A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present.

Gonzales has released a book of etudes specifically geared towards a very large target audience; lapsed piano students. Remember way back, when your parents forced you to sit down in front of the piano and practice while all the other kids were outside riding their bikes? The piano seemed torturous, and you caused your parents so much grief that they eventually let you quit piano. Now you have regrets and wish there was some way to re-introduce yourself to the piano so you can finally feel that sense of musical accomplishment (and possibly inspire your own family).

Response to the first Solo Gonzales puzzle was overwhelming – happy to hear that so many Chilly Gonzales fans up for a challenge. As promised, we have developed puzzle number two, and we think it’s even a bit trickier than the first. This puzzle mainly covers from Presidential Suite all the way to Ivory Tower, and (as always) almost all of the clues are Gonz-related in some way.

Ivory Tower was a great melding of Gonzales’ lush piano and Boys Noize’s driving rhythms, but rather than being a one-off project, it seems to have been just the beginning of a longer-term collaboration.

Fans of Chilly Gonzales have impeccable taste (obviously), and always seem up for a challenge, so we at SoloGonzales decided to create a series of Gonz-themed crossword puzzles that combine Gonzales history, songs, musical knowledge, and just about anything else related to Gonzales.

Gonzales has created a mish-mash of beats, samples, pop melodies and harsh tokes that sticks in your head, sticks to the wall, leaves a mess on the floor, makes long distance phone calls and never does the dishes. You need fun friends like this.
– James Keast – exclaim.ca (2000)

Über Alles signals the imminent rise to world domination of a major talent. Twisted pop genius.
– Dave Stelfox – spannerd.org (2000)

After being nominated in 2008 with Feist for “The Reminder”, Chilly Gonzales’ name finally echoed through the holy halls of the Staples Center in Los Angeles last night, when he received a Grammy for his contribution to Daft Punk’s RAM.

Man, this is war – where careers get killed and that’s not a metaphor – Gonzales Never Stop (Rap version)

War and conflict has and will always occur between predators and prey, rivals for mates, siblings, and even between parents and their offspring. While it’s possible that our species could have arrived where we are today in the absence of conflict, historical evidence overwhelmingly supports the notion that conflict played a huge role in establishing the relatively peaceful lifestyle we enjoy today. The problem is that we’re still ‘wired’ for conflict – we haven’t quite ‘given up the fight’. This is especially evident sporting events, where the struggle on the field emulates a ‘mini-war’ of sorts. In the same vein, life’s struggles weren’t lost on composers, who seem to constantly try to capture conflict within music and opera. The entertainment value of conflict within sports and music hasn’t escaped Gonzales, as he recently told Thomas Bärnthaler of Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitunh Magazin:

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art. – Frédéric Chopin

10 years ago, in the fall of 2003, Gonzales began composing a series of short songs for solo piano that would eventually redefine his career and expose his music to a worldwide audience. Disenchanted with his role as producer for French icons such as Jane Birkin and Charles Aznavour, the recent Parisian transplant transformed his feelings of isolation into piano pieces that combined the emotion of Ravel, Debussy, and Satie with the pop sensibilities of Michael Jackson. The resulting album, appropriately dubbed “Solo Piano”, seemed to represent a radical departure from his previous ventures, which were more closely associated with prankster rap and hip-hop.

Record labels have been dressing up musicians in magical and sometimes ridiculous clothes for many years, while audiences have basked in the glory of the latest disposable brain tickler. But there is a growing chorus of people who have taken to the internet to “undress” mindless pop stars exposing what’s left: shallowness and vanity, and at the same time, revealing the music industry’s greed and ostentatiousness. These individuals recognize that musicians have been swindled and are merely pawns in the big-money world of music. Gonzales has openly identified all of this for years, and his voice is finally being heard. The people are shouting that there is a new Emperor in town. And the Emperor doesn’t show up naked. He wears a robe. “Der neue Kaiser” – that’s what the German issue of Rolling Stone recently called Chilly Gonzales in a four pager about his rising fame and the future of music.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Those words (attributed to Winston Churchill) resonate with a tone of vast experience, and leads to other questions relating to the nature of success and the lessons of failure. By all accounts, the Hungarian composer György Ligeti was extremely successful, yet constantly downplayed any accolades bestowed upon him. Something drove him to continually venture into new musical territory that came with a high probability of failure, yet with his vast experience, he was generally able to contribute something novel to the world of music. In the theme of success and failure, Gonzales recently tweeted a link to an article by James Martin in Canada’s “Globe and Mail” newspaper: