I had a dream of you again.
I cannot stop now. Part of me you have been and part of me you will always be.
You don't know me, but you pulled me back into the waking living world. A tribe of people have helped me come along this slow and dreary course. You are the music of this march into the sunlight.
Now I know the power you have. It is no less than the power of life.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
America, Meet Jean-Michel Jarre
One of the Premier Musicians in the World Remains Mostly Unknown in the United States
In my own research I've been able to compile a list of the top ten reactions of American listeners to the music of Jean Michel Jarre.
10. "I'm feeling kind of odd."
9. "Wow. I can actually feel my brain taking shape."
8. "What the hell is this stuff?"
7. "I think I've heard this before, but I can't remember where."
6. "Turn it off. Please, turn it off!"
5. "Tragically new age. Someone's going to attack me with a crystal and a smudge wand any second now."
4. "All right. I'm hooked."
3. "There's no singing. What's up with that?"
2. "This is from some indie movie, right?"
1. "I don't quite understand it, but I like it."
It's no exaggeration to say that Jean Michel Jarre, the dynamic French composer, is the godfather of electronic music as we know it. The great revolution first went international with the release of Jarre's album "Oxygene" in 1976 and Jarre has never stopped. Around the world he's celebrated for his live light and music extravaganzas, many of which have had audiences of one million or more, and his concerts have set and broken world records for number of attendees. Jarre was the first western musician to ever perform in the People's Republic of China. In 1993 he became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. Jarre gave a free concert as part of the celebration of the wedding of Prince Albert of Monaco in early July. He even has an asteroid'"4422 Jarre'"named after him.
Yet, after all of these accomplishments, after 80 million records sold, Jean Michel Jarre remains largely unknown in the United States. It's not that the American demographic is the do-all and end-all, of course, but in a country where so many different musical styles are loved and enjoyed it's hard to understand how a performer with Jarre's credentials could slip under the radar.
Then again, maybe it's no surprise that Jarre isn't a household name in the United States. He's not particularly controversial, he's not making a fool of himself in public, he doesn't have a reality show or a fashion line (even if many people think he must be a designer based on his name), and his music actually requires the listener to be still and have an experience. He's never released an "Unplugged" album (obviously). For me and my coterie of Jarre fans, these are all positive things. But we're the exception.
Being a United States citizen, I've taken a step back to look at musical artists and the whole industry, wondering how would Jarre fit into the aural matrix. First, I refuse to believe that there's not a clandestine population of would-be fans who have simply never been introduced to Jarre and his work. Heck, I have to think of how I myself was introduced. Basically, my father was and is a Francophile and a French teacher. As he was tapped into the European current, he learned about this amazing new release called "Oxygene" and that was the beginning. Jean-Michel Jarre has been the music of my family's life ever since.
Lots of fans are here but they just don't know it yet. After all, it's not like electronic music isn't wildly popular. I keep bringing up the example of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. Reznor has been commercially successful without compromising his art and is widely considered an electronic musical genius in his own right. All of this was capped by his Oscar win for Best Soundtrack for his work on "The Social Network".
All right. As much as it pains me to admit it, looks and personality weigh in big time with American audiences. On this count, Jean-Michel Jarre has the whole package, whether he means to or not. In linguistics there is a class of accents called "plus accents", and for Americans a French accent is tops. Jarre goes one better with his clarity of expression and witty, personable style. I suspect he would easily fall into the American idea of "handsome". Like I said, it's awful that I need to even think along these lines, but it's the nature of the beast. On the other hand, if you've got it, flaunt it.
Finally, another thing to consider is the vast desert the music industry has become. This is the perfect time for the new--even if it's actually old. A new way of listening is like finding a new way of thinking, a new way of looking at the world. For us in the States, Jarre is not only something different, but it's nourishing, the encouragement to maybe reach beyond the limits we've set for ourselves.
Getting Jarre to bring his live spectacular to the United States is another matter.
On April 5, 1986, Jean-Michel Jarre performed a legendary concert Rendez-Vous Houston: A City in Concert. The futuristic skyscrapers were the backdrop for a spectacular light and laser show which accompanied the concert. This concert had an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest outdoor "rock concert" in history, with figures varying from 1 to 1.5 million in attendance. Rendez-Vous Houston celebrated the astronauts who had been lost in the Challenger disaster only two and a half months previously. Astronaut Ron McNair, a personal friend of Jarre, had been killed in the disaster. He was supposed to play the saxophone from space during the track "Last Rendez-Vous"; his substitute for the concert was Houston native Kirk Whalum. The event marked Houston's 150th birthday and NASA's 25th anniversary.
2011 marks 25 years since the Houston concert, and Jarre has not made a return visit. I've read some of his remarks about America being old fashioned and completely disinterested in his art and performance. I don't agree. I think the problem is that Jarre's music has no popular outlet in the United States. People who are fans were probably introduced to the music by other fans. But where would fresh listeners get to sample the Jarre experience left to their own devices?
Of course there are American Jarre fans already, but consider this an open invitation. Plug "Jean Michel Jarre" into your favorite search engine and find the various opportunities to listen to his music that are online. Who knows?
In my own research I've been able to compile a list of the top ten reactions of American listeners to the music of Jean Michel Jarre.
10. "I'm feeling kind of odd."
9. "Wow. I can actually feel my brain taking shape."
8. "What the hell is this stuff?"
7. "I think I've heard this before, but I can't remember where."
6. "Turn it off. Please, turn it off!"
5. "Tragically new age. Someone's going to attack me with a crystal and a smudge wand any second now."
4. "All right. I'm hooked."
3. "There's no singing. What's up with that?"
2. "This is from some indie movie, right?"
1. "I don't quite understand it, but I like it."
It's no exaggeration to say that Jean Michel Jarre, the dynamic French composer, is the godfather of electronic music as we know it. The great revolution first went international with the release of Jarre's album "Oxygene" in 1976 and Jarre has never stopped. Around the world he's celebrated for his live light and music extravaganzas, many of which have had audiences of one million or more, and his concerts have set and broken world records for number of attendees. Jarre was the first western musician to ever perform in the People's Republic of China. In 1993 he became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. Jarre gave a free concert as part of the celebration of the wedding of Prince Albert of Monaco in early July. He even has an asteroid'"4422 Jarre'"named after him.
Yet, after all of these accomplishments, after 80 million records sold, Jean Michel Jarre remains largely unknown in the United States. It's not that the American demographic is the do-all and end-all, of course, but in a country where so many different musical styles are loved and enjoyed it's hard to understand how a performer with Jarre's credentials could slip under the radar.
Then again, maybe it's no surprise that Jarre isn't a household name in the United States. He's not particularly controversial, he's not making a fool of himself in public, he doesn't have a reality show or a fashion line (even if many people think he must be a designer based on his name), and his music actually requires the listener to be still and have an experience. He's never released an "Unplugged" album (obviously). For me and my coterie of Jarre fans, these are all positive things. But we're the exception.
Being a United States citizen, I've taken a step back to look at musical artists and the whole industry, wondering how would Jarre fit into the aural matrix. First, I refuse to believe that there's not a clandestine population of would-be fans who have simply never been introduced to Jarre and his work. Heck, I have to think of how I myself was introduced. Basically, my father was and is a Francophile and a French teacher. As he was tapped into the European current, he learned about this amazing new release called "Oxygene" and that was the beginning. Jean-Michel Jarre has been the music of my family's life ever since.
Lots of fans are here but they just don't know it yet. After all, it's not like electronic music isn't wildly popular. I keep bringing up the example of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. Reznor has been commercially successful without compromising his art and is widely considered an electronic musical genius in his own right. All of this was capped by his Oscar win for Best Soundtrack for his work on "The Social Network".
All right. As much as it pains me to admit it, looks and personality weigh in big time with American audiences. On this count, Jean-Michel Jarre has the whole package, whether he means to or not. In linguistics there is a class of accents called "plus accents", and for Americans a French accent is tops. Jarre goes one better with his clarity of expression and witty, personable style. I suspect he would easily fall into the American idea of "handsome". Like I said, it's awful that I need to even think along these lines, but it's the nature of the beast. On the other hand, if you've got it, flaunt it.
Finally, another thing to consider is the vast desert the music industry has become. This is the perfect time for the new--even if it's actually old. A new way of listening is like finding a new way of thinking, a new way of looking at the world. For us in the States, Jarre is not only something different, but it's nourishing, the encouragement to maybe reach beyond the limits we've set for ourselves.
