GONZO by Chilly Gonzales review: 'a witty wordsmith'

Chrysanths: Leave No Shadow (Chemikal Underground) ★★★★

Jamie Sutherland: The World As It Used To Be (Frictionless Music) ★★★

Eva Cassidy: Walking After Midnight (Blix Street) ★★★

Playful piano maestro Chilly Gonzales came out of therapy a couple of years ago and immediately felt the need to return to rapping. Coincidence? He thinks not. Join him on the couch for his new album GONZO which is all about him (and other stuff).

Gonzales, aka Cologne-based Canadian pianist, composer and commentator Jason Beck, would never claim to be a gifted rapper but he is a witty wordsmith, free associating deliberately corny rhymes such as “it’s a long time since I have opened the Venetian blinds of my mind” to muse on subjects such as pseudonyms, cancel culture and the slow strangulation of music by algorithm.

His signature melodic piano playing does not even feature on the opening title track, on which he indulges in the hip-hop tradition of egotistical autobiography. The results are more my-stage-name-is than My Name Is but there is also a touch of Eminem-like snottiness on Surfing the Crowd.

Having recently released an album of French language pop, GONZO continues his European odyssey by rapping (reasonably) in German on I.C.E. For all his self-aggrandising – and self-deprecating – humour, there is a serious point at the heart of Neoclassical Massacre, as he lays into the algorithms used on streaming sites to create bland quasi-classical playlists as aural wallpaper for studying.

Gonzales considers himself one of the OGs of popular neo-classical piano composition. His diss is followed by the melodramatic minute-long flourish of Cadenza while the melodramatic instrumental Fidelio also sticks out among the vocal bravado.

Elsewhere, this renaissance raconteur offers the mellow Eighties easy listening of High As A Kite, cheeky, stealthy electro smooch of Open the Kimino and the tom drum-driven F*** Wagner, a “love the art, hate the artist” accompaniment to his campaign to rename Cologne’s Richard Wagner Strasse as Tina Turner Strasse.

Chrysanths is a new project from Modern Studies singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emily Scott. Leave No Shadow is as beautifully conceived as anything in their catalogue, rich with swooning string arrangements, ravishing vocals and painterly lyrics like brushstrokes implying a sensual world.

The sultry accord of Rising combines jazzy inflections, tremulous harmonies, dancing strings and slight dissonance on keyboards into an intoxicating whole. Scott’s vocals are smooth and soothing at the centre of a quiet hurricane of sound on Late Bloomer and the luscious melodrama of Landscapes while the heady vocal melody, melancholy runs on piano and sighing strings on Stones all speak of heartbreak.

Broken Records frontman Jamie Sutherland also strides out with a second solo album. The World As It Used To Be was written in a solo spurt during the pandemic and features Sutherland’s familiar soul holler as it always was, sounding like a Caledonian Brandon Flowers in a somewhat pared-back setting.

He celebrates his love of the US folk rock pioneers with a Scotpop slant on the Dylan universe, leaning in heavy on harmonica on You Were My Friend and Greenwich Village dreaming on While I Sleep. Closer to home, Always Be is his homage to the Moray coast, a place he wants to introduce to his children but also to be laid to rest.

Eva Cassidy’s Walkin’ After Midnight provides another live snapshot of the Washington DC songwriter who became a posthumous sensation in the late Nineties. Cassidy flexes her bluesy and western swing muscles on this recording of a 1995 bar gig in Annapolis, accompanied by violin, bass and guitar, offering a different flavour to covers she would perform elsewhere. For Cassidy completists, Down Home Blues is the only song not previously released in other live incarnations but it’s worth remembering that Cassidy herself was not trying to curate a catalogue but simply singing a repertoire of standards for the love of it.

CLASSICAL

Smetana & Schubert: Piano Trios (Supraphon) ★★★★★

The impact is immediate. Two powerful sighing motifs from violinist Matouš Pěruška and this debut album by Trio Bohémo reveals in one fell swoop both the uncompromising emotional heft of Smetana’s Trio in G minor, and the gripping emergence of a Hungarian-based Czech piano trio that’s worth keeping an eye on. Smetana’s part-tragic work is an inviting vehicle for any piano trio to display its technical and emotional virtuosity, from the intellectual intensity of the opening movement to the mood swings of the central Allegro and a feverish Finale that is part romp, part idyll. The playing is passionate and profound, impressively slick. If anything, the ensuing Schubert E Flat Piano Trio veers periodically into terrain that seems over-rough for the inherent delicacy of the music, but there is honesty and precision in a performance that, once again, captivates and thrills the ear. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Daniel Herskedal: Call for Winter II: Resonance (Edition Records) ★★★★

You may never hear a more quintessentially Nordic sound than that generated by the multi-layered tuba and bass trumpet of Norwegian musician Daniel Herskedal. Composed and recorded during a week spent in a remote mountain cabin, this follow-up to his Call for Winter project of nine years ago embodies his chosen environment with immense soundscapes. The opening title track gathers itself into a sonorous groove over rumblings and bellowings suggestive of a snoring dragon (or a film score, perhaps, for a troll movie). The apparently contrarily titled Hope sees Herskedal’s bass trumpet take on an astonishingly vocal quality reminiscent of an Armenian duduk, Gæjkedh-vearalde has a slow, sad brass band drift, though not without warmth, while sheets of organ-like sound provide a magisterial backdrop for Thawing Permafrost. At times ineffably melancholy but also powerfully elemental, this is music of wide horizons. Jim Gilchrist