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“It’s in Your Hands + Variations on Satie” first appeared on the I LIKE THE STREET album in 2011. This is a single-edit for radio use.

"All this happened to me because of music."--Erik Satie

The music bed is an adaptation of Satie’s Gnosseinnes #1 to a rock-tango beat. My goal was to pay tribute to Nuevo Tango music and Astor Piazzolla, with a nod to glam rock. The lyrics are about the love that God empowers you with. It’s your responsibility to do something with it. Felipe Torres called it “elegant” and told me to make it the last track on the I LIKE THE STREET album (where the long version first appeared in 2011).

I perform it in my live set on occasion. It is founded on an F minor chord played on a 12-string guitar tuned down to C/G/C/E/G/C. When you play Fm from the 4th fret, it makes an odd Fm9/7 chord. I played all the instruments and it was recorded entirely at Mind’s Eye Studios in Williamsport PA (with Scott Francis at the board).

Ultimately, this track is nothing without Satie.

Odd, funny and romantic things happen when you tune into the world of The Velvet Gentleman, Satie (1866-1925). Rather than mull the debate over whether he was a prophet or leg-puller, it’s simpler to enjoy the pragmatic surrealism in the Satie sonique, where lovely and mysterious messages rise from the mundane "readymades" of your life.

The Velvet Enigma of Satie spoke through artists such as The Doors, Brian Eno, and Frank Zappa. Where some composers would leave performance instructions like allegro con moto, Satie would suggest playing "like a nightingale with a toothache."

Satie made elaborate jokes about not being a musician, never wrote for large orchestras, and was an academy misfit. In his life alive, he was a gadfly to critics and traditionalists. Yet he was always respected by esteemed composers: Ravel, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Poulenc, and Debussy. He wrote in multiple genres (cabaret, chamber, ragtime, tango) and was a precursor of ambient music, atonalism, conceptual art, Dada-ism, impressionism, minimalism and neo-classicism. Darius Milhaud said that Satie, within his body of work, prophesied every major movement in music for the next 50 years beyond his life.

"He was a knowing old card…intelligently mischievous. I liked him from the start."-Igor Stravinsky

Of Satie's prophecies, he was one of a few (with Percy Grainger) who said that the ability to mechanically reproduce music would change the craft of songwriting-this as Thomas Edison's phonograph, invented in 1887, was still a babe of science. Satie believed that the emotional and the mechanical were equally important to creativity. He practiced reductionism as a countermand to bloated, overdressed composition. Years passed, and the "3-minute pop song" accommodated the 3-minute long 78 r.p.m record. Music today is rarely made without some bridge with technology or computers (Satie was also one of the first to write sound effects into his scores).

"Have you ever tried to clean sounds? It is a dirty process."-Satie

For 27 years, Satie kept an apartment in the drab Parisian suburb of Arcueil. Though he was an outgoing person with many friends, Satie never invited anyone inside his apartment. After his death, friends entered the place, opening a door to strange revelations.

Satie’s friends walked into a dark dustbowl with ragged curtains. They could not reconcile this with the immaculately groomed and clean Satie they knew. His piano was covered in cobwebs, with broken pedals held with rope. Did this explain why he did most of his composing in public cafes with nice pianos?

Also found were:

1. Dozens of unheard compositions stuffed in clothes pockets, furniture and behind the piano.
2. Rows of unused handkerchiefs and umbrellas. Did this explain the unswerving answer given to friends who asked Satie what he'd like for his birthday? "I always wanted a handkerchief and an umbrella."
3. All seven of Satie's velvet suits, one for each day of the week.
4. His walking stick, which Satie, capable of tantrums and not shy of fighting, used as a club.
5. Hammers, which Satie carried around as a defense against muggers around Arcuiel.
6. Countless drawings of medieval buildings. Did this explain the odd, anonymous newspaper ads promoting "castles of iron?"

Most telling, they found the portrait of Satie by actress/artist Suzanne Valadon, along with every letter and drawing she gave him. She was the only only intimate female relationship of his life. The Valadon Affair was an interlude during Satie's first "spiritual phase," when he was taken with "The Rosy Cross" (Rosicrucianism). He believed that an "ignorance of God" lowers human comprehension of aesthetics; to not appreciate Creation is to be immoral. He published his music in threes to reflect the Holy Trinity.

From this phase came Gnosseinnes #1 (1890), a short, haunting and beautiful piece that is comical, simple, soaring and melancholy all at once. In 2006, it was motif for Kitty Garstin/Naomi Watts in the film, THE PAINTED VEIL. If you know the story of how Kitty is transformed from a self-absorbed party girl into an enriched woman, the song is truly hers.

During the 1890s, Greek art was fashionable with the French. Like Trios Gymnopedies, Gnosseinnes #1 is an abstraction on Greek history. The Knossos in Crete was the scene of Ariadne and the Minotaur. The song could have been inspired by a Grecian vase depicting young girls dancing; others say it is drawn from the word "Gnostic" (Satie never said). Written in the Lydian scale, it has a Mediterranean flavor with an oriental overtone. It is not hard to imagine a hologram of Greek girls spinning in the air.

The melody aches with laughter and tears. It is immediately gripping; lyrical with no words, piercing time, reaching back to the sights, smells and even the tactile senses of what was going on in life.

The playing instructions for Gnosseinnes #1 are "open your head" and "with astonishment." It was written without bar lines or time signature. There is no "one way" to play it.

Said to be Satie's most popular piano work, it is also easy to play, making it that much easier to read the mind of a Velvet Gentleman.

credits

from IF I COULD DRESS LIKE CLIVE OWEN (MUSIC FOR FILMS NOT YET MADE), released July 2, 2013
JJB: bass, drums, guitars, keyboards, percussion, vocals

Written & produced by Johnny J Blair copyright 2011 Word2Soul BMI

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Johnny J Blair "Singer at Large" San Francisco, California

"Johnny is a virtuoso"--Brian Wilson
"Pop music with a conscience.”--Goldmine
“the Harry Houdini of rock and roll.”-- Spotlight. Listen to Johnny's fast-paced mix of old school soul, psychedelia, punk/new wave, & classic pop/rock. Singer-songwriter in his own right, he was also a sideman for Davy Jones and The Monkees + performed with David Cassidy, Al Stewart, Buddy & Julie Miller, & others. ... more

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