Getting Jarre to bring his live spectacular to the United States is another matter.
On April 5, 1986, Jean-Michel Jarre performed a legendary concert Rendez-Vous Houston: A City in Concert. The futuristic skyscrapers were the backdrop for a spectacular light and laser show which accompanied the concert. This concert had an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest outdoor "rock concert" in history, with figures varying from 1 to 1.5 million in attendance. Rendez-Vous Houston celebrated the astronauts who had been lost in the Challenger disaster only two and a half months previously. Astronaut Ron McNair, a personal friend of Jarre, had been killed in the disaster. He was supposed to play the saxophone from space during the track "Last Rendez-Vous"; his substitute for the concert was Houston native Kirk Whalum. The event marked Houston's 150th birthday and NASA's 25th anniversary.
2011 marks 25 years since the Houston concert, and Jarre has not made a return visit. I've read some of his remarks about America being old fashioned and completely disinterested in his art and performance. I don't agree. I think the problem is that Jarre's music has no popular outlet in the United States. People who are fans were probably introduced to the music by other fans. But where would fresh listeners get to sample the Jarre experience left to their own devices?
Of course there are American Jarre fans already, but consider this an open invitation. Plug "Jean Michel Jarre" into your favorite search engine and find the various opportunities to listen to his music that are online. Who knows?
Sunday, July 17, 2011
UPDATE: I Seem to Be Back
The new fan experience in the United States, which we're calling JarreFan USA-International (as it's open to everyone everywhere) has taken a definite shape with a network of Jarre fans from all parts of the States and our partners abroad.
"Magnetic Fields Forever" is the name of our website (in progress) as well as any
fanzines or publications created by the group.
We declared our existence and our purpose (to celebrate Jean Michel Jarre with the rest of the world) this past July 14, "La fete nationale". We're aiming to have the website and all of its goodies working by Jarre's birthday, August 24. Okay, so maybe this is too adorable...
Anyway, we're taking ideas, contributions, membership requests, whatever you can imagine at jarrefanusa@novemberwolf.com and remember that you don't have to be from the US to help bring a US presence into the world of Jarre fandom!
We're getting there!
"Magnetic Fields Forever" is the name of our website (in progress) as well as any
fanzines or publications created by the group.
We declared our existence and our purpose (to celebrate Jean Michel Jarre with the rest of the world) this past July 14, "La fete nationale". We're aiming to have the website and all of its goodies working by Jarre's birthday, August 24. Okay, so maybe this is too adorable...
Anyway, we're taking ideas, contributions, membership requests, whatever you can imagine at jarrefanusa@novemberwolf.com and remember that you don't have to be from the US to help bring a US presence into the world of Jarre fandom!
We're getting there!
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Essentials and Rarities Review
From playgroundmag.net
Jean Michel Jarre has always been a hard one to crack in the underground, as the memories of his excesses, especially those concerts in front of over a million people and his omnipresence in the eighties, still weigh on us heavily. In fact, even today, his music is seen as an extension of the worst commonplaces of progressive rock, the stuff that punk sought to eradicate: the symphonic, the epic, the virtuoso complacency, the passivity instead of angst, and even a certain scientific optimism close to new age, which is now strangely out of fashion. However, over the past few years there have been cautious attempts to revaluate certain aspects of his production, in the first place with the first wave of cosmic synths led by Lindstrøm, but most of all after the revolution caused by hypnagogic pop. A very clear example was given in a very funny article in The Wire, where Savage Pencil described how “hypnagogic kids” (sic) were flooding the secondhand stores to buy old Jean Michel Jarre vinyls.
The first CD of this double compilation album focuses on the most triumphant part of his career, and not one of his hits is missing, even to the point where it seems too obvious a selection, mostly because there already are a lot of other compilations with very similar tracklists. I suppose it’s a strategy to make the second, much more interesting part more attractive commercially, but in any case, it’s quite revealing to hear those compositions again after a few seasons of listening to artists like Stellar Om Source and Oneohtrix Point Never. Without a doubt, more than one of Jarre’s ideas have been used in hypnagogic pop, although with less grandiloquence and more darkness.
But, as said, the second part of the CD is the truly interesting one. It’s a collection of tracks from albums and singles prior to “Oxygène” (1976), which show quite a different side to the French musician. While it was known that Jean Michel was a student of Pierre Schaeffer in his Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Musical Research Group), it was almost an insignificant piece of information due the fact that the music he made under the influence of that group drew hardly any attention at the time and that, until now, few people had heard it, which made it hard to evaluate the true importance of his episode as a student of one of the pioneers of electronica and concrete music.
The excellent “Happiness Is A Sad Song” is a surprising opening to the second CD, a song made especially for an art exhibition, that shows Jarre as a good student of Schaeffer, completely immersed in the sound of the GRM and getting the best out of it. It’s not bad at all, as a starting point for his career. A big part of what follows shows an embryonic Jarre, experimenting in different fields, like prog, on the delicious “Hypnose”, on which his preference for the grandiloquent melody that has characterised the better part of his work is already showing. “Erosmachine” and “La Cage” were on a 7” that is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting rarities of this collection. It’s a single that would now most likely be released by Ghost Box. The two songs are spot on, from the meticulous sonic design in stereo and the oppressive tone of “Erosmachine” to the rhythmic exploration and abrasive sounds of “La Cage”.
The rest of the selection focuses on the two albums prior to “Oxygène”: the soundtrack of “Les Granges Brûlées” and “Deserted Place”, an album of library music constructed basically from a Farfisa organ and an EMS synthesiser. Of the two, the most interesting moments are on the latter, as the first is somewhat more functional, despite its trademark melodic attractiveness. Those melodies have a very Ghost Box-ish flavour to them on “Windswept Canyon”, of which the placid tone is accompanied on several occasions by a bubbling rhythm and the abrasive character of the sound of the wind mentioned in the title. Many of the tracks off “Deserted Place” are short, as they should be, because it’s library music, but there are also some interesting, albeit failed, experiments, like the upbeat “Rain Forest Rap Session” or the dismissible “Music Box Concerto” and “Iraqui Hitch-Hiker”. The songs from “Deserted Place”, in general, show Jarre as hesitant and irregular, but eager to try out different ideas with a more Spartan aesthetic than what he would do later on in his career.
“Essentials & Rarities” is, therefore, an inconsistent but opportune compilation, as it allows us to clarify his little-known beginnings at a time when his music is on the rise again, thanks to hypnagogic pop and the new cosmic sounds.
Jean Michel Jarre has always been a hard one to crack in the underground, as the memories of his excesses, especially those concerts in front of over a million people and his omnipresence in the eighties, still weigh on us heavily. In fact, even today, his music is seen as an extension of the worst commonplaces of progressive rock, the stuff that punk sought to eradicate: the symphonic, the epic, the virtuoso complacency, the passivity instead of angst, and even a certain scientific optimism close to new age, which is now strangely out of fashion. However, over the past few years there have been cautious attempts to revaluate certain aspects of his production, in the first place with the first wave of cosmic synths led by Lindstrøm, but most of all after the revolution caused by hypnagogic pop. A very clear example was given in a very funny article in The Wire, where Savage Pencil described how “hypnagogic kids” (sic) were flooding the secondhand stores to buy old Jean Michel Jarre vinyls.
The first CD of this double compilation album focuses on the most triumphant part of his career, and not one of his hits is missing, even to the point where it seems too obvious a selection, mostly because there already are a lot of other compilations with very similar tracklists. I suppose it’s a strategy to make the second, much more interesting part more attractive commercially, but in any case, it’s quite revealing to hear those compositions again after a few seasons of listening to artists like Stellar Om Source and Oneohtrix Point Never. Without a doubt, more than one of Jarre’s ideas have been used in hypnagogic pop, although with less grandiloquence and more darkness.
But, as said, the second part of the CD is the truly interesting one. It’s a collection of tracks from albums and singles prior to “Oxygène” (1976), which show quite a different side to the French musician. While it was known that Jean Michel was a student of Pierre Schaeffer in his Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Musical Research Group), it was almost an insignificant piece of information due the fact that the music he made under the influence of that group drew hardly any attention at the time and that, until now, few people had heard it, which made it hard to evaluate the true importance of his episode as a student of one of the pioneers of electronica and concrete music.
