Gonzales (musician)
Encyclopedia
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
musician currently residing in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. Though best known for his first MC
Master of Ceremonies
A Master of Ceremonies , or compere, is the host of a staged event or similar performance.An MC usually presents performers, speaks to the audience, and generally keeps the event moving....
and electro albums, he is also a pianist, producer, and songwriter.
He regularly collaborates with the Canadian musicians Feist
Leslie Feist
Leslie Feist , known professionally as simply Feist, is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, both as a solo artist and as a member of the indie rock group Broken Social Scene....
, Peaches
Peaches (musician)
Merrill Beth Nisker , better known by her stage name Peaches, is a Canadian electronic musician and performance artist who lives in Berlin, Germany. Her songs are noted for disregarding traditional gender norms and their use of sexually explicit lyrics...
and Mocky
Mocky
Mocky is a Somali-Canadian singer, music producer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and composer.-Biography:Mocky was born Dominic Salole in Saskatchewan, Canada. He later moved to Ottawa and Toronto, and then to London, Amsterdam and Berlin. His father is of Somali descent, but was born in...
. Additionally, he has collaborated with Jamie Lidell
Jamie Lidell
Jamie Lidell is an English musician and soul singer living in Nashville, United States...
on the albums Multiply and Compass
Compass (album)
Compass is a 2010 album by Jamie Lidell, released May 18. It is produced by Lidell and features additional production by Beck, Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor, Lindsey Rome and Robbie Lackritz.-Track listing:Written by Jamie Lidell...
, Buck 65
Buck 65
Richard Terfry , who uses the stage name Buck 65, is a Canadian experimental artist, MC and turntablist. Underpinned by an extensive background in abstract hip hop, his more recent music has extensively incorporated blues, country, rock, folk and avant garde influences.Terfry is also a radio host,...
on the album Secret House Against the World
Secret House against the World
Secret House Against the World is an album by Buck 65 released in July 2005. It was produced with Graeme Campbell and Charles Austin, who worked extensively on Talkin' Honky Blues and the Big Rig soundtrack with Terfry....
, and performed with Drake
Drake (entertainer)
Aubrey Drake Graham , who records under the mononym Drake, is a Canadian recording artist and actor. He originally became known for playing Jimmy Brooks on the television series Degrassi: The Next Generation....
at the 2011 Juno Awards. According to The New Yorker, "when Gonzales released an album called 'Presidential Suite', Feist accompanied him on tour around Europe and Australia."
Biography
Gonzales was born on March 20, 1972 and began teaching himself pianoPiano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
at age three, when his older brother Chris
Christophe Beck
Christophe Beck , also credited as Chris Beck, is a Canadian television and film score composer....
began taking lessons. He was later classically trained as a pianist at McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
, where he began both his composing career, co-authoring several musicals with his brother, and his performing career, as a jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
virtuoso
Virtuoso
A virtuoso is an individual who possesses outstanding technical ability in the fine arts, at singing or playing a musical instrument. The plural form is either virtuosi or the Anglicisation, virtuosos, and the feminine form sometimes used is virtuosa...
.
In the 1990s, he embarked on a pop
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
career as the leader of the alternative rock
Alternative rock
Alternative rock is a genre of rock music and a term used to describe a diverse musical movement that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular by the 1990s...
band Son
Son (band)
Son was a Canadian alternative rock band in the 1990s. The band included Jason Beck, Dominic Salole and Dave Szigeti.- Discography :*Thriller - Warner Bros. Records, 1996*Filler - EP, 1997*Wolfstein - Warner Bros. Records, 1998- Notes :...
. Son was signed to a three-album deal with Warner Music Canada in 1995, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records
Warner Bros. Records
Warner Bros. Records Inc. is an American record label. It was the foundation label of the present-day Warner Music Group, and now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of that corporation. It maintains a close relationship with its former parent, Warner Bros. Pictures, although the two companies...
. The first release, the Prince
Prince (musician)
Prince Rogers Nelson , often known simply as Prince, is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Prince has produced ten platinum albums and thirty Top 40 singles during his career. Prince founded his own recording studio and label; writing, self-producing and playing most, or all, of...
/Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello , born Declan Patrick MacManus, is an English singer-songwriter. He came to prominence as an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s and later became associated with the punk/New Wave genre. Steeped in word play, the vocabulary of Costello's lyrics is broader...
-flavored LP Thriller, was moderately successful, spawning one single that received heavy radio airplay ("Pick up the Phone") and leading to several opening gigs for the Barenaked Ladies
Barenaked Ladies
Barenaked Ladies is a Canadian alternative rock band. The band is currently composed of Jim Creeggan, Kevin Hearn, Ed Robertson, and Tyler Stewart. Barenaked Ladies formed in 1988 in Scarborough, Ontario, then a suburban municipality outside the City of Toronto...
. While the album's production values were limited (Warner Bros. simply released the band's hastily recorded demo
Demo (music)
A demo version or demo of a song is one recorded for reference rather than for release. A demo is a way for a musician to approximate their ideas on tape or disc, and provide an example of those ideas to record labels, producers or other artists...
), it showcased Beck's gift for melody
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...
, and his talent as a self-taught producer
Record producer
A record producer is an individual working within the music industry, whose job is to oversee and manage the recording of an artist's music...
.
The latter was even more in evidence with Son's second release, Wolfstein
Wolfstein
Wolfstein is a small town in the district of Kusel, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is situated on the river Lauter, approx. 23 km north-east of Kusel, and 20 km north-west of Kaiserslautern....
, recorded at a fully equipped studio in LA with the assistance of Chris Beck, then on his way to becoming an Emmy-award winning soundtrack
Soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...
composer. Nominally a concept album
Concept album
In music, a concept album is an album that is "unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative, or lyrical." Commonly, concept albums tend to incorporate preconceived musical or lyrical ideas rather than being improvised or composed in the studio, with all songs contributing...
about a man who starts turning into a wolf after hitting one with his car, it featured a darker, more complex sensibility than its predecessor, and marked Gonzales's arrival as a musical innovator in his own right.
As far as Warner Bros. was concerned, however, the album represented too radical a change in direction, and suffered from a dearth of singles acceptable to the Canadian pop charts—perhaps the most upbeat, catchy tune on the album had the radio-unfriendly title, "Making a Jew Cry". The label gave little promotional support to the release, and parted ways with the band soon after. (While remaining largely silent on the experience in interviews, Gonzales did recount part of his Warner Bros. experience in "Candy", the opening track to his 2000 album, The Entertainist.)
Recognising that pop success had as much to do with a good press
News media
The news media are those elements of the mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public or a target public.These include print media , broadcast news , and more recently the Internet .-Etymology:A medium is a carrier of something...
angle as musical talent, Gonzales decamped to Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
in 1999, where he decided his Jewish heritage could give him a marketing
Marketing
Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
edge. However, he spoke no German. He adopted the 'Chilly Gonzales' moniker after reportedly being hailed as such by a stranger in the street, and developed this into his popular stage persona
Persona
A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek πρόσωπον...
as a Jewish supervillain MC. Of moving away from Canada, what Gonzales said in an interview was: “My experiences in Canada had been disappointing, because I hadn’t really stepped up on the extra-musical elements of music making."
With this change in image came another major change in Gonzales's musical style. His three albums on the German Kitty-yo
Kitty-Yo
Kitty-Yo is a German record label specializing in quirky pop and electronica. It was founded in 1994 in Berlin following the creation of an independent zine of the same name...
label were largely built around rap
Rapping
Rapping refers to "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". The art form can be broken down into different components, as in the book How to Rap where it is separated into “content”, “flow” , and “delivery”...
