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[[Jean Michel Jarre]] is a French electronic musician and multimedia performer. He was born in Lyons in 1948 as the son of the film score composer Maurice Jarre (''[[Doctor Zhivago]]'') and a former [[La Résistance|Résistance]] member.
His musical career began in [[The Sixties|the late 1960s]] with two bands, one of which covered the Shadows and the Spotnicks with Jarre as as Strat-toting Hank Marvin stand-in and appeared in a nowadays obscure French movie. His first release was the single ''La Cage'' in 1971 which is so rare that it has grown more expensive than many synthesizers. It was followed by the not less rare album ''Deserted Palace'' (1972) and the movie soundtrack ''Les Granges Brûlées'' (1973). Over [[The Seventies|the 70s]], Jarre did a couple of jobs in the music industry including TV and advertising music and composing the music and/or writing the lyrics (!) of French chansons/pop songs, partly in the wake of the disco era.
These jobs seem to have paid him enough to gather together a decent home studio—in a time when there were practically no home studios at all as opposed to today, and when ''all'' equipment including the synthesizers was hardware—and record his 1976 breakthrough album, ''Oxygène''. This album, together with its 1978 successor ''Equinoxe'', defined Jarre's [[Signature Style]] of electronic music that
The people who bought ''Oxygène'' and ''Equinoxe'' have never gotten over Jarre leaving his [[Signature Style]] in [[The Eighties]], moving on with the development of electronic instruments, and trying new styles. ''Zoolook'' (1984, featuring [[Laurie Anderson]], Marcus Miller, and [[King Crimson|Adrian Belew]], just to name a few guest musicians) was heavily based on vocal samples from dozens of languages, ''Revolutions'' (1988) had more Roland D-50 written over it than anything ever made by [[Enya]], ''Waiting For Cousteau'' (1990) was [[X Meets Y|Jarre meets]] [[Welcome to the Caribbean, Mon|steel drums]].
The 1993 album ''Chronologie'' saw Jarre on his way back to the roots with the dance styles of [[The Nineties]] combined with some analog synths and sounds used by Jarre in his more popular albums from [[The Seventies]]; besides, it was Jarre's first album with all tracks given the album title and the track number as titles since ''Magnetic Fields'' (1981). ''Oxygène 7-13'', released in 1997 (intended to be a 20-years-on-Oxygène anniversary album but delayed by several months) was thoroughly analog and an almost complete return to Jarre's [[Signature Style]], weren't it for some more contemporary dance beats in some parts.
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''Metamorphoses'' (2000) was Jarre's first and only album with the majority of tracks having vocals and lyrics and being sung for a change, only two out of twelve tracks are [[Instrumentals]]. Once again, though, it didn't sound like anything Jarre had made before. ''Sessions 2000'' (2002) was made of recorded electronic jazz-like jam sessions which Jarre put on a CD because he had to fulfill his album quota before he could get out of his record deal. His subsequent original releases (''Geometry Of Love'', 2003, ''Téo & Téa'', 2007) turned out so weird that Jarre hardly ever played anything out of them at his concerts. Instead, he revived older material twice (he had to because his old recordings remained property of the jazz label). In 2004, ''Aero'' was released, a sort of [[Greatest Hits Album]] with three new tracks and the rest having been partly re-recorded and remixed in surround sound, and in 2007, Jarre and three of his co-musicians remade all of ''Oxygène'' live in one sitting, enabling the whole album to be performed live on stage.
Jarre probably keeps a negative record sales record with his 1983 album ''Music For Supermarkets'', of which only one copy was produced and then sold at an auction.