The excellent “Happiness Is A Sad Song” is a surprising opening to the second CD, a song made especially for an art exhibition, that shows Jarre as a good student of Schaeffer, completely immersed in the sound of the GRM and getting the best out of it. It’s not bad at all, as a starting point for his career. A big part of what follows shows an embryonic Jarre, experimenting in different fields, like prog, on the delicious “Hypnose”, on which his preference for the grandiloquent melody that has characterised the better part of his work is already showing. “Erosmachine” and “La Cage” were on a 7” that is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting rarities of this collection. It’s a single that would now most likely be released by Ghost Box. The two songs are spot on, from the meticulous sonic design in stereo and the oppressive tone of “Erosmachine” to the rhythmic exploration and abrasive sounds of “La Cage”.
The rest of the selection focuses on the two albums prior to “Oxygène”: the soundtrack of “Les Granges Brûlées” and “Deserted Place”, an album of library music constructed basically from a Farfisa organ and an EMS synthesiser. Of the two, the most interesting moments are on the latter, as the first is somewhat more functional, despite its trademark melodic attractiveness. Those melodies have a very Ghost Box-ish flavour to them on “Windswept Canyon”, of which the placid tone is accompanied on several occasions by a bubbling rhythm and the abrasive character of the sound of the wind mentioned in the title. Many of the tracks off “Deserted Place” are short, as they should be, because it’s library music, but there are also some interesting, albeit failed, experiments, like the upbeat “Rain Forest Rap Session” or the dismissible “Music Box Concerto” and “Iraqui Hitch-Hiker”. The songs from “Deserted Place”, in general, show Jarre as hesitant and irregular, but eager to try out different ideas with a more Spartan aesthetic than what he would do later on in his career.
“Essentials & Rarities” is, therefore, an inconsistent but opportune compilation, as it allows us to clarify his little-known beginnings at a time when his music is on the rise again, thanks to hypnagogic pop and the new cosmic sounds.
My Bad
I guess I'm apologizing to myself more than to anyone else. Things have gotten a little bumpy lately and I haven't been posting here as much as I'd like to. However, I want to credit my copy of "Essentials and Rarities" for helping me get through what's been kind of a rough time. But things are looking up, and I hope to have much to share about the "Princely Wedding" in Monaco and Jarre's jaw-dropping free concert in celebration at Port Hercule!
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Euronews Partnership
For the first time in its history, euronews is becoming a partner with a major figure of the music world to create a unique alliance between an international news channel and a world-renowned artist.
An extraordinary alignment of the stars must have brought about this surprising, yet natural joining of forces. The international news channel, euronews, and the world-renowned musician, Jean Michel Jarre, have decided to work together to cover a series of events, uniting their respective talents and know-how.
All Rights reserved
euronews and Jean Michel Jarre gravitate in similar directions, using the strength of images projected on the international stage. They also share common roots in the city of Lyon where Jarre was born and where euronews was established in 1993.
euronews will now accompany the artist on his European and global tours in the coming years.
The channel will be covering the release of Jean Michel Jarre's albums, including the upcoming "Essentials & Rarities," available as of Monday, 30 May 2011.
euronews will also participate in Jarre's European tour which will soon take him to every corner of the continent
Jean Michel Jarre and the teams of Euronews are exploring a whole range of collaborative projects on themes such as innovation in images, sound, the media and emerging technologies.
No Comment Live at the concert in Monaco
euronews will give a live, exclusive broadcast of the concert by Jean Michel Jarre for the wedding of H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco and Charlene Wittstock on 1 July. The show will be rebroadcast on a special edition of the channel's emblematic programme, "No Comment Live," and on all of its media platforms. From the event preparations to the live concert at Port Hercule and the ceremony, euronews will for the first time in its history create a real media event with complete coverage of the princely wedding. The build-up in the week before the celebration and highlights including the concert will be detailed in an upcoming press release by the channel.
About the partnership, Jean Michel Jarre said, "I always watch euronews during my frequent travels around the word. I genuinely appreciate the channel and feel a close connection with the values it defends: pure information, without distortion, factual analysis and a comprehensive perspective on the world. For me, it is an incredible resource for sharing and a platform for my European projects."
Michael Peters, Managing Director of euronews, explained, "The contact with Jean Michel Jarre has convinced us that an international news channel like euronews can venture into new territory by creating such an original partnership. We have found a synergy in the uniting of two different worlds and euronews is proud to accompany Jean Michel Jarre and his team on their worldwide audio-visual explorations."
An extraordinary alignment of the stars must have brought about this surprising, yet natural joining of forces. The international news channel, euronews, and the world-renowned musician, Jean Michel Jarre, have decided to work together to cover a series of events, uniting their respective talents and know-how.
All Rights reserved
euronews and Jean Michel Jarre gravitate in similar directions, using the strength of images projected on the international stage. They also share common roots in the city of Lyon where Jarre was born and where euronews was established in 1993.
euronews will now accompany the artist on his European and global tours in the coming years.
The channel will be covering the release of Jean Michel Jarre's albums, including the upcoming "Essentials & Rarities," available as of Monday, 30 May 2011.
euronews will also participate in Jarre's European tour which will soon take him to every corner of the continent
Jean Michel Jarre and the teams of Euronews are exploring a whole range of collaborative projects on themes such as innovation in images, sound, the media and emerging technologies.
No Comment Live at the concert in Monaco
euronews will give a live, exclusive broadcast of the concert by Jean Michel Jarre for the wedding of H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco and Charlene Wittstock on 1 July. The show will be rebroadcast on a special edition of the channel's emblematic programme, "No Comment Live," and on all of its media platforms. From the event preparations to the live concert at Port Hercule and the ceremony, euronews will for the first time in its history create a real media event with complete coverage of the princely wedding. The build-up in the week before the celebration and highlights including the concert will be detailed in an upcoming press release by the channel.
About the partnership, Jean Michel Jarre said, "I always watch euronews during my frequent travels around the word. I genuinely appreciate the channel and feel a close connection with the values it defends: pure information, without distortion, factual analysis and a comprehensive perspective on the world. For me, it is an incredible resource for sharing and a platform for my European projects."
Michael Peters, Managing Director of euronews, explained, "The contact with Jean Michel Jarre has convinced us that an international news channel like euronews can venture into new territory by creating such an original partnership. We have found a synergy in the uniting of two different worlds and euronews is proud to accompany Jean Michel Jarre and his team on their worldwide audio-visual explorations."
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
How Do I Say It In "American"?
Kind of a funny story. Indulge me.
My poor father has been searching for a replacement vehicle (new car sounds so materialistic). Since 1985 he has driven nothing but Chrysler minivans, and has sworn by them as the most efficient cars around. Unfortunately, the minivan is going by way of the dodo. My dad would just get another of what he has know if he could, but it's not an option.
So we've both been researching minivan-like vehicles for months. Finally, he's starting to like the Chevrolet Equinox (that's the tie in). But after more than thirty years of using the French version in his speech because of Jarre's Equinoxe I'm having to train him in saying the word in a way our local car dealing folks will understand.
But there's no way around it. "Equinox" just looks strange to us. "We can fix it," I told him. "We'll get a stick on metallic 'e' to the name and have the only Equinoxe in the neighborhood."
My poor father has been searching for a replacement vehicle (new car sounds so materialistic). Since 1985 he has driven nothing but Chrysler minivans, and has sworn by them as the most efficient cars around. Unfortunately, the minivan is going by way of the dodo. My dad would just get another of what he has know if he could, but it's not an option.
So we've both been researching minivan-like vehicles for months. Finally, he's starting to like the Chevrolet Equinox (that's the tie in). But after more than thirty years of using the French version in his speech because of Jarre's Equinoxe I'm having to train him in saying the word in a way our local car dealing folks will understand.
But there's no way around it. "Equinox" just looks strange to us. "We can fix it," I told him. "We'll get a stick on metallic 'e' to the name and have the only Equinoxe in the neighborhood."
Sunday, May 29, 2011
From The Jelling Festival
Jean Michel Jarre, scene, Jelling Music Festival, Sunday 29th May
He is now a tragicomic figure him Jean Michel Jarre.
As the Frenchman appeared in Gl Vrå in 2002, sat all 1000 cars stuck in the mud of North Jutland, and when visionaries who headlined closed Jelling with a midnight concert, stood just a few thousand of the 50,000 festival wellies left in the South Jutland slipped.
The site was abandoned after three days of rain heavy hardships, and those who were to experience eccentrics, spurting the water for a few mud smeared sneakers because they found out that Jarre behaved like a lunatic scientist who had swallowed a glass of Prozac.
