About Chilly Gonzales and the Gonzervatory I’ve been a fan of Chilly’s music for some time. He has recorded two great piano albums: Solo Piano and Solo Piano II.
Le Bureau Export Paris France Opening of Chilly Gonzales’ “Gonzervatory”.Piano virtuoso Chilly Gonzales launches his « Gonzervatory » project in Paris this 26th of April.Chilly Gonzales is a certified multi-talented melomaniac, Grammy-Award winner and forward thinking pianist, he created a singular musical workshop, amusingly called the « Gonzervatory ».Open to 7 carefully-selected young international musicians (song-writers), it’s a conservatory of its own kind. The workshop will see Chilly Gonzales & the students pushing the boundaries of musical pedagogy.The chosen “Gonzervatorians” will be welcomed directly on stage at the Parisian venue, Le Trianon, and will then benefit from an intensive week-long learning experience. The coaches selected by Gonzales are: Peaches, Socalled, Fred Wesley/Illyria, Jarvis Cocker & Lisa Kainde Diaz. The final rendition of this workshop will be a “ Graduation Concert” – the occasion for artists & young musicians to present the product of their work.The project seeks to reflect on « Musical Humanism », questioning the status of musicians today, and interpreting the audience’s psychology. Most of it will be broadcasted by Arte Concerts and on Gonzales’ social media, starting this 26th of April, with the opening concert at 8:30 PM. More information.
A concert is worth a hundred rehearsals. The adrenalin alone is a force-multiplier of learning. The threat of embarrassment, the shadow of failure, the fog of unresolved tension.
But also – the unexpected laugh where you didn’t mean a joke, the consensus that leads to mid-song applause, the feeling of musical time simply stopping None of this can happen while you sit alone in a studio or at your instrument. Music is communication, so we prepare to communicate. Before a concert, we repeat, rehearse, we make a plan, but we KNOW we will tear up the plan.We need the plan, but then we don’t need the plan.Six performers will meet me in Paris.
We will spend 8 days making these meticulous plans on a metaphorical sheet of paper. Come join us at the Trianon, and watch us tear up that sheet of paper. Come join us for 100 rehearsals in 2 hours.TICKET LINKS HERE:(Thank You, from left to right, to Matilda Abraham, Angus Tarnawsky, Casey Mq, Teacher Assistant Socalled, Dani Shivers – Joona Samuel). The Gonzervatory is now officially a reality.The day of the announcement, I was curious to see the feedback on Twitter.
I couldn’t help but notice that the few dozen likes we had accrued were vastly outnumbered by my impulsive retweet of the statement “Chilly Gonzales always looks like he got out of the shower.” (hat tip to Twitter user @whatyouseyr).Unsurprisingly, snark travels faster than heart. At first I felt disappointed, and a little dirty. One might say I needed a shower. But waitMy bathrobe-plus-slicked-back-hair look is indeed my trademark, featured prominently in the Gonzervatory video. And this prompted a Twitter-perfect response that spread further than my initial, idealistic plea.
If the music business is about branding now (as opposed to record sales), this random guy’s tweet represented a triumph of snarky marketing.#snarketing.And isn’t this the kind of thinking I want to share with my Gonzervatorians? Haven’t I consistently given advice to my musician friends to project a cartoon-character-esque visual identity? This retweet may be proof of the power of looking at yourself through the eyes of the audience. This is a power that can be used for good, a power that can be shared.
(c)Alexandre IsardWe were supposed to launch The Gonzervatory tomorrow.But in a classic plot twist, an older version of our press release somehow found its way to hipster blog Stereogum, who posted it a day early. They even mention that the link (for applying to my new all-expenses-paid residential musical workshop) wasn’t working properly. I almost screamed at my computer screen: “Of course it doesn’t work, it’s not supposed to work until tomorrow.”But this is part of launching new projects in 2017.months of planning followed by laptop screaming.Once I calmed down, we simply decided to move the announcement ahead by a day.But The Gonzervatory has actually involved years, not months, of planning.
Back in 2004 when I released Solo Piano, I was looking for a way to engage my audience in relation to this quieter, more reflective musical direction.I remembered being a kid, making music with my older brother, playing happy songs in a sad way, replacing the happy major chords with darker, minor onesSo I tested out a stage routine in which I played Happy Birthday in a minor key, punctuated by the line “another year has gone by, motherfucker”. It killed.Since then, I made different attempts at sharing my view of music as a kind of a toy.The Gonzervatory is somehow the human manifestation of my major – minor routine, a place to play with this toy and to take it apart – the direct transmission of a musical vision to younger and hungrier musicians.Who knows how many will actually apply? Is my dream of forming a kind of musical X-men with me as Professor X going to actually WORK?Once the fucking link works, we’ll find out!