Open this photo in gallery: Chilly Gonzales's 2004 album Solo Piano engaged a new fanbase emotionally and in bigger numbers.Victor Picon/Supplied A little more than 20 years ago, Chilly Gonzales was working with Jane Birkin at Paris’s Studio Ferber on the chic singer’s duets album, Rendez-vous. It wasn’t going well, owing to a bureaucracy peculiar to the French. “The diplomacy was exhausting,” says Gonzales, born Jason Beck in Montreal. “I wasn’t ready for the level of indirectness and pecking order.” At the time, Gonzales was a failed pop star turned Berlin-based expat and electro-rap curiosity – not high up in...