No blinding
The veteran show closed airspace over Jelling because of his laser light was a threat to flight safety, but blinding was the few rays now not straightforward, and it is probably doubtful that alarmism could have many garden birds to roam uncertain of its wings. Rather, it was a threat to good taste.
ALSO READ: JEAN MICHEL JARRE CLOSE JYSK SKY
Although the somewhat Altmodisch and quite completed scenography possessed a certain geeky charm, so you can not say the same about music.
A bygone era
62-year-old Jarre has a few catchy themes, but his New Age-like naivete of a bygone era sounded hopelessly obsolete, and if we compare with Kraftwerk, the electronic composer does not match the Germans' cool format and different classic sound.
Jelling Music Festival anno 2011 was despite the circumstances actually a tolerable game, though neither will be remembered for Jarre, his idiot good tones or long neon tubes, but for rain, rain and again rain.
Jean Michel Jarre is famous - and infamous in the North - for its spectacular concerts, and after the mud disaster in Gl Vrå in 2002 is now mad again with visionaries from Lyon.
ALSO READ: 1000 CAR overtaken FREE AFTER Jarre CONCERT
Sunday, he is headlining the Jelling Music Festival, and because of the Frenchman's intense laser light, which appears to be a hazard to flight safety, so close the air space just above Jelling two hours Sunday evening in a "corridor of 18 times 18 km.
- There sits a man out of Billund Airport and directing aircraft around Jelling, says festival spokesman Thorkild High to Ekstra Bladet.
The third biggest
Jelling Music Festival over the years has evolved into the country's third biggest festival after Roskilde and Skanderborg, and there are only few partout tickets back to the year edition.
25,000 spectators will over the weekend could see Liam Gallagher's new band Beady Eye, and among many others LOC, Nik & Jay, Black Sun and not least Jean Michel Jarre.
He is now a tragicomic figure him Jean Michel Jarre.
As the Frenchman appeared in Gl Vrå in 2002, sat all 1000 cars stuck in the mud of North Jutland, and when visionaries who headlined closed Jelling with a midnight concert, stood just a few thousand of the 50,000 festival wellies left in the South Jutland slipped.
The site was abandoned after three days of rain heavy hardships, and those who were to experience eccentrics, spurting the water for a few mud smeared sneakers because they found out that Jarre behaved like a lunatic scientist who had swallowed a glass of Prozac.
No blinding
The veteran show closed airspace over Jelling because of his laser light was a threat to flight safety, but blinding was the few rays now not straightforward, and it is probably doubtful that alarmism could have many garden birds to roam uncertain of its wings. Rather, it was a threat to good taste.
ALSO READ: JEAN MICHEL JARRE CLOSE JYSK SKY
Although the somewhat Altmodisch and quite completed scenography possessed a certain geeky charm, so you can not say the same about music.
A bygone era
62-year-old Jarre has a few catchy themes, but his New Age-like naivete of a bygone era sounded hopelessly obsolete, and if we compare with Kraftwerk, the electronic composer does not match the Germans' cool format and different classic sound.
Jelling Music Festival anno 2011 was despite the circumstances actually a tolerable game, though neither will be remembered for Jarre, his idiot good tones or long neon tubes, but for rain, rain and again rain.
Jean Michel Jarre is famous - and infamous in the North - for its spectacular concerts, and after the mud disaster in Gl Vrå in 2002 is now mad again with visionaries from Lyon.
ALSO READ: 1000 CAR overtaken FREE AFTER Jarre CONCERT
Sunday, he is headlining the Jelling Music Festival, and because of the Frenchman's intense laser light, which appears to be a hazard to flight safety, so close the air space just above Jelling two hours Sunday evening in a "corridor of 18 times 18 km.
- There sits a man out of Billund Airport and directing aircraft around Jelling, says festival spokesman Thorkild High to Ekstra Bladet.
The third biggest
Jelling Music Festival over the years has evolved into the country's third biggest festival after Roskilde and Skanderborg, and there are only few partout tickets back to the year edition.
25,000 spectators will over the weekend could see Liam Gallagher's new band Beady Eye, and among many others LOC, Nik & Jay, Black Sun and not least Jean Michel Jarre.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Practical Urban Applications for JMJ's Music
10) Relieves stress while stuck in traffic
9) Makes the El trip from Penn back up to the Northeast seem faster
8) Mood music--need I say more?
7) Great for sitting by the river
6) Throws everyone for a loop when blasted out of car windows
5) Relaxes scared pooches during thunderstorms
4) Enables concentration at work without getting tense
3) Serves as an ice breaker with strangers
2) Sends a "leave me alone" vibe to roommates without being rude
1) You can almost forget you're swinging through the urban jungle
9) Makes the El trip from Penn back up to the Northeast seem faster
8) Mood music--need I say more?
7) Great for sitting by the river
6) Throws everyone for a loop when blasted out of car windows
5) Relaxes scared pooches during thunderstorms
4) Enables concentration at work without getting tense
3) Serves as an ice breaker with strangers
2) Sends a "leave me alone" vibe to roommates without being rude
1) You can almost forget you're swinging through the urban jungle
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Mediacrity?
JEAN MICHEL JARRE, the French musician who pioneered electronic music with his album Oxygene 25 years ago, plans to perform a concert powered totally by wind, writes Maurice Chittenden.
The synthesizer player, who has played to millions of people by taking over whole cities for extravagant light and sound shows, will rely on energy from 45 windmills.
The event, planned for a wind farm near Aalborg in Denmark next spring, will include displays by wind surfers and giant projections of pictures of windmills. Carlsberg and Tuborg, the lager companies, have been involved in negotiations over possible sponsorship.
The concert for 50,000 people aims to raise more than £1m for charity and will be filmed for future broadcast.
Jarre, 53, once married to the British actress Charlotte Rampling, said: "When talking about the wind, people nearly always state what damage it can cause. However, through the music I am composing specially for the show, it will express how we can use the wind in our favour.
"Both the wind and water are elements that go back to the creation of Earth. The element of water has been used a lot by artists for many years. However, very little has been done using the wind."
Jarre, who ate nothing but beans on toast for two weeks on his first trip to Britain on a school exchange 40 years ago, said: "When you are a passenger on an aircraft you can see light and the wind as the plane rises. Thousands of images are conjured up in your mind. The wind will be the engine and the heart of the concert."
The performer, who has sold more than 50m albums, took over London’s emerging Docklands 13 years ago for a spectacular show of lasers, fireworks and images projected on buildings. Hank Marvin of the Shadows joined him on stage and the concert was watched by the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
He has since performed similar concerts in Houston, Beijing, Paris and Moscow, playing to 3m people in the Russian capital in what was claimed to be the biggest ever rock concert. He celebrated the millennium with a show at the pyramids.
The synthesizer player, who has played to millions of people by taking over whole cities for extravagant light and sound shows, will rely on energy from 45 windmills.
The event, planned for a wind farm near Aalborg in Denmark next spring, will include displays by wind surfers and giant projections of pictures of windmills. Carlsberg and Tuborg, the lager companies, have been involved in negotiations over possible sponsorship.
The concert for 50,000 people aims to raise more than £1m for charity and will be filmed for future broadcast.
Jarre, 53, once married to the British actress Charlotte Rampling, said: "When talking about the wind, people nearly always state what damage it can cause. However, through the music I am composing specially for the show, it will express how we can use the wind in our favour.
"Both the wind and water are elements that go back to the creation of Earth. The element of water has been used a lot by artists for many years. However, very little has been done using the wind."
Jarre, who ate nothing but beans on toast for two weeks on his first trip to Britain on a school exchange 40 years ago, said: "When you are a passenger on an aircraft you can see light and the wind as the plane rises. Thousands of images are conjured up in your mind. The wind will be the engine and the heart of the concert."
The performer, who has sold more than 50m albums, took over London’s emerging Docklands 13 years ago for a spectacular show of lasers, fireworks and images projected on buildings. Hank Marvin of the Shadows joined him on stage and the concert was watched by the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
He has since performed similar concerts in Houston, Beijing, Paris and Moscow, playing to 3m people in the Russian capital in what was claimed to be the biggest ever rock concert. He celebrated the millennium with a show at the pyramids.
Monday, May 23, 2011
If JMJ had gone into designing bumperstickers...
Is that a Moog in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Real men wear pink.
My other keyboard is a VCS3.
Cover me. I'm changing tempos.
Virgos do it first. Virgos do it best.
A man with a laser harp knows no boundaries.
I'll spell "Oxygene" any damn way I want!
Concerts around the world and still no place to park.
