Jean-Michel Jarre

Jean-Michel Jarre, born on August 24, 1948 in Lyon as Jean-Michel André Jarre, is a French musician, composer and music producer . His compositions for the synthesizer, which are considered groundbreaking for electronic music, were created under the influence of Pierre Schaeffer from the beginning of the 1970s.

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The career of Jean-Michel Jarre

Jean-Michel Jarre was born in Lyon on August 24, 1948, the son of musician Maurice Jarre and former resistance fighter France Péjot. His father, who would later become a famous film music composer (including “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Dr. Zhivago” and “Ghost”), may have passed the genes on to him, but he did not have much influence on his son, as his parents divorced when Jean-Michel was three years old. His father Maurice went to Hollywood, while his son stayed with his mother in France.

Jarre began classical piano lessons at the age of five. He skipped them when his mother France gave him a jazz concert for his tenth birthday, where he was serenaded by none other than trumpet legend Chet Baker. From then on, his love was jazz, before he formed The Dustbins and Mystère IV in the 1960s. As a guitarist, mind you.

In 1967, he even made a brief appearance with the Dustbins in the film “Des Garcons Et Des Filles” by French director Etienne Perier. After this excursion into rockier realms, Jarre turned to a completely different musical field. As a member of the Groupe De Recherches Musicales, founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1958, he was indirectly involved in the development of the sampling technique that the members of the group devised under the name “Musique Concrete”.

In this creative environment, he began experimenting with electronic sounds for the first time. The first tangible result of this creative phase was the single “La Cage”, released in 1969, of which he was only able to sell a few hundred copies. He left the Groupe again in 1971 and in the same year composed electro-acoustic music for the Paris Opera’s AOR ballet – incidentally as the youngest composer ever to be allowed to write for the opera.

His next project, the film music for “Les Granges Brulées” (“The Lioness and her Hunter”) starring Alain Delon, is still quite flattering when it comes to describing it as “eccentric” and is not the yellow of the egg, even for die-hard Jarre fans. Over the course of just under 28 minutes, there are sounds that take some getting used to and may not be to everyone’s taste. Nevertheless, this early work already contains harmonies and set pieces with which Jean-Michel Jarre would later celebrate great success.

Until 1976, Jarre mainly worked on advertising jingles, radio and television productions and compositions for other artists, including Francoise Hardy. Meanwhile, Jarre quietly tinkered with his version of electronic sounds. In contrast to other musicians who integrate synthetic sounds into their concept, the Frenchman had a more orchestral side from the very beginning, which went hand in hand with a good dose of pomp.

He also lives this out on his third work. “Oxygene” is the name of the album with which he shoots from just over zero to one hundred. The album sold over eight million copies in a very short space of time and made him a celebrated pop star. The track list reads quite simply with “Oxygene (Part 1)” to “Oxygene (Part 6)”. With the fourth part, Jarre created the prototype of what is now referred to as space sounds on countless samplers. Hardly a day goes by in this world without this central piece being used as background music somewhere on television.

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Despite his mega-success, Jarre skillfully evades the mechanisms of the music business. He prefers the skillful staging of his music on a large scale instead of concerts as the necessary consequence of a record . For Jean-Michel Jarre, big means big in the truest sense of the word. His second major album, ‘Equinoxe’, was released in 1978 and musically tells the story of an entire day.

With ‘Equinoxe Part V’, it once again has a catchy tune that every child knows today. Before the record is released, over 1.5 million pre-orders have already been placed. Jarre has so far successfully played the concert refusenik, but is now going all out. On July 14, 1979, he gave his first open-air concert on the Place De La Concorde in Paris. Over a million people watched the spectacle, earning him an entry in the Guinness Book of Records.

On the following album ‘Magnetic Fields’, he no longer limited himself to the synthetic production of sounds, but also experimented with everyday noises, which he transformed in such a way that they fitted into his concept. For example, he modulated the sound of a moving train from the sounds of a printer head.

He uses a Fairlight CMI, a synthesizer with sample technology, for the first time. Although, from an artistic point of view, the work could not match his two previous great deeds, the Chinese government invited him to perform in China as the first Western musician of the post-Mao era. Jean-Michel Jarre sets off for the Far East with a large amount of equipment. Live recordings are released there as a double LP under the name ‘The Concerts In China’.

1983 marks the release of the rarest album in Jarre’s history. The album ‘Music For Supermarkets’ was pressed on vinyl exactly once. A collector bought the record at auction for 69,000 francs. With this action, Jarre made a statement against the increasing commercialization of music and donated the money to an organization for the benefit of young artists. The master tapes of the album were destroyed after the auction and the album was only played once on Radio Luxembourg. Fans recorded the performance and MP3s of the tracks are now available on the Internet. Although he did not completely discard the melodies, later releases such as “Rendez-Vous” and “Zoolook” only contain isolated elements from this album.

In 1984, he left the safe side with “Zoolook” and began experimenting. He sampled scraps of speech and combined them into sound collages. The various guest musicians are another novelty. Bass virtuoso Marcus Miller, Yogi Horton, Adrian Belew (King Crimson) and live drummer Frederick Rousseau as well as performance artist Laurie Anderson (“Diva”) contributed to the album.

In 1986, Jarre was to give a concert to celebrate the 150th birthday of the city of Houston and the 25th anniversary of the space agency. The highlight of the concert was to be the piece by astronaut Ronald McNair, who was to take part in the concert from space on board the Challenger and play the saxophone. However, the catastrophe in which the space shuttle exploded put a spanner in the works.

Nevertheless, the concert takes place, but as a memorial event for the dead astronauts. Shortly afterwards, the piece ‘Rendez-Vous’, produced especially for this performance, is released. In the same year, the Pope visited Jarre’s home town of Lyon. After the pontiff had blessed the city, the electronic musician began his performance in the old town. The recordings from Houston and Lyon were compiled into a live album called “Cities In Concert/Houston-Lyon”.

With ‘Revolutions’, Jean-Michel Jarre bids farewell to experimentation. He presents himself as much more pop-oriented than before in the late eighties. Many die-hard fans cannot understand this change and are annoyed. The situation is similar with ‘Waiting For Cousteau’ and ‘Chronologie’, which feature large-scale keyboard sounds and mainly New Age sounds. In 1990, he received his second entry in the Guinness Book with a performance in the architectural high-tech district of La Defense.

A whopping 2.5 million viewers were in attendance. Three live albums were released in ’94 and ’95. This gave rise to the suspicion that Jarre had nothing more to say musically. After four years without a new studio album, he couldn’t come up with much that was new. Because ‘Oxygene 7-13’ merely continues the concept of his super-hit from the seventies. It is pleasing, but creative is different.

As a result, Jarre is mainly occupied with familiarizing himself with the latest technical gimmicks and continuing to give concerts on a large scale. One highlight is the Millennium Concert in front of the pyramids of Giza. Although ‘Metamorphoses’ (2000) flopped commercially, the compositions, which are somewhat more catchy, are quite convincing. Sessions 2000′, which flirts with jazz sounds, rightly falls by the wayside.

It is rumored that Jarre only recorded this album to fulfil his contract with Sony, as he was anything but in agreement with the music giant’s work. At his concerts in China in 2004, Jean-Michel Jarre unpacked the next big hit. He had the gig filmed with all the technical bells and whistles and released the whole thing as a double DVD with breathtaking sound and picture in June 2005.

On August 26, 2005, he made another major appearance, this time at a place steeped in history in Poland: the Gdansk shipyard, where workers founded the first free trade union in the Eastern Bloc in 1980. Jarre spoke in front of an audience of 170,000 and even dedicated two songs to the Pope, who had recently died. He was not sparing with pathetic words. The cameras are there again. The committed musician likes to use major concerts such as those in China in 2004, Poland in 2005 or the Moroccan desert in 2006 (as ambassador for the UN program ‘Water for Life’) to put social issues in the spotlight. The Polish result will be available from February 2006 under the name ‘Solidarnosc Live’ as a DVD with bonus audio CD.

In 2007, Jarre surprised the music community with a modern fairy tale. Téo & Téa’ is about the ups and downs of the lives of two soulmate kids who get to know each other on the dancefloor. Some claim that the narrative sounds fresh and that Jarre opens himself up to new musical structures while dancing with fun. Some even say that ‘Téo & Téa’ comes close to Jarre’s masterpiece ‘Zoolook’ in its intensity. There is no need to go too far out on a limb, as there are those who claim that he is no longer able to enchant. What is certain, however, is that he still works skillfully on his synthesizers and never stands still.

Jarre takes a look back in 2007, when the masterpiece ‘Oxygène’ was released worldwide for the 30th time. In November, a recording of a performance of the album will be released. The performance took place in his studio and he used the original equipment that he had already used for the recordings in the 70s.

In 2015, the ‘Electronica’ project is released for the first time in eight years with original, new material. Two albums (‘The Time Machine’ and ‘The Heart Of Noise’) feature collaborations with very different artists, including the Pet Shop Boys, Yello, Julia Holter, John Carpenter and Pete Townswend. Two albums (‘The Time Machine’ and ‘The Heart Of Noise’) feature collaborations with very different artists, including the Pet Shop Boys, Yello, Julia Holter, John Carpenter and Pete Townswend.

Jarre offers a variety of different songs. The Frenchman catapults himself back into the limelight with a great deal of media fanfare. To complement this, he goes on an extensive tour of the big venues. He enchants his audience with a colorful mix of old and new songs and the accompanying 3D visuals.

Just in time for the 40th anniversary of his successful album “Oxygene”, the third and final part of the “Oxygene” series follows just one year after “Electronica 1”. And the man still hasn’t had enough… Two years later, he returns to his album “Equinoxe” from 1977. For his vision of 2018, he uses the artwork from the original album and continues musically with ‘Equinoxe Infinity’. He wonders what the people on the cover have been doing all this time.

