Chilly Gonzales, live at The Sugar Club

Chilly Gonzales, the self-proclaimed ‘musical genius’, stunned The Sugar Club audience with his technically daring ‘Piano Talk Show’. He played a generous set of almost two hours, with no break.

He’s a completely egocentric performer, name dropping his list of ‘famous friends’, demanding silence from the audience, but as a guy said to me after, “he’s that good”, so it’s okay. He displayed a masterful ambidexterity, with solid bass grooves and complex right hand melodies. Although much of the audience were not familiar with Gonzo, they had heard about it via friends and word of mouth, there are many Gonzo converts now.

The audience sang an ostinato (Italian term for ‘loop’, as he explained), he flirted with a girl in the front row, and gave a mini music theory class. He invited a hipster up to play an embarrassing duet, he climbed inside the Kawai grand piano and plucked bass notes to a rap, sat underneath the keyboard to play renditions of pop songs. He wore a tartan dressing gown and slippers, and begrudgingly performed ‘Never Stop’ (from the i-Pad ad) with the mellotron app on, yes you guessed it, his i-Pad. The crowd knew his songs from his latest album, reciting the ends of lines back to him.

No key was left unplayed, he did eight encores, and finished with a musical synopsis of the entire show in 2 minutes, much like this review. Mark my words; Chilly Gonzales is going to be huge.