Nope. THAT part is not mechanical.
Don't get older. Get better!
Real men wear pink.
My other keyboard is a VCS3.
Cover me. I'm changing tempos.
Virgos do it first. Virgos do it best.
A man with a laser harp knows no boundaries.
I'll spell "Oxygene" any damn way I want!
Concerts around the world and still no place to park.
Nope. THAT part is not mechanical.
Don't get older. Get better!
Video Bons Bons
From the tour
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mofBAHsUUz4
Interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lCPjWtmpAo
Interview after rehearsal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP-yCCzF7lU
Humorous 1997 interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX183ml-W9k
Jarre talking about Teo & Tea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSAY-hknEIc
Of course there will be more!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mofBAHsUUz4
Interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lCPjWtmpAo
Interview after rehearsal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP-yCCzF7lU
Humorous 1997 interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX183ml-W9k
Jarre talking about Teo & Tea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSAY-hknEIc
Of course there will be more!
Gone Vaporware
Not really. "Vaporware" was what we used to call people from the amnin cult who were still in the community but never popped up on IRC or newsgroups.
In this case, I've pushed the machine off to the side so that I could let the music transport me out beyond the stars.
In this case, I've pushed the machine off to the side so that I could let the music transport me out beyond the stars.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Back to Harmonic OBE
It's been a while since I've made a post from my metaphysical vantage point of the world as it is shaped with the help of one man and his music. I feel like I'm doing something almost sacred in my efforts to raise awareness of this master of harmonics here in my country. It's like we'd all be better with this music in our lives and souls. Maybe that's carried away, but then again I'm carried away, and I only wish everyone could feel this free passion, this escape from the gravity of the every day. How much more can the hand be extended? The entire world has climbed aboard and learned to fly. Why shouldn't we? Let me be the bridge.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Essentials and Rarities
The tracklist of Jarre's forthcoming album, released 30th May.
CD 1 – ESSENTIALS
1. Souvenir Of China 3’59
2. Oxygene 2 3’12
3. Arpegiateur 6’16
4. Oxygene 4 4’14
5. Equinoxe 4 6’42
6. Calypso 2 2’28
7. Zoolook 3’52
8. Magnetic Fields 1 5’20
9. Magnetic Fields 2 4’02
10. Equinoxe 5 3’55
11. Industrial Revolution 2 2’22
12. Rendez Vous 4 3’59
13. Gloria, Lonely Boy 5’30
14. Oxygene 6 6’21
15. Space Of Freedom 8’02
CD 2 – RARITIES
1. Happiness Is A Sad Song 5’53
2. Hypnose 3’29
3. Erosmachine 2’58
4. La Cage 3’23
5. Chanson Des Granges Brûlées 2’45
Song Of The Burnt Barns
6. Windswept Canyon 7’39
7. The Abominable Snowman 0’52
8. Deserted Palace 2’22
9. Le Pays De Rose / Roseland 2’01
10. Rain Forest Rap Session 1’40
11. Black Bird 3’06
12. Music Box Concerto 2’41
13. Iraqi Hitch-Hiker 2’25
14. Les Granges Brûlées 3’13
15. La Cage Vitalic RMX 4’16
16. Erosmachine Vitalic RMX 3’45
You can order it here.
CD 1 – ESSENTIALS
1. Souvenir Of China 3’59
2. Oxygene 2 3’12
3. Arpegiateur 6’16
4. Oxygene 4 4’14
5. Equinoxe 4 6’42
6. Calypso 2 2’28
7. Zoolook 3’52
8. Magnetic Fields 1 5’20
9. Magnetic Fields 2 4’02
10. Equinoxe 5 3’55
11. Industrial Revolution 2 2’22
12. Rendez Vous 4 3’59
13. Gloria, Lonely Boy 5’30
14. Oxygene 6 6’21
15. Space Of Freedom 8’02
CD 2 – RARITIES
1. Happiness Is A Sad Song 5’53
2. Hypnose 3’29
3. Erosmachine 2’58
4. La Cage 3’23
5. Chanson Des Granges Brûlées 2’45
Song Of The Burnt Barns
6. Windswept Canyon 7’39
7. The Abominable Snowman 0’52
8. Deserted Palace 2’22
9. Le Pays De Rose / Roseland 2’01
10. Rain Forest Rap Session 1’40
11. Black Bird 3’06
12. Music Box Concerto 2’41
13. Iraqi Hitch-Hiker 2’25
14. Les Granges Brûlées 3’13
15. La Cage Vitalic RMX 4’16
16. Erosmachine Vitalic RMX 3’45
You can order it here.
Ten Things I Learned From Watching The "Equinoxe 5" Video (more humor)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO5w30uKISk&playnext=1&list=PLB07D67161846D92A
10) Great hair disguises a multitude of sins.
9) If you play a synthesizer on the beach long enough, a horse will suddenly appear.
8) Create a hypnotic image for your album cover and it will follow you everywhere.
7) Sometimes there's just no escaping the 1970's.
6) Run the same few seconds of film over and over and maybe no one will notice.
5) If you've got good eyes, flaunt them.
4) Only a blessed few people can make synthesizing sexy.
3) Elevator shots always end up being interesting.
2) Synthesizer set ups can appear in any natural setting.
1) If you're going to hallucinate, do it to your own music.
10) Great hair disguises a multitude of sins.
9) If you play a synthesizer on the beach long enough, a horse will suddenly appear.
8) Create a hypnotic image for your album cover and it will follow you everywhere.
7) Sometimes there's just no escaping the 1970's.
6) Run the same few seconds of film over and over and maybe no one will notice.
5) If you've got good eyes, flaunt them.
4) Only a blessed few people can make synthesizing sexy.
3) Elevator shots always end up being interesting.
2) Synthesizer set ups can appear in any natural setting.
1) If you're going to hallucinate, do it to your own music.
Friday, May 13, 2011
America, Meet Jean-Michel Jarre
It's probably no surprise that Jean-Michel Jarre isn't exactly a household name in the United States. He's not controversial, he's not making a fool of himself in public, he doesn't have a reality show or a fashion line (even if many people think he must be a designer based on his name), and his music actually requires the listener to be still and have an experience. He's never released an "Unplugged" album (obviously). For me and my coterie of Jarre fans, these are all positive things. But we're the exception.
Being a United States citizen, I've taken a step back to look at musical artists and the whole industry, wondering how would Jarre fit into the aural matrix. First, I refuse to believe that there's not a clandestine population of would-be fans who have simply never been introduced to Jarre and his work. Heck, I have to think of how I myself was introduced. Basically, my father was and is a Francophile and a French teacher. As he was tapped into the European current, he learned about this amazing new release called "Oxygene" and that was the beginning. Jean-Michel Jarre has been the music of my family's life ever since.
They are here, and they don't know it yet. After all, it's not like electronic music isn't wildly popular. I keep bringing up the example of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. Reznor has been commercially successful without compromising his art and is widely considered an electronic musical genius in his own right. All of this was capped by his Oscar win for Best Soundtrack for his work on "The Social Network". Yes, I am also a dyed-in-the-wool Trent Reznor admirer, but the point remains. Electronic music has a definite place on the American landscape.
As much as it pains me to admit it, looks and personality weigh in big time with American audiences. Fortunately, I think Jean-Michel Jarre has the whole package, whether he means to or not. In linguistics there is a class of accents called "plus accents", and for Americans a French accent is tops. Jarre goes one better with his clarity of expression and witty, personable style. I suspect he would easily fall into the American idea of "handsome". Like I said, it's awful that I need to even think along these lines, but it's the nature of the beast. On the other hand, if you've got it, flaunt it.
Finally, another thing to consider is the vast desert the music industry has become. This is the perfect time for the new--even if it's actually old. A new way of listening is like finding a new way of thinking, a new way of looking at the world. For us in the States, Jean-Michel Jarre is not only something different, but it's nourishing, the encouragement to maybe reach beyond the limits we've set for ourselves. I would applaud a Jarre renaissance in the States. We need it. Badly.
Being a United States citizen, I've taken a step back to look at musical artists and the whole industry, wondering how would Jarre fit into the aural matrix. First, I refuse to believe that there's not a clandestine population of would-be fans who have simply never been introduced to Jarre and his work. Heck, I have to think of how I myself was introduced. Basically, my father was and is a Francophile and a French teacher. As he was tapped into the European current, he learned about this amazing new release called "Oxygene" and that was the beginning. Jean-Michel Jarre has been the music of my family's life ever since.
