, my dear! That’s the point. When Chopin wrote for himself, he was doing what I did. Only people got confused and thought, "Oh! Let’s become the Chopin virtuoso!" But the lesson of Chopin shouldn’t have been to create an army of Chopin clones who play exactly how he did. I feel very sorry for the classical pianists who don’t understand Chopin was an improviser and embodied music in the way that when you watch Prince or Stevie Wonder and musicians like that, the music just comes out of them.
With these classical guys, a lot of the times they forget that to be a complete musician, you should compose, you should improvise, you should embellish, you should edit, you should personalize. Every virtuoso is, in a sense, a false virtuoso, because they’re only writing for themselves. No one questions whether Woody Allen is a good writer or not. You can criticize him over time for maybe repeating some of his themes, and that’s a whole different story.
I’d like to think my technique will evolve and even between the two Solo Piano albums, what I was trying to do was not repeat myself too much. I think songs like “White Keys” and “Train of Thought,” they just couldn’t have existed on the first album. If I were suddenly able to play everybody’s technique, it would take me so much time I would lose my own voice. Which is what happens to a lot of those robotic classical virtuosi. I’m proud of the fact that I’m a personalized virtuoso. If you want to call that false or not, well, I might have been speaking for effect, but you want to have your own personal voice.
I think Feist is a great example of a songwriter where we recognize a lot of recurring themes in her lyrics, nature themes, a lot of the same kinds of melodies, vocal reaches, melodic jumps, but it evolves, you know, and she becomes more and more like herself, and that’s the definition of a virtuoso, I think.
"White Keys" from Solo Piano II:
How did the 27-hour Guinness World Records performance change the conversation about you as a musician?
Luckily that was the positive trauma I needed at the time. I made a pretty strategic error on an album called Soft Power, where I fooled myself into thinking singing would be an appropriate form of expression for me, which I don’t think it is. Verbal expression is important to me, which is why I rap, and emotion expression is important to me, which is why I compose instrumental music, but unfortunately singing is not what I was put on this musical earth to do.
With the Guinness performance, I felt like I’d jumped the shark, as they say in the TV business, and I needed to remind myself and my audience of what are the real core tenets of what I do. That’s about musical genius, competition, extreme spectacle, and so I was lucky to think of that idea.... We had almost half-a-million people and we became the second-biggest trending topic on Twitter, and it really woke me up to how ... there is a place for Chilly Gonzales doing what he does best. I don’t have to twist myself into all sorts of knots and try to be a pop singer that I’m clearly not destined to be.
That was the moment I started my label. That was the moment I put the Chilly back into my name. And that was the moment I decided to become more and more like myself, and not to soften the rough edges, but sharpen them.
Chilly Gonzales brings his Solo Piano II tour to Canada, beginning Nov. 5 at the Rio Theatre in Vancouver. You can find full tour information on CBC Music.
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