Frank Gonzales Crussi

A Very Chilly Christmas, featuring Feist and Jarvis Cocker. Composer, showman in slippers and a bathrobe, he has a deep dedication to his craft: he’s an Entertainer. His humble service to this calling lends a certain inevitability to this announcement: Chilly Gonzales has made a Christmas album.

It is said that “everything is bigger in Texas,” and with a talent as large as the state itself, musician Randy Pavlock easily breathes new life into the legend. Musically based in Austin, Randy proudly hails from Navasota, “The Blues Capital of Texas.” Together with the band, Twenty Four Seven, this brilliant young guitar slinger delivers the very best in hard-driving, yet heartfelt original Texas blues rock!A self-taught and multi-dimensional guitarist, singer, songwriter, recording artist, and engineer, Randy has displayed his enormous wealth of talents throughout the globe…..

The cinematic ambitions of Chilly Gonzales were not previously well known, although very few forms fit his intentions to cycle between solo piano and throwback dance music quite like an original score. (Of course, if he'd tried to fit both piano meditations and funky house on a proper album, the cries of "Unity!" would have gone up immediately from outraged music fans.) Ivory Tower, the soundtrack to an "existentialist sports comedy about chess and success," was apparently recorded before the movie was filmed, so the filming could be arranged around the album; it's true that this sounds more like an album than a soundtrack. The piano lines are simplistic and repetitive, and the rest of the production is sunny, breezy house music the way they made it in New York during the mid-'90s, similar to Gonzales' Soft Power from 2008 - but without the attention-grabbing retro qualities…

Some artists like to signal their pretension in a subtle way - James Murphy with his “Hello Steve Reich” remix of David Bowie’s “Love Is Lost”, for example. Others, however, just can’t help themselves. Chilly Gonzales (A.K.A Jason Beck) might be fall into the latter camp. His 2015 album, Chambers, has been in gestation since Solo Piano II, the sequel to the acclaimed - and innovatively named - Solo Piano I. This LP is similarly literally titled, as it is, in essence, a 12-track suite for a chamber ensemble - string quartet and piano, to be precise.
If you know anything about our man Gonzales, though, you'll know that things are never quite what they appear when he's around. All genres are permeable for this man: from the '90s indie-rock stylings of his first project Son to the Manic, and surreal rap of The Entertainist, he's pretty much tried it all…

Some critics have called Gonzales "the Latin-American Stevie Ray Vaughan," but a closer listen also shows bits of B.B. King and Carlos Santana popping up in Tino's Latin-with-the-blues style. Double Feature is a reissue of Gonzales' debut CD, originally released in 1994 on Remedy Records, with the previously unissued-in-the-U.S. EP Live at the Chameleon Club. Tino does a nice job on a pair of Ray Agee tunes ("Talk About Love," "Leave Me Alone") and covers of tunes by McKinley Mitchell, Howlin' Wolf, and old chestnuts like Jimmy Reed's "Big Boss Man" and Andre Williams' "Twine Time." But it's the original material here that impresses the most; songs like "Piece of Work," "Young Thing," and the title track end up being the shining moments on the studio portion of the disc…