They are here, and they don't know it yet. After all, it's not like electronic music isn't wildly popular. I keep bringing up the example of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. Reznor has been commercially successful without compromising his art and is widely considered an electronic musical genius in his own right. All of this was capped by his Oscar win for Best Soundtrack for his work on "The Social Network". Yes, I am also a dyed-in-the-wool Trent Reznor admirer, but the point remains. Electronic music has a definite place on the American landscape.
As much as it pains me to admit it, looks and personality weigh in big time with American audiences. Fortunately, I think Jean-Michel Jarre has the whole package, whether he means to or not. In linguistics there is a class of accents called "plus accents", and for Americans a French accent is tops. Jarre goes one better with his clarity of expression and witty, personable style. I suspect he would easily fall into the American idea of "handsome". Like I said, it's awful that I need to even think along these lines, but it's the nature of the beast. On the other hand, if you've got it, flaunt it.
Finally, another thing to consider is the vast desert the music industry has become. This is the perfect time for the new--even if it's actually old. A new way of listening is like finding a new way of thinking, a new way of looking at the world. For us in the States, Jean-Michel Jarre is not only something different, but it's nourishing, the encouragement to maybe reach beyond the limits we've set for ourselves. I would applaud a Jarre renaissance in the States. We need it. Badly.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Top Ten American Reactions to JMJ's Music (humor)
10. "I'm feeling kind of odd."
9. "Wow. I can actually feel my brain taking shape."
8. "What the hell is this stuff?"
7. "I think I've heard this before, but I can't remember where."
6. "Turn it off. Please, turn it off!"
5. "Tragically new age. Someone's going to attack me with a crystal and a smudge wand any second now."
4. "All right. I'm hooked."
3. "There's no singing. What's up with that?"
2. "This is from some indie movie, right?"
1. "I don't quite understand it, but I like it."
9. "Wow. I can actually feel my brain taking shape."
8. "What the hell is this stuff?"
7. "I think I've heard this before, but I can't remember where."
6. "Turn it off. Please, turn it off!"
5. "Tragically new age. Someone's going to attack me with a crystal and a smudge wand any second now."
4. "All right. I'm hooked."
3. "There's no singing. What's up with that?"
2. "This is from some indie movie, right?"
1. "I don't quite understand it, but I like it."
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Crazy In A Good Way
This is a totally superficial post addressing Jean Michel Jarre as an enchanting and attractive man.
I've looked at the dates. Jean Michel was 23 when I was born, which makes him a contemporary of my parents.
Appreciating Jean Michel as a devastatingly sexy man is easy as long as I don't think about my parents.
Besides, 23 years older is way too old, right? It's a crazy fantasy.
And then I started checking out the dates on the women he's been linked to.
Charlotte Rampling is 2 years older than Jean Michel, so nothing earth-shattering.
But...Isabelle Adjani was born in 1960. So she's 11 years older than me and 12 years younger than Jean Michel. In other words, he's not adverse to fishing in a younger pond.
And this is the kicker. Jean Michel has been linked to the irritatingly beautiful Marie Drucker. She was born in 1974 and is therefore 3 years younger than me!
I'm not sure why this is funny to me, but I've been laughing pretty hard.
I've looked at the dates. Jean Michel was 23 when I was born, which makes him a contemporary of my parents.
Appreciating Jean Michel as a devastatingly sexy man is easy as long as I don't think about my parents.
Besides, 23 years older is way too old, right? It's a crazy fantasy.
And then I started checking out the dates on the women he's been linked to.
Charlotte Rampling is 2 years older than Jean Michel, so nothing earth-shattering.
But...Isabelle Adjani was born in 1960. So she's 11 years older than me and 12 years younger than Jean Michel. In other words, he's not adverse to fishing in a younger pond.
And this is the kicker. Jean Michel has been linked to the irritatingly beautiful Marie Drucker. She was born in 1974 and is therefore 3 years younger than me!
I'm not sure why this is funny to me, but I've been laughing pretty hard.
Monday, May 2, 2011
My Jarre Project--What Am I Up To?
After a few weeks of wondering and puzzling and trying to figure out what the hell I'm looking to do with all of this, I've decided to buckle down and share what's going on in my head. After all, getting other people interested is at the heart of this whole enterprise, and it's tough to raise interest without some clue as to how and why. So here we go.
1) Cultural Rehab for the United States
All right, now I'm aware that Jean-Michel Jarre isn't exactly stoked about performing in the States. And he's right--his music and stage shows aren't exactly what your average American is looking for as far as entertainment. What I've observed living in the United States is that relatively few people are ever exposed to Jarre, but those that get a taste quickly become devoted fans. Once people know him, they love him. So the question really is, "How do we introduce Jean-Michel Jarre to the widest possible audience?"
In the absence of a fan club type organization in the States (so far as I know) I'm stepping in to mobilize Jarre fans with the major objective of bringing at least one show to our shores. However improbable, the only way this goal is impossible is if no one bothers to try.
2) The "Jarrechives"
This one might prove a little easier. Essentially, I'm looking to gather all articles and other media about Jean-Michel Jarre into one online archive--or as I put it, "Jarrechive". Through these writings we all get a better feel for Jarre the person, not to mention his life has made for some very interesting reading. I've already begun by searching for online articles and bringing them together on my blog, but I'm inviting everyone to contribute. All languages are welcome (we can find willing translators). You can send links, texts, or other media to me at ejconroy778@gmail.com . All contributors will be included among the Jarrechive supporters as part of the project.
Personally I'm excited!
1) Cultural Rehab for the United States
All right, now I'm aware that Jean-Michel Jarre isn't exactly stoked about performing in the States. And he's right--his music and stage shows aren't exactly what your average American is looking for as far as entertainment. What I've observed living in the United States is that relatively few people are ever exposed to Jarre, but those that get a taste quickly become devoted fans. Once people know him, they love him. So the question really is, "How do we introduce Jean-Michel Jarre to the widest possible audience?"
In the absence of a fan club type organization in the States (so far as I know) I'm stepping in to mobilize Jarre fans with the major objective of bringing at least one show to our shores. However improbable, the only way this goal is impossible is if no one bothers to try.
2) The "Jarrechives"
This one might prove a little easier. Essentially, I'm looking to gather all articles and other media about Jean-Michel Jarre into one online archive--or as I put it, "Jarrechive". Through these writings we all get a better feel for Jarre the person, not to mention his life has made for some very interesting reading. I've already begun by searching for online articles and bringing them together on my blog, but I'm inviting everyone to contribute. All languages are welcome (we can find willing translators). You can send links, texts, or other media to me at ejconroy778@gmail.com . All contributors will be included among the Jarrechive supporters as part of the project.
Personally I'm excited!
From Paris-Match
Should I translate these into English or just let readers attempt French?
http://www.parismatch.com/Culture-Match/Musique/Actu/Jean-Michel-Jarre.-70187/
http://www.parismatch.com/Culture-Match/Musique/Actu/Dans-les-coulisses-du-concert-de-Jean-Michel-Jarre-106665/
http://www.parismatch.com/Culture-Match/Musique/Actu/Jean-Michel-Jarre.-70187/
http://www.parismatch.com/Culture-Match/Musique/Actu/Dans-les-coulisses-du-concert-de-Jean-Michel-Jarre-106665/
Friday, April 29, 2011
Jarre in America--Nothing Is Impossible
After all, it's happened before.
On April 5, 1986, Jean-Michel Jarre performed a legendary concert Rendez-Vous Houston: A City in Concert. The futuristic skyscrapers were the backdrop for a spectacular light and laser show which accompanied the concert. This concert had an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest outdoor "rock concert" in history, with figures varying from 1 to 1.5 million in attendance (Jarre has achieved world record events on several occasions). Rendez-Vous Houston celebrated the astronauts who had been lost in the Challenger disaster only two and a half months. Astronaut Ron McNair, a personal friend of Jarre, had been killed in the disaster. He was supposed to play the saxophone from space during the track "Last Rendez-Vous"; his substitute for the concert was Houston native Kirk Whalum. The event marked Houston's 150th birthday and NASA's 25th anniversary.
This year marks 25 years since the Houston concert, and Jarre has not made a return visit. I've read some of his remarks about America being old fashioned and completely disinterested in his art and performance. I don't agree. I think the problem is that Jarre's music has no popular outlet in the United States. People who are fans were probably introduced to the music by other fans. But where would fresh listeners get to sample the Jarre experience left to their own devices?
