There is a version of Chilly Gonzales that wants you to know he’s the smartest person in the room, and then there’s Ivory Tower, which is the version that forgot to keep his guard up.
Jason Charles Beck — Gonzales to everyone who discovered him through Solo Piano or the endless YouTube clip of him in a bathrobe schooling pop stars — released this record quietly in 2010, and it has lived quietly ever since. That’s not a complaint. Some albums earn their obscurity like a good local bar earns its regulars.
The Room It Was Made In
Ivory Tower was recorded in Paris, where Gonzales had been living long enough to absorb a certain unhurried Gallic approach to the studio. The production has that quality — nothing is rushed, nothing is over-explained. He worked with collaborators including Feist, with whom he had a long creative partnership that stretched back to Montreal and forward through The Reminder, and the record carries that intimacy, that sense of two people who have already said the hard things to each other and moved on to the interesting ones.
The piano is central, as it always is with Gonzales, but Ivory Tower layers it differently than Solo Piano did. There are strings arranged with care, synth textures that feel borrowed from a slightly sad 1980s film score, and vocals — actual lead vocals — that Gonzales deploys like a man who knows he’s not a conventional singer and has decided that’s precisely the point.
What He’s Actually Doing Here
The lyrical mode is mock-grandiose and then suddenly not mock at all. Gonzales has always played the character of the pompous genius, the self-appointed maestro, but on tracks like “Never Stop” and “Overnight” the costume slips. You hear something that sounds genuinely like longing, or regret, dressed up in just enough wit to be presentable in public.
“Never Stop” in particular is a remarkable piece of writing. It became something later — a sort of modern piano standard, covered and recontextualized — but here in its original form it’s almost uncomfortably sincere. The melody does the thing that only the best melodies do: it sounds like you already knew it.
The album is not without its self-indulgences. Gonzales is constitutionally incapable of making something without a wink somewhere in it, and occasionally the winking is the whole joke. But these moments are briefer than you’d expect from a man whose public persona is built on them.
What lingers, sitting with this record late at night, is how much genuine musicianship is buried under the performance of musicianship. The chord voicings are sophisticated without being showy. The arrangements breathe. Someone who actually knows how to play is making decisions that only someone who actually knows how to play would make — and then pretending it’s effortless, which of course is its own kind of effort.
After the Joke Lands
There’s a tradition in music of the comedian who can actually sing, the entertainer who turns out to be an artist when nobody’s looking. Ivory Tower is Gonzales caught in that middle distance — too playful to be taken entirely seriously, too skilled to be dismissed.
Put it on after eleven. Let the piano come through properly. The record rewards the kind of attention you can only give something when the day is finally done.