Chilly Gonzales trumps himself as a “musical genius” right out of the gate on his Fireside Chat on Red Bull Music Academy Radio, so he’d better have the chops to back it up. (Though lately he prefers to announce his tagline as un génie musicale“, seeing as how he’s living in Paris.) Yeah, the guy is very tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing, but he can actually back a lot of it up: he’s already been in the Guinness Book of World Records for longest continuous piano concert (27 hours, to be precise), and got his start early with the band Son, a three-piece, Elvis Costello-y group which sparked enough interest in the executives at Warner Bros. to get them picked up.

They had a small hit with “Pick Up The Phone,” which earned them some noteworthy success in their Canadian homeland, as well as gigs opening for The Barenaked Ladies. Known as Jason Beck then, Chilly always seemed uncomfortable with his heritage, and, according to his Wikipedia page, “developed [the pseudonym Chilly Gonzales] into his popular stage persona as a ‘Jewish supervillain MC’.”

Just to drive the point home, Beck/Gonzales also helped pen a song for his band Son called “Making a Jew Cry”, much to the irk of some peeps at Warner. But despite what may be a somewhat self-loathing attitude, Chilly has been able to apply his multi-talented musical abilities to all kinds of different scenarios: throwing concerts at legendary music halls, helping craft remixes for other artists, shooting his own feature film, and spending recent years working with such renowned artists as Leslie Feist and Peaches. Recently he signed with Mercury Records, and is headed back into the studio.

So there ya go. But perhaps Chilly puts it best himself, when he announces: “I’m a movie with no plot, written in the back of a piss-powered taxi…I’m an imperial armpit, sweating with Chianti…I’m a toilet with no seat, flushing tradition down…I AM EUROPE.”