Biography (read more)
Jason Charles Beck was born on 20 March 1972 in Canada, the son of Ashkenazi Jews who had fled Hungary during the Second World War, and the younger brother of the film composer Christophe Beck. He taught himself the piano from three, when his brother began lessons, went to Crescent School in Toronto, and was classically trained as a pianist at McGill University, where he started composing — co-writing several musicals with his brother — and performing as a jazz pianist. In the 1990s he led the alternative rock band Son, signed to a three-album deal with Warner Music Canada in 1995; the first record, Thriller, produced the radio single “Pick up the Phone” and support slots for Barenaked Ladies, and the darker follow-up Wolfstein was too far a departure for the label. He has lived in Paris, Berlin and Cologne, and is now based in London.
His work runs across rap albums, collaborations with Feist and Drake, the Solo Piano trilogy of classical piano writing, and records made with Daft Punk and Boys Noize, the latter also as Octave Minds; in 2022 he and Plastikman, with Tiga, released Consumed in Key, a piano reworking of Plastikman’s 1998 minimal techno album. He won a Grammy for his part in Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories in 2013. He also broadcasts and writes — the web series Pop Music Masterclass on WDR, Classical Connections on BBC Radio 1, The History of Music on Arte and Music’s Cool with Chilly Gonzales on Apple Music — and has published opinion pieces in The Guardian, Vice and Billboard.
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