People who have spent the last 35 years without ever hearing Oxygene would probably be amazed to discover Jarre's discography and the diversity of styles. But it's also happening right now. Essentials and Rarities, a two-disk import, will be available in the United States June 7.
On April 5, 1986, Jean-Michel Jarre performed a legendary concert Rendez-Vous Houston: A City in Concert. The futuristic skyscrapers were the backdrop for a spectacular light and laser show which accompanied the concert. This concert had an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest outdoor "rock concert" in history, with figures varying from 1 to 1.5 million in attendance (Jarre has achieved world record events on several occasions). Rendez-Vous Houston celebrated the astronauts who had been lost in the Challenger disaster only two and a half months. Astronaut Ron McNair, a personal friend of Jarre, had been killed in the disaster. He was supposed to play the saxophone from space during the track "Last Rendez-Vous"; his substitute for the concert was Houston native Kirk Whalum. The event marked Houston's 150th birthday and NASA's 25th anniversary.
This year marks 25 years since the Houston concert, and Jarre has not made a return visit. I've read some of his remarks about America being old fashioned and completely disinterested in his art and performance. I don't agree. I think the problem is that Jarre's music has no popular outlet in the United States. People who are fans were probably introduced to the music by other fans. But where would fresh listeners get to sample the Jarre experience left to their own devices?
People who have spent the last 35 years without ever hearing Oxygene would probably be amazed to discover Jarre's discography and the diversity of styles. But it's also happening right now. Essentials and Rarities, a two-disk import, will be available in the United States June 7.
Music for Exploring the Universe
Sometimes in the urban summer evenings, when the neighborhood kids have been herded indoors and the fuzz popping irritation seems like only the crest of a distant nightmare, I go out into my garden to listen to the Universe.
There are almost as many names for this presence as there are stars in the celestial sphere. Perhaps the most popular name for this is simply "God", but for me that's too limiting. "Universe" pretty much encompasses all the possibilities.
I listen, and I hear it speaking. I don't mean a voices in my head kind of speaking. The feeling is more like a gentle but all-pervasive reminder. My life is not only planted in the mundane. I am living as a being infused and gifted with a relationship to the Universe. Whatever else might happen in my life, that relationship is actually what's most important to me.
But it's not all sweet and kind, like being lifted away on the white feathers of an angel's wings. Oh no, that's not how it works for me. Very frequently I can hear the Universe laughing at me, and I probably deserve it. This happens when I have blithely ignored sign after sign of trouble ahead, only to learn a lesson the hard and sometimes painful way. You see, the Universe warns me when I'm about to do something especially stupid. The problem is getting my primate brain to recognize the warnings for what they are.
I get especially disquieted when I see that the Universe has saved me from what may have been a disaster. The signs have been abundantly clear, but in my primate ignorance I chose to ignore them. For instance, I'm even now writing this from the security of a metaphorical palm that swooped down and carried me out of what could possibly been a mistake at best and a life-bending horror at the worst. This time, at last, I see the signs, and I'm interpreting them in a way I feel is metaphysically correct.
At least in my experience, the Universe doesn't discriminate. Whatever your belief system or non-belief system, the Universe is the Universe, and it will warn you and guide you if you keep open to the signs. And when the Universe suggests something might not be the best of ideas, think about it.
Maybe it's not what you want, but it might be what you need.
There are almost as many names for this presence as there are stars in the celestial sphere. Perhaps the most popular name for this is simply "God", but for me that's too limiting. "Universe" pretty much encompasses all the possibilities.
I listen, and I hear it speaking. I don't mean a voices in my head kind of speaking. The feeling is more like a gentle but all-pervasive reminder. My life is not only planted in the mundane. I am living as a being infused and gifted with a relationship to the Universe. Whatever else might happen in my life, that relationship is actually what's most important to me.
But it's not all sweet and kind, like being lifted away on the white feathers of an angel's wings. Oh no, that's not how it works for me. Very frequently I can hear the Universe laughing at me, and I probably deserve it. This happens when I have blithely ignored sign after sign of trouble ahead, only to learn a lesson the hard and sometimes painful way. You see, the Universe warns me when I'm about to do something especially stupid. The problem is getting my primate brain to recognize the warnings for what they are.
I get especially disquieted when I see that the Universe has saved me from what may have been a disaster. The signs have been abundantly clear, but in my primate ignorance I chose to ignore them. For instance, I'm even now writing this from the security of a metaphorical palm that swooped down and carried me out of what could possibly been a mistake at best and a life-bending horror at the worst. This time, at last, I see the signs, and I'm interpreting them in a way I feel is metaphysically correct.
At least in my experience, the Universe doesn't discriminate. Whatever your belief system or non-belief system, the Universe is the Universe, and it will warn you and guide you if you keep open to the signs. And when the Universe suggests something might not be the best of ideas, think about it.
Maybe it's not what you want, but it might be what you need.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
More Quantum Artifacts
People Magazine
December 05, 1977 Vol. 8 No. 23
Charlotte Rampling Makes Strange Music with Electronic Composer Jean-Michel Jarre
By Kevin Dowling
All the appropriate titles—Three's Company, One Day at a Time, What's Happening—have been preempted. So suffice it to say that this is about actress Charlotte Rampling, 31, and recall that when last heard from (PEOPLE, Feb. 3, 1975) she was fresh from choosing press agent Brian Southcombe over male model Randall Lawrence, thus breaking up their London ménage à trois. Charlotte was also saying she had had Brian's baby "to keep us together."
Since then the green-eyed British colonel's daughter has replaced hapless Southcombe with a new man: Jean-Michel Jarre, 29, a celebrated French composer of electronic music.
They met in May 1976 at dinner in a friend's restaurant, Chez Nano, in St.-Tropez. Rampling and Southcombe were living nearby in apparent bliss with their son, Barnaby. Sampling the fondue Chez Nano that balmy evening, Southcombe, a New Zealander public relations consultant who helped guide Charlotte's career, could hardly have dreamed that in less than a week he would be saying goodbye to his partner of 11 years and wife of four.
"After that meal," says Jarre, from a sofa in Charlotte's rambling apartment in the fashionable Eighth Arrondissement, "the next time we were together was two days later here in Paris. After that there was no need for further discussion. We have been together since that time."
They went public early in their affair, appearing together at the Cannes film festival where Charlotte was a judge. Jarre slept in her room, and whenever they went out an avalanche of photographers pursued them. Rampling was under heavy career pressure at the time. With an uncertain record (Georgy Girl was her best-remembered credit), she had starred in the sadomasochistic Night Porter, then rejected "a variety of extraordinary women's roles—perverse, degenerate, frightening." Three roles she did play added little to her professional stature. One was Jackpot, with Richard Burton as co-star, which ran out of money after 70 minutes of film were in the can. The second was Farewell, My Lovely, a humdrum private-eye film with Robert Mitchum. This year she appeared with Richard Harris in a whale epic, Orca, which bellied up.
And yet today, eight months after bearing Jarre's child, David—a half brother for Barnaby, now 4, and Jarre's 3-year-old daughter Emilie by his estranged wife—Charlotte seems undisturbed by her flagging career. Though she is pale, the chain-smoking and nervous foot twitching that once characterized her are gone.
Is this new demeanor the result of the change in partners? (Her divorce is final. Jarre's from a Paris public relations woman is not.) "I can't begin to explain," she says. "I could write a whole book about it if you want, but it concerns so many different elements, all mixed together..." Her voice trails off as she gropes for a summarizing phrase. "It comes out with certain results that I can't begin to tell you, really. Perhaps it's something that even I haven't absorbed yet." (For his part, Southcombe says, "I still love Charlotte and I'd have her back tomorrow if she'd come. But it seems to be over.")
One notable difference about this new partnership is the status of the man. When she was with Southcombe, Charlotte was the star. He was Mr. Rampling. At the time of Chez Nano, Jarre too was relatively unknown, but he was a musical innovator whose time was coming. It has arrived.
He is the hottest performer on Europe's pop music scene right now. An alumnus of the Conservatoire de Paris and the son of movie score composer Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago), Jean-Michel released an electronic music album, Oxygene, a year ago. It consists of synthesizer tracks that he composed, performed and produced. The album and a single have sold more than three million copies around the world. (The LP hit the U.S. in September and has climbed to number 78 on Billboard's charts.)
Composers, especially electronic ones, are something new to Rampling. "I'll never know where the music comes from," she marvels. "I often wonder why he doesn't suddenly sit up in bed and start singing or whistling something. He never does. The music just goes through his head all the time. When he is working he shuts himself in the studio for weeks on end. I don't hear anything till the job is finished."