On November 7, 2019, Jarre released the music app EōN for iOS and iPadOS via his production company AERO PRODUCTIONS in the Apple App Store. The app is generative and uses music and graphics to create a never-ending audiovisual experience using algorithms. The collaboration with the French music app development studio BLEASS and the designer Alexis André, who works for Sony in Tokyo, led to the creation of this music. Jarre thus continues the generation of music with the help of computer algorithms, which he already presented in 1990 with the title ‘Waiting for Cousteau’.

On December 13, 2019, Jarre released a CD and LP edition entitled Snapshots from EōN. The EōN app generates music that is never repetitive or repetitive, based on Jarre’s compositions. The purpose of such a generative music app is to capture and share special moments. Jarre did this selfishly.

On December 8, 2020, Jean-Michel Jarre announced a virtual Notre Dame concert. The concert took place under the title Welcome to the Other Side and was streamed live on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2020, from 11:25 pm until January 1, 2021 at 0:15 am. During the broadcast, Jarre performed as an avatar in a virtual environment of Notre-Dame Cathedral. However, he was also shown performing in person a few times.

The live broadcast of the VR concert was a special feature. Previously, such events were usually recorded and then played back due to the high technical requirements. Initially, a recording of the event was available to download and stream via Jarre’s website. A Blu-Ray box set was released in 2021. The concert was released in full on Jarre’s official YouTube channel in 2022.

On April 9, 2021, Jean-Michel Jarre released his new studio album “Amazônia”. The album was inspired by a project by photographer and filmmaker Sebastião Salgado. On June 21, 2021, Jarre was awarded the “Badge of the Commander of the Legion of Honor” by French President Emmanuel Macron for his services to music. This award is the third for Jarre.

On June 21, 1995, he was awarded the title of “Chevalier” before the Concert for Tolerance. In 2011, he was awarded the title “Officer” (franz. Officier). After almost a year and a half without live music in front of an audience due to the corona pandemic, he gave a performance of current and older pieces in front of 200 people, which were heavily adapted to modern dance rhythms.

On October 21, 2022, Jarre released his 22nd studio album and project called Oxymore. The music album is dedicated to the Frenchman Pierre Henry, who died in 2017. Pierre Schaeffer is considered a pioneer of electronic music . A VR called Oxyville was also released. Two songs from the album were published on YouTube. Jarre commented that he sees the future of music in multi-channel and binaural sound formats.

On October 24, Jarre presented a virtual concert dedicated to the album and Pierre Henry. The concert was streamed live and could be viewed via YouTube in 2D or via VR access in the virtual reality Oxyville. Oxyville is a futuristic city with many clubs from the underground scene and is reminiscent of a mixture of cyberpunk and film noir. Jarre’s living image, as he operates his synthesizers and input devices, was projected into VR using a virtual projector. The dark music and atmosphere, strongly reminiscent of musique concrète, provoked mixed reactions in the live chat comments on YouTube.

Jean-Michel Jarre and the influence of his music

Jean-Michel Jarre’s music had a major influence on the Commodore 64 games of the early 1980s, such as Yie Ar Kung Fu, Bomb Jack and Trolly Wally. Even an asteroid in the main belt was named after him and his father Maurice Jarre. The music video for Magnetic Fields Part 2 uses the Fairlight CMI sampling computer, which Jarre was one of the first artists to use musically. The album Chronology can be listened to in a continuous loop, as it begins and ends with the same sequence.

For many years, Jarre dispensed with the hyphen between his first names, but since 2015 it has been part of his name again. Although his albums were originally recorded digitally, the remastered editions from 2015 show that they have been remastered from the original analog tapes. After a concert in Munich in March 2010, Jarre encouraged his fans to distribute recordings of his concerts and even cover versions of his music, as long as he is credited as the author. These recordings and cover versions have since been widely distributed on platforms such as YouTube.

Life

Jean-Michel Jarre’s life was eventful. In 1975, he married Flore Guillard, with whom he had a daughter named Émilie Charlotte. After their divorce in 1977, he met the actress Charlotte Rampling, with whom he married in 1978 and had two more children: Barnaby Southcombe and David Jarre. The protracted divorce only followed in 2002 after their separation in 1996.

Jarre became engaged to Isabelle Adjani in 2002, but their separation in 2004 caused a stir in the media. He then got engaged to Anne Parillaud and married her in 2005, but they divorced in 2010. Finally, in 2019, he married Gong Li, an actress from Singapore who is 17 years his junior.

Studio albums

• 1972 Deserted Palace
• 1973 Les Granges Brûlées
• 1976 Oxygène
• 1978 Equinoxe
• 1981 Les Chants Magnétiques / Magnetic Fields
• 1983 Musique pour supermarché / Music for Supermarkets
• 1984 Zoolook
• 1986 Rendez-Vous
• 1988 Revolutions
• 1990 Waiting for Cousteau
• 1993 Chronology
• 1997 Oxygene 7-13
• 2000 Métamorphoses
• 2001 Interior Music
• 2002 Sessions 2000
• 2003 Geometry of Love
• 2007 Téo & Téa
• 2015 Electronica 1: The Time Machine
• 2016 Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise, Oxygene 3
• 2018 Equinoxe Infinity
• 2019 Snapshots from EōN
• 2021 Amazônia
• 2022 Oxymore
• 2023 Oxymoreworks