Celebrated as the European electronic music community’s premier ambassador, composer Jean Michel Jarre elevated the synthesizer to new peaks of popularity during the 1970s, in the process emerging as an international superstar renowned for his dazzling concert spectacles.
The son of famed film composer Maurice Jarre, he was born August 24, 1948, in Lyon, France, and began studying piano at the age of five. Abandoning classical music as a youth, Jarre became enamored of jazz before forming a rock band called Mystere IV; in 1968, he became a pupil of the musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, joining Groupe de Recherches Musicales. His early experiments in electro-acoustic music yielded the 1971 single “La Cage”; the full-length…
…Deserted Palace followed a year later. Jarre’s early works were largely unsuccessful, and gave little indication of the work to follow. As he struggled to find his own voice, he wrote for a variety of singers, including Françoise Hardy, and also composed for films. Seeking to push electronic music away from its minimalist foundations as well as the formal abstractions of its most experimental practitioners, he slowly developed the orchestrated melodicism of his 1977 breakthrough effort, Oxygène, an enormous commercial hit that reached the number two spot on the U.K. pop chart. The follow-up, 1978’s Equinoxe, was also a smash, and a year later Jarre held the first in a series of massive open-air concerts at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the estimated one million spectators on hand earning him a place in The Guinness Book of World Records.
Only in the wake of 1981’s Les Chants Magnétiques (Magnetic Fields) did Jarre mount a proper tour, traveling to China with a staggering amount of stage equipment in tow; the five performances, performed backed by some 35 traditional instrumentalists, later generated the LP Concerts in China. Released in 1983, Music for Supermarkets instantly became one of the most collectible albums in history — recorded for an art exhibit, only one copy was ever pressed, selling at a charity auction for close to $10,000. The master was then incinerated, guaranteeing the record’s rarity. Jarre’s next proper release was 1984’s Zoolook, which failed to connect with audiences with the same success as its predecessors.
A two-year hiatus followed before he resurfaced on April 5, 1986, with an extravagant live performance in Houston celebrating NASA’s silver anniversary; in addition to the over one million in attendance, it was also broadcast on global television. Rendez-Vous appeared a few weeks later, and after another highly visual live date in Lyon, France, Jarre assembled the best material from the two events as the 1987 concert LP Cities in Concert: Houston/Lyon. Revolutions, featuring legendary Shadows guitarist Hank B. Marvin, followed in 1988, and a year later a third concert LP, dubbed simply Jarre Live, hit stores. After 1990’s En Attendant Cousteau (Waiting for Cousteau), Jarre mounted his biggest live experience yet, with an attendance of over two and a half million fans converging on Paris to see him perform in honor of Bastille Day.
The decade to follow proved surprisingly quiet, however, and apart from the occasional live appearance Jarre was largely removed from the limelight; finally, in 1997 he issued Oxygène 7-13, updating his concepts for a new musical era. At the turn of the millennium, he recorded Metamorphoses and then took a break from the studio as a flurry of reissues and remixes followed, including Sessions 2000, Les Granges Brulees, and Odyssey Through O2. In 2007, after a seven-year hiatus from recording, Jarre released a new dance single, “Teo and Tea,” a surprisingly strong return to electro, and followed it with a trancey, angular album also titled Teo and Tea. The collection Essentials & Rarities appeared in 2011, a year that also saw him perform a three-hour, internationally broadcast concert in Monaco honoring the marriage of Prince Albert and Charlene Wittstock. He released the albums Electronica, Vol. 1: The Time Machine and Electronica, Vol. 2: The Heart of Noise in 2015 and 2016, respectively, both of which featured numerous well-known guest musicians including John Carpenter, Vince Clarke, Cyndi Lauper, Pete Townshend, Armin van Buuren, and Hans Zimmer. Also in 2016, Jarre revisited his signature work yet again, with the release of Oxygène 3. All three Oxygène albums were also issued as Oxygène Trilogy.
CD1: Oxygene
Jean Michel Jarre, son of film composer Maurice Jarre, is one of the true pioneers of electronic music. Oxygène is one of the original e-music albums. It has withstood the test of time and the evolution of digital electronica. Jarre’s compositional style and his rhythmic instincts were his strong points in 1976. While his popularity has escalated exponentially over the years, he never quite achieved the quality of this amazing recording. The innocence and freshness provide most of its charm. Jarre’s techniques and ability provide the rest. This epic work will appeal to fans of Tonto’s Expanding HeadBand, Tangerine Dream, Synergy, Kraftwerk, and Klaus Schulze.
