Open this photo in gallery: Chilly Gonzales's 2004 album Solo Piano engaged a new fanbase emotionally and in bigger numbers.Victor Picon/Supplied A little more than 20 years ago, Chilly Gonzales was working with Jane Birkin at Paris’s Studio Ferber on the chic singer’s duets album, Rendez-vous. It wasn’t going well, owing to a bureaucracy peculiar to the French. “The diplomacy was exhausting,” says Gonzales, born Jason Beck in Montreal. “I wasn’t ready for the level of indirectness and pecking order.” At the time, Gonzales was a failed pop star turned Berlin-based expat and electro-rap curiosity – not high up in many pecking orders. He retreated to an upright piano in a studio room next door, employing the celeste pedal that softens notes with felt. It’s considered a practice pedal, but Gonzales liked the sound and the tape machine rolled. And so, in 2004, the same year Birkin released Rendez-vous, he put out Solo Piano, an album of 16 elegant, hummable neoclassical themes for left-hand accompaniment and right-hand melody. “It was a true product of accident and circumstance,” says Gonzales, who classically trained as a pianist at McGill University. “It was an album I didn’t know I was making until I was almost done.” Fluke or not, Solo Piano changed his career. Where people had previously appreciated his music on a chin-stroking intellectual level, a new fanbase was responding emotionally – and in bigger numbers. Open this photo in gallery: After receiving a standing ovation at Toronto’s Massey Hall in 2007, Gonzales says: 'I realized I had a choice."Victor Picon/Supplied “I just put it out there and the whole thing blew up. I suddenly had 10 times the audience,” the 53-year-old says on a video call from his residence in Paris. (Home is Cologne, Germany – “It’s where my piano is.”) In 2007, after receiving a standing ovation at Toronto’s Massey Hall for a 40-minute solo piano performance as the opening act for his friend Leslie Feist (who also worked on the Birkin album), Gonzales had an epiphany about his own future. “I realized I had a choice,” he says. “Do I say the lesson I learn from this is that I should just stick to piano because this is working and this is getting me everything I had been working for? Or was the lesson to wait for the next accident?” He decided on the latter. While he did release Solo Piano II in 2012, Gonzales has carved a path marked by idiosyncratic choices: French hip hop, a gorgeous Christmas album, piano duels, bathrobes as stage wear, a 27-hour solo concert that set a Guinness World Record and a valiant but unsuccessful attempt at orchestral rap. Casual fans may know him from high-profile collaborations with Feist, Jarvis Cocker, Daft Punk and Drake. His most recent studio album is last year’s Gonzo, a charismatic effort of rap with moments of piano. For his impending concert at Massey Hall on Tuesday, he promises a “full Gonzo experience,” with all his modes represented and special guests promised. With all due respect to Kendrick Lamar and his Drake-savaging, career-salvaging hit Not Like Us, the greatest diss track of 2024 was Gonzales’s single from Gonzo that accused German composer Richard Wagner of antisemitism: “And I know that we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but this decomposing composer needs a kick in the head.” It also includes a shout-out to Drake: “He said a Jew poet couldn’t be a true poet, but have you heard Hotline Bling? A Jew wrote it.” Open this photo in gallery: Gonzales says he sides with his fellow Canadian in the rap war between Drake and Kendrick Lamar.Victor Picon/Supplied Gonzales’s affiliation with Drake is the result of another happy accident. The pop-rap king appropriated The Tourist from Solo Piano for his 2009 mixtape, So Far Gone. Drake was originally drawn to Solo Piano by Gonzales’s exotic sobriquet. The two later collaborated on Drake songs, including Marvins Room, from 2011’s Take Care. “I don’t know Drake well,” he says. “We spent three or four evenings in the studio, and it was among the best collaborations I’ve ever experienced. He’s a serious musician.” Gonzales sides with his fellow Canadian in the rap war between Drake and Lamar, particularly when it comes to latter’s lewd double entendre about the former – “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor” – on Not Like Us. “As time goes on, history will be kinder to Drake than it will be to Kendrick Lamar,” he says. “I think Kendrick Lamar made a deal with the devil by trivializing pedophilia to win a beef, and it will come back to bite him.” What lies ahead for Gonzales is anyone’s guess. He’s ready for more happy accidents, though he would rather encourage opportunities than wait on them. Namely, he prefers the freewheeling nature of making rap music to more laborious pop collaborations. “What I love about being in the studio with rappers is that it really corresponds to the values of why I started to make music in the first place, which is the ecstasy of spontaneous creation,” he says. “The sessions happening now with non-rap people are joyless and feel dead. Honestly, I’m not sure I could ever go back to that.” Chilly Gonzales plays Massey Hall on Tuesday. Info at masseyhall.com.