, though his skills as a keyboardist shone through on a series of interspersed instrumental
Instrumental
An instrumental is a musical composition or recording without lyrics or singing, although it might include some non-articulate vocal input; the music is primarily or exclusively produced by musical instruments....
tracks. European critics and audiences were more receptive to the eclectic and experimental nature of Gonzales's output. His first Kitty-yo single, "Let's Groove Again", became an immediate dancefloor hit upon its 1999 release. (It was later used in a BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
promotional trailer for their new TV programme The Restaurant
The Restaurant (UK TV Series)
The Restaurant was a British reality television series in which a group of couples competed for the chance to set up a restaurant financially backed and personally supported by French chef Raymond Blanc. The winning couple were given their own restaurant to run...
aired in 2007.) Gonzales became a fixture in both nightclubs and on the summer pop festival circuit.
In 2004 the performer revealed a new face to the world through an album entirely made up of instrumental material, "Solo Piano". Highly acclaimed by public and critics alike, it drew immediate comparisons to the work of Erik Satie
Erik Satie
Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde...
and so attracted a new global audience to his work. "Solo Piano" has been released in several countries, and remains Gonzales's best-selling album to date.
In the meantime Gonzales continued to develop as a producer and songwriter for other artists, collaborating on singles and albums with Peaches
Peaches (musician)
Merrill Beth Nisker , better known by her stage name Peaches, is a Canadian electronic musician and performance artist who lives in Berlin, Germany. Her songs are noted for disregarding traditional gender norms and their use of sexually explicit lyrics...
, renowned chanteuse Jane Birkin
Jane Birkin
Jane Mallory Birkin, OBE is an English-born actress and singer who lives in France. In recent years she has written her own album, directed a film and become an outspoken proponent of democracy in Burma.- Early life :...
and budding indie star Leslie Feist
Leslie Feist
Leslie Feist , known professionally as simply Feist, is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, both as a solo artist and as a member of the indie rock group Broken Social Scene....
. The output of the latter collaboration—Feist's 2003 album, "Let It Die
Let It Die
-Personnel:* Gonzales – piano, various instruments* Feist – guitar, vocals* Julien Chirol – trombone* Frédéric Coudere – saxophone-Album:...
"-- became a bestseller, won critical acclaim and industry awards, and became the basis for her breakthrough as a mainstream pop
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
artist. Gonzales returned as a key contributor on Feist's 2007 album, "The Reminder", which was nominated for a Grammy and won a Juno Award
Juno Award
The Juno Awards are presented annually to Canadian musical artists and bands to acknowledge their artistic and technical achievements in all aspects of music...
.
In early 2008 he announced he was going back to the studio as a singer in his own right, and had re-signed with a major label, Mercury Records
Mercury Records
Mercury Records is a record label operating as a standalone company in the UK and as part of the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group in the US; both are subsidiaries of Universal Music Group. There is also a Mercury Records in Australia, which is a local artist and repertoire division of Universal...
. On April 7 Soft Power was released. While maintaining a typically eclectic mix of styles, Soft Power was in some ways a stylistic return for Gonzales—his most purely pop
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
recording since Thriller, though with a sound inspired more by the seventies hits of such artists as the Bee Gees
Bee Gees
The Bee Gees are a musical group that originally comprised three brothers: Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb. The trio was successful for most of their 40-plus years of recording music, but they had two distinct periods of exceptional success: as a pop act in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and as a...
and Billy Joel
Billy Joel
William Martin "Billy" Joel is an American musician and pianist, singer-songwriter, and classical composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man", in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to...
. Of his choice to sing on this album, Gonzales said in an interview, “I was afraid of doing an album with a bunch of guests, as so many people could’ve expected. I didn’t want to open up my Rolodex and get everyone to sing for me. I thought, ‘No, I want to put myself in more of a danger zone.’” Gonzales said in an interview that he works in the Bee Gees style of music: "There's a Bee Gees cover on Feist's album Let it Die "Inside and Out
Inside and Out
"Inside and Out" is a single released in 2005 by Canadian singer Feist. It is the third single from her 2004 album Let It Die. The song is a cover of the Bee Gees' 1979 hit "Love You Inside Out".-Song information:...
" which I'm sort of responsible, for better or worse, for putting on that album."
Apart from his solo career, he is also a member of the Berlin-based hip-hop band Puppetmastaz.