1. Oxygene, Pt. 1
2. Oxygene, Pt. 2
3. Oxygene, Pt. 3
4. Oxygene, Pt. 4
5. Oxygene, Pt. 5
6. Oxygene, Pt. 6
CD2: The Concerts in China [Part 1]
Jean-Michel Jarre performed a handful of concerts in Peking and Shanghai in 1981, marking the first time that a modern Western musical artist had played in communist China. Sensing the historical importance of the event (and the career milestone it represented), a double album of live music from these concerts was released the following year as Les Concerts en Chine. The release is half musical travelogue (featuring new pieces presumably inspired by China) and half career retrospective, with faithful reproductions of excerpts from Equinoxe and Les Chants Magnetiques (Magnetic Fields) interspersed with new works and snippets of Chinese dialogue. There has always been a strong visual component to Jarre’s live shows, which the listener is left out of on these recordings (small pockets of applause during some of the songs allude to the graphic goings-on), but even without the lights and lasers this is engaging stuff. Highlights from the show include “Jonques de Pecheurs au Crepuscule” (Fishing Junks at Sunset), a welcome respite from Jarre’s ultra-modern music that features a traditional Oriental arrangement, and new works like “Arpegiateur” and “Nuit a Shangai” that compare favorably with the brisk, streamlined sound of Tangerine Dream in the early ‘80s. Connecting these sections with dialogue and street noises (some of which, in the case of “Les Chants Magnetiques,” have always been there) breaks up the concert nicely, although two lighthearted intermissions (“L’Orchestre Sous la Pluie” and “La Derniere Rumba”) make too fine a point of it. Owners of Equinoxe and Les Chants Magnetiques expecting to hear a new interpretation of these albums won’t find any surprises on Les Concerts en Chine except a short ping-pong match inexplicably billed as “Les Chants Magnetiques I.” The real attraction is the new music, and the newness that all of this must have held for its audience. [Regrettably, when Dreyfus reissued the concert on compact disc in 1992, it opted to split the original double LP into two separate discs as Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.]
1. L’ouverture
2. Arpegiateur
3. Equinoxe, Pt. 4
4. Jonques de Pecheurs Au Crepuscule
5. L’orchestre Sous Le Pluie
6. Equinoxe, Pt. 7
CD3: The Concerts in China [Part 2]
1. Orient Express
2. Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 1
3. Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 3
4. Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 4
5. Harpe Laser
6. Nuit A Shanghai
7. La Dernière Rumba
8. Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 2
9. Souvenir de Chine
CD4: Chronology
For fans of Jean-Michel Jarre, Chronologie contains more of Jarre’s proven ability to blend familiar sounds in the New Music tradition into unusual, inventive compositions. The uninitiated will find Chronologie’s blend of 19th Century classical musical themes with pop, rave and rap sounds downright danceable. Many of the pieces begin with a classical sound — in one song it’s deeply resonating pipe organ — and almost invariably pick up the tempo quickly and slide right into a Gloria Estefan beat…
1. Chronology, Pt. 1
2. Chronology, Pt. 2
3. Chronology, Pt. 3
4. Chronology, Pt. 4
5. Chronology, Pt. 5
6. Chronology, Pt. 6
7. Chronology, Pt. 7
8. Chronology, Pt. 8
CD5: Metamorphoses
Recorded in 2000 and not available in the United States until 2004, Metamorphoses is another of those enormous productions by the French electronic music master. Offering a cycle of songs, Jarre and his platoon of keyboards — a wonderful meld of cutting-edge and vintage technologies — delve into the notion of change and evolution with a remarkable efficiency despite the plethora of guest vocalists and instrumentalists. His collaborations with Laurie Anderson (“Je me souviens”) and Natacha Atlas (“C’est la Vie”) are wonderfully successful. The former is a staggered sequencer-driven track whose pulse varies, throbs, and wanes as the vocals are articulated in syncopated fashion in alternating cadences. The latter is an Eastern-tinged house track, where elements of disco, breakbeat, and even jungle enter and leave the mix after leaving traces of themselves on what follows their articulation. Atlas sings and wails and whispers, following sequences of broken beats and ushering in acid house pulsations as a lonesome violins caresses the proceedings and the cut breaks wide open in a frenzy of longing and increasing tempos before a trancey set of beats takes it out. Other vocalists include Lisa Jacobs (“Millions of Stars”), Dierdre Dubois (“Miss Moon”), and Veronique Bossa (“Give Me a Sign”) Because of its many colors, Metamorphoses is the most adventurous recording of Jarre’s in a decade, and articulates his universal language of transcultural musicality and futuristic altruism fantastically.
1. Je Me Souviens
2. C’est la Vie
3. Rendez-Vous à Paris
4. Hey Gagarin
5. Millions Of Stars
6. Tout Est Bleu
7. Love Love Love
8. Bells
9. Miss Moon
10. Give Me A Sign
11. Gloria, Lonely Boy
12. Silhouette