A description of Jean Michel Jarre wouldn't be complete without mentioning his concerts. Jarre took both
It took him until 1993 to actually tour for the first time, and even then, he only played a couple of shows throughout Europe because each of the huge custom-made open-air stages took several days to weld together. And it wasn't before 1997—two years after his third big show in Paris, this time under the Eiffel Tower—that he had a tour concept that fit onto existing stages in locations with a solid roof. Jarre's last giant show in a city was part of Moscow's 850th anniversary, played in front of the State University (the biggest building in all of Moscow, and the architecture of the Stalin era was impressively huge) and watched by at least 3.5 million people as the university can be seen all over the city. The millennium celebrations led him to the pyramids of Gizeh which of course were used as projection screens again. The 21st century saw him play a number of smaller single shows in places such as the Akropolis in Athens, a Danish windmill park, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a legendary shipyard in Gdańsk, and the Moroccan desert; on the other hand, he has been playing one tour per year since 2008 where he keeps shamelessly showcasing unbelievable amounts of mostly highly valuable vintage synthesizers.
* La Cage (Single, 1971)
* Deserted Palace (1972)
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* Téo & Téa (2007)
* Oxygène – New Master Recording (2007)
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* [[AcCENT Upon the Wrong SylLABle]]: "Hey Gagarin" with vocoded vocals from Jarre himself. Unlike the correct Russian pronunciation, Jarre puts the emphasis in "Gagarin" on the last syllable. Justified in that the whole song is <s>sung</s> vocoded with a strong French accent, and in French, it's always the last syllable that's emphasized, and this happens to other words in it as well.
* [[Audience Participation]]: ''Revolution, Revolutions'' when played at a gig in the United Kingdom, Manchester in particular.
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* [[Spoken Word in Music]]: The weather forecast verses of "Tout Est Bleu", the original verses of "Millions Of Stars", "Je Me Souviens" and "Love Love Love" as a whole, parts of "C'est La Vie", the "project explanation" bits from "Téo & Téa", and understandable samples of Chinese in "Souvenir Of China" (the voice samples on ''Zoolook'' might or might not count). The lyrics of "Revolution, Revolutions" have always been spoken into the vocoder at concerts after 1990. And then there are the spoken interludes from the ''Europe In Concert'' tour.
* [[Technology Porn]]: The 2008 ''Oxygène Tour'' seemed to focus on gear. Loads of vintage gear. He even used special rectangular spotlights to illuminate synthesizers individually or in groups for a while. Tour merch included T-shirts with synth close-up images. The two following tours toned this down only slightly.
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20140911112410/http://blog.texfm.ro/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/jmj-pic.jpg This.]
** Many of Jarre's albums include lists of the gear used to record them. ''Rendez-vous'' goes as far as listing who of the musicians involved used what on which track.
* [[Theremin]]: Claimed to have been played on ''Oxygène 7-13''. This instrument did in fact appear at the ''Oxygène Arena Tour'' the same year and at every Jarre concert ever since. Jarre has actually learned to play it meanwhile.
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* [[Unusual User Interface]]: The Laser Harp. Instead of strings, it has laser beams which, meanwhile, are powerful enough to slice your hand if you put it in them with no protective gloves on. And yes, the laser harpist does insert his hands into the beams. The maximum number of 10 beams used by Jarre isn't much of an obstacle since different notes can be assigned to the beams.
* [[Word Salad Lyrics]]: "Millions of Stars" seems to have these, at least it had them before the verses were rewritten with stars and planets. If you're a musician, though, you will find out that they're chords. The first line in the first verse (see below) is actually even played at that time during the song.
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* [[Xenophone]]: [[Subverted Trope|Subverted]] in a sense by many instruments designed for Jarre. The Laser Harp is a perfect example—even today, many people don't believe it is actually playable.
** M. Jarre has had more than one laser harp since he started using them - they have been upgraded and replaced as technology has improved (for instance, earlier models were built into a podium with an overhead truss to intercept the beams). The current models may well function as implied, but some of the older ones plainly didn't (c.f. the London Docklands concert, where one of his hands drifted out of its beam without affecting the sustained note he was trying to hold).
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[[Category:Jean Michel Jarre]]
[[Category:Music]]
[[Category:Names to Know in Music]]
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