CHILLI GONZALES ON PIANO

By Crash redaction

THE TALENTED, MULTI-STYLE ARTIST CHILLY GONZALES TALKS ABOUT HIS ANYTHING BUT TYPICAL CAREER AS AN “ENTERTAINER” AND GIVES US HIS PERSONAL DEFINITION OF THE ARTIST. INSPIRED BY AN ECLECTIC MIX OF MUSIC LIKE POP, JAZZ, AND RAP, CHILLY GONZALES TELLS US ABOUT HIS NEW ALBUM, SOLO PIANO II.

You changed musical styles a lot over your career: electronica, rap, classical… is it a taste for risk or a need to do something new every time?

I don’t really have an answer, it just comes naturally. I don’t have to make an effort to change. Almost all of my music is written on the piano, but I might change styles when I meet people, like Boys Noize who I wanted to work with. But I don’t have an electro mindset: I don’t go to clubs. I’m something of a tourist in this world, and I was happy to meet someone as talented as Boys Noize to kind of guide me through. Rap is a different story: it’s the way I chose to express myself verbally. I’ve always been drawn to rap for its raw and expressive capabilities. Singing more or less tries to express hidden feelings, while rap is more of a public form of speech, and that’s what I like about it. I give the impression that I go from one style to another, but I’m a pianist above all. And when I write lyrics it’s mostly with a rap aesthetic and attitude in mind, although I don’t think of myself as a rap artist. I think of myself more as an “entertainer” – meaning a man of his time who’s focused on the audience. For me that means being a producer, performer, and composer. Anything and everything for entertainment!

You’re focused on your audience, but do you ever fear your audience will get lost?

Actually I have several different audiences. Sometimes an audience might get the impression that I’m pushing something too far, but I don’t lose them because they know I’m going to come back to what they like. It’s just a way of getting away from habit and normalcy. It seemed to me like musicians weren’t taking very many risks. I’ve met a lot of artists I like, but I get the feeling that their character is a lot more complex than what they show in their songs and concerts. So I think that if I have an audience, I should treat them as intelligently as possible and assume they can understand a blend of different styles. I don’t think it’s too “challenging” for people. It’s something that lets me show different sides of my personality.

Why did you leave berlin for paris?

I’m not as big of a fan of Paris as some people are. What I like in Paris isn’t really the city’s beauty or postcard moments on a bridge. I was drawn by a unique kind of project with a director, Renaud Letang, who gave me the chance to learn what it meant to make really high quality albums. I worked on projects with Aznavour and Birkin and I was able to use a lot of musical skill. I was able to maintain what I had developed in Berlin by making a few trips there and inviting people to work in Paris, like Peaches and Feist. It was a phase in my career that I wouldn’t have been able to do in Berlin. Once it came to an end, I stopped producing records. In 2009 I totally reorganized what I was doing. I changed my name again, this time to Chilly Gonzales. I set the Guinness world record. I started working with Boys Noize on Ivory Tower. In short, I started to be more and more myself.

What do you mean by that?

I make fewer and fewer compromises to expand my audience. I try to just secure the audience I have and, oddly enough, that ends up expanding it. I created my own label and stopped working for labels like Mercury. A lot of things changed. 2009 marked the beginning of a new era for me.

People often call you a music genius. However, you say you’re not an artist. But isn’t creative genius the essence of the artist?

You have a very sentimental idea of the artist.

Genius and artists do not account for themselves. They receive inspiration and express creativity…

You’re right. Pure creativity exists, but someone who signs a contract, who gives concerts, photos, interviews – by your definition and mine – is not an artist. They have a certain self-consciousness, an ambition. For me a real artist is like you say: someone who explains themselves badly, or at least not very well. So, by definition, we don’t know the artist. I met some in Berlin, but they are all people who aren’t interested in their careers. And it’s out of respect for real artists that I say that. I know I can seem kind of provocative when I say, “I’m an entertainer, not an artist.” But it’s just to show that you have to think about what a real artist is. All the geniuses we admire were businessmen. They struggled with audience demand and what they needed to express. It’s this struggle that makes the entertainer. The entertainer is an artist who becomes modest in an odd sort of way, and who accepts the need to please an audience. You become believable for your audience. Saying I’m a music genius, for me, is a way to say that I have a rather scientific and mathematical approach to and understanding of music. But inspiration appears in the listener’s ear. I won’t hide the fact that I’m ambitious: I want to reach as many people as possible. Doing something avant-garde that no one sees is, for me, less valuable. And it’s art.

With your new album, solo piano ii, did you meet your challenge of modernizing classical music?

You have to be careful with that idea. My pieces are influenced by pop music above all else. They generally last between three or four minutes and follow a verse-chorus pattern. I’m very conservative when it comes to song structures. That’s why I say I’m not a classical musician. What I don’t like is the invisible structure of classical music. To be a man of my time, I know I have to have a pretty obvious structure while keeping some of the color of classical music. I prefer to say I’m a pop composer with a lot of classical sensibility. I collect something like musical postures in my music. When I composed Solo Piano II, somehow I was thinking like a rapper, because they are very structured songs and they don’t have the same depth as classical music. But that doesn’t mean I invented a new style of music. I don’t see the same boundaries in music that other people do. I use all of these different postures for the good of entertainment. There aren’t many musicians in my generation who have these same timeless values of harmony and mastery of musical material.