Jean Michel Jarre: Difference between revisions

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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.

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 soundeddid nothingnot likesound as though it had been made with machines (as opposed to [[Kraftwerk]], for example). The major labels saw no chance in [[Instrumentals|instrumental]] electronic music being commercially successful, though, so Jarre released ''Oxygène'' at a small jazz label where it reached gold status withinin no time. Since Jarre's music didn't fit into any established musical genre, the hit single "Oxygène 4" managed to top the U.S. pop, jazz, classical music, and country charts all at once; not bad for a French musician.

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 lightshowslight shows and audience sizes [[Up to Eleven]]. His 1979 premiere concert with only him and some electronic instruments on a stage on the Place de la Concorde in Paris already gave him an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the largest concert audience ever—one million. What they saw wasn't just a synth nerd in a keyboard castle but a show of lights and projections of previously unseen dimensions. In 1981, the British Embassy in the People's Republic of China got him to play five indoor concerts in Beijing and Shanghai as the first pop musician ever. Jarre's next live show in Houston, Texas, in 1986 was blown out of any proportions imaginable when he used just about all of downtown Houston's skyline as the backdrop (as in he had lights, laser projections, still images, and even movies shot onto the facades of several-100-feet-tall skyscrapers with skytrackers on their roofs and gigantic fireworks even above these) for a concert with which he beat his own record (more than 1.5 million spectators). He played a similar outdoor concert for Pope John Paul II in his hometown Lyons half a year later, he gave a show on a stage floating on the River Thames inmidst the ruins of the Queen Victoria Docks in London in 1988 during a phase of downright extremely bad weather, and he improved his own record a second time on a pyramid-shaped stage in front of Paris' brand-spanking-new skyscraper quarter La Défense in 1990 (for some 2.5 million people).

== {{Discography: ==}}

** [https://web.archive.org/web/20140911112410/http://blog.texfm.ro/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/jmj-pic.jpg This.]