On May 18, 2009, at the Ciné 13 Théâtre , Paris, he broke a world record
World record
A world record is usually the best global performance ever recorded and verified in a specific skill or sport. The book Guinness World Records collates and publishes notable records of all types, from first and best to worst human achievements, to extremes in the natural world and beyond...
for the longest solo-artist performance with a total time of 27 hours, 3 minutes and 44 seconds, breaking a record set by Prasanna Gudi.
On September 25, 2009, he challenged singer/songwriter/fellow pianist Andrew W.K.
Andrew W.K.
Andrew W.K. is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, entertainer, and motivational speaker. He is the host of the television series Destroy Build Destroy.-Early life & career:Andrew Wilkes-Krier was born in Stanford, California, and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan...
to a piano battle at Joe's Pub in New York City. After twenty minutes of back and forth, Chilly finally threw a gold necklace at Andrew, distracting him long enough to claim victory. A rematch has been talked about but not yet organized.
He may be most famously known by his song "Never Stop" on his 2010 album which the opening piano tune was featured on the original Apple Inc.'s iPad commercials. Apple even went as far to make an electric guitar version .
Discography
- Let's Groove Again - Single, 1999
- O.P. Original Prankster - (EP), 1999
- Gonzales Über Alles - Kitty-YoKitty-YoKitty-Yo is a German record label specializing in quirky pop and electronica. It was founded in 1994 in Berlin following the creation of an independent zine of the same name...
, 2000 - The Entertainist - Kitty-Yo, 2000 (under the name "Chilly Gonzales")
- Presidential Suite - Kitty-Yo, 2002
- Z - Kitty-Yo, 2003
- Solo Piano - No Format!No Format!No Format! is an independent record label based in Paris and created in 2004.The label seeks to invest in original musical projects, be them instrumental or vocal, and has built up a catalogue of 18 works since its inception...
, 2004 - Soft Power - MercuryMercury RecordsMercury Records is a record label operating as a standalone company in the UK and as part of the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group in the US; both are subsidiaries of Universal Music Group. There is also a Mercury Records in Australia, which is a local artist and repertoire division of Universal...
/UniversalUniversal Music GroupUniversal Music Group is an American music group, the largest of the "big four" record companies by its commanding market share and its multitude of global operations...
, 2008 - Ivory Tower - Gentle Threat, 2010 (under the name "Chilly Gonzales")
- The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales - Gentle Threat, 2011 (under the name "Chilly Gonzales")
Filmography
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Ivory Tower Ivory Tower (2010 film) Ivory Tower is a 2010 Canadian feature film and the directorial debut of Adam Traynor, a musician from the German-based hip-hop group Puppetmastaz. The film was co-written by Canadian pianist and rapper Gonzales and French director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma... |
Hershell | Independent film co-written with Céline Sciamma Céline Sciamma Céline Sciamma is a French screenwriter and film director.-Filmography:Director* 2007 : Water Lilies* 2009 : Pauline * 2011 : TomboyScreenwriter... , and co-starring Peaches Peaches (musician) Merrill Beth Nisker , better known by her stage name Peaches, is a Canadian electronic musician and performance artist who lives in Berlin, Germany. Her songs are noted for disregarding traditional gender norms and their use of sexually explicit lyrics... , Feist and Tiga Tiga (musician) Tiga is the stage name of Montreal-born DJ/producer Tiga James Sontag . His album Sexor won the 2007 Juno Award for Dance Recording of the Year.-Career:He graduated from Selwyn House School, a prestigious school in Westmount... |
External links
- Official Site
- Kitty-Yo: Gonzales
- No Format!
- Epitonic: Gonzales
- Ustream: 27-hour concert highlights
- Thought Catalog: Introducing Chilly Gonzales
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/may/20/gonzales-longest-solo-concert
- Chilly Gonzales in session at the Rob da Bank show
- http://www.rockfeedback.com/review/5083/chilly-gonzales-the-unspeakable-chilly-gonzales-gentle-threat/
- 2011 Interview on the Jekyll and Hyde Show, 106FM Jerusalem