Satie: Gymnopédies & Gnossiennes

Jazz pianist Jacques Loussier is perhaps best known for his swinging trio arrangements of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, music that lends itself particularly nicely to that kind of treatment because it tends to be melodically attractive, harmonically complex, and rhythmically quite square — take a Bach melody and swing it, and the results are almost always really fun. But unlike Bach, Erik Satie was a willfully weird composer, and the piano suites he titled Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes are slow, repetitive, and sometimes written in free time, which creates some challenges for putting them into a jazz setting. But Loussier does a fine job here — much of the music may be hard to recognize, but the arrangements are gorgeous; note in particular the busy bass part on the second variation on “Gymnopédie No. 1.”