Jarre nods: "I know what I am aiming for but I prefer to compose in private. There I can spend eight hours at a time working out the musical statement." He has a convert's passion about the role of electronic music. While reading for a degree in French literature at the University of Paris, he enrolled with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales of Pierre Schaeffer, the French guru of synthesizers. Jarre left after three years, charging that avant-garde sectarianism was just as lifeless as that of the Conservatoire. That same year, at 22, he wrote a stunning electronic ballet score, Aor, which created a minor sensation at the Paris Opera.
Now he creates new kinds of sound and helps create new instruments as well. On Oxygene he plays four synthesizers and a battery of new devices, one of which, the Rhythmin' Computer, was built to his order. For this reason Jarre likes to compare himself to the 17th-and 18th-century founders of classical music. "When one of those pioneers heard a sound in his head, he popped around the corner to an instrument maker and asked him to invent the clarinet," he says. More seriously, he observes, "Beethoven becomes an electronic composer when his music is played on the radio or through amplifiers. I'm just using the instruments of my time."
Jarre and Rampling's thinking comes together in the "New Philosophy" of Jean-Michel's friend, essayist Bernard-Henri Lévy. Lévy has outraged the French Left with his criticism of static ideologies and especially of Marxist theory.
The need, according to the New Philosophy, is for individuality, compassion and experience. To Charlotte and Jean-Michel that means marriage. "We have been busy, but next year we plan to get married," he says. They are already looking for a house—in the country, for the children's sake. "There are those who say that marriage is a restrictive formalism," Jarre adds. "In fact, marriage predates religion and law. It is a celebration of love between two people which is at the very base of our Western civilization."
Charlotte agrees, and says she is looking forward to "being fulfilled and developing as a woman and a wife and a mother." Could their life together be La Petite Maison dans la Prairie?
December 05, 1977 Vol. 8 No. 23
Charlotte Rampling Makes Strange Music with Electronic Composer Jean-Michel Jarre
By Kevin Dowling
All the appropriate titles—Three's Company, One Day at a Time, What's Happening—have been preempted. So suffice it to say that this is about actress Charlotte Rampling, 31, and recall that when last heard from (PEOPLE, Feb. 3, 1975) she was fresh from choosing press agent Brian Southcombe over male model Randall Lawrence, thus breaking up their London ménage à trois. Charlotte was also saying she had had Brian's baby "to keep us together."
Since then the green-eyed British colonel's daughter has replaced hapless Southcombe with a new man: Jean-Michel Jarre, 29, a celebrated French composer of electronic music.
They met in May 1976 at dinner in a friend's restaurant, Chez Nano, in St.-Tropez. Rampling and Southcombe were living nearby in apparent bliss with their son, Barnaby. Sampling the fondue Chez Nano that balmy evening, Southcombe, a New Zealander public relations consultant who helped guide Charlotte's career, could hardly have dreamed that in less than a week he would be saying goodbye to his partner of 11 years and wife of four.
"After that meal," says Jarre, from a sofa in Charlotte's rambling apartment in the fashionable Eighth Arrondissement, "the next time we were together was two days later here in Paris. After that there was no need for further discussion. We have been together since that time."
They went public early in their affair, appearing together at the Cannes film festival where Charlotte was a judge. Jarre slept in her room, and whenever they went out an avalanche of photographers pursued them. Rampling was under heavy career pressure at the time. With an uncertain record (Georgy Girl was her best-remembered credit), she had starred in the sadomasochistic Night Porter, then rejected "a variety of extraordinary women's roles—perverse, degenerate, frightening." Three roles she did play added little to her professional stature. One was Jackpot, with Richard Burton as co-star, which ran out of money after 70 minutes of film were in the can. The second was Farewell, My Lovely, a humdrum private-eye film with Robert Mitchum. This year she appeared with Richard Harris in a whale epic, Orca, which bellied up.
And yet today, eight months after bearing Jarre's child, David—a half brother for Barnaby, now 4, and Jarre's 3-year-old daughter Emilie by his estranged wife—Charlotte seems undisturbed by her flagging career. Though she is pale, the chain-smoking and nervous foot twitching that once characterized her are gone.
Is this new demeanor the result of the change in partners? (Her divorce is final. Jarre's from a Paris public relations woman is not.) "I can't begin to explain," she says. "I could write a whole book about it if you want, but it concerns so many different elements, all mixed together..." Her voice trails off as she gropes for a summarizing phrase. "It comes out with certain results that I can't begin to tell you, really. Perhaps it's something that even I haven't absorbed yet." (For his part, Southcombe says, "I still love Charlotte and I'd have her back tomorrow if she'd come. But it seems to be over.")
One notable difference about this new partnership is the status of the man. When she was with Southcombe, Charlotte was the star. He was Mr. Rampling. At the time of Chez Nano, Jarre too was relatively unknown, but he was a musical innovator whose time was coming. It has arrived.
He is the hottest performer on Europe's pop music scene right now. An alumnus of the Conservatoire de Paris and the son of movie score composer Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago), Jean-Michel released an electronic music album, Oxygene, a year ago. It consists of synthesizer tracks that he composed, performed and produced. The album and a single have sold more than three million copies around the world. (The LP hit the U.S. in September and has climbed to number 78 on Billboard's charts.)
Composers, especially electronic ones, are something new to Rampling. "I'll never know where the music comes from," she marvels. "I often wonder why he doesn't suddenly sit up in bed and start singing or whistling something. He never does. The music just goes through his head all the time. When he is working he shuts himself in the studio for weeks on end. I don't hear anything till the job is finished."
Jarre nods: "I know what I am aiming for but I prefer to compose in private. There I can spend eight hours at a time working out the musical statement." He has a convert's passion about the role of electronic music. While reading for a degree in French literature at the University of Paris, he enrolled with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales of Pierre Schaeffer, the French guru of synthesizers. Jarre left after three years, charging that avant-garde sectarianism was just as lifeless as that of the Conservatoire. That same year, at 22, he wrote a stunning electronic ballet score, Aor, which created a minor sensation at the Paris Opera.
Now he creates new kinds of sound and helps create new instruments as well. On Oxygene he plays four synthesizers and a battery of new devices, one of which, the Rhythmin' Computer, was built to his order. For this reason Jarre likes to compare himself to the 17th-and 18th-century founders of classical music. "When one of those pioneers heard a sound in his head, he popped around the corner to an instrument maker and asked him to invent the clarinet," he says. More seriously, he observes, "Beethoven becomes an electronic composer when his music is played on the radio or through amplifiers. I'm just using the instruments of my time."
Jarre and Rampling's thinking comes together in the "New Philosophy" of Jean-Michel's friend, essayist Bernard-Henri Lévy. Lévy has outraged the French Left with his criticism of static ideologies and especially of Marxist theory.
The need, according to the New Philosophy, is for individuality, compassion and experience. To Charlotte and Jean-Michel that means marriage. "We have been busy, but next year we plan to get married," he says. They are already looking for a house—in the country, for the children's sake. "There are those who say that marriage is a restrictive formalism," Jarre adds. "In fact, marriage predates religion and law. It is a celebration of love between two people which is at the very base of our Western civilization."
Charlotte agrees, and says she is looking forward to "being fulfilled and developing as a woman and a wife and a mother." Could their life together be La Petite Maison dans la Prairie?
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Always Scintillating...
The keys to my success: Jean Michel Jarre
By MICK WALL
Last updated at 17:27 12 January 2008
Next week The Mail on Sunday is giving away Oxygène, that triumph of Seventies pioneering electronica. Here, Jean Michel Jarre reveals why the original is still the best (but didn't make him as rich as you think)
Jean Michel Jarre recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of his best-known work, the 12 million-selling Oxygène, with a ten-night run at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris.
The album, consisting entirely of electronic instrumental music, recorded at Jarre's home, was the surprise hit of 1977, producing a memorable single, Oxygène (Part IV).
In Paris last December, Jarre performed the entire work using the original equipment, including more than 50 vintage synthesizers, and he is due to bring the show to London's Royal Albert Hall this March.
It will be a relatively intimate event for Jarre, who is better known for huge, globe-straddling multimedia events.
The first was before a million people in Place de la Concorde in Paris, in 1979. The most recent was the Water For Life concert in the Sahara in 2006. Then there have been historic one-night stopovers such as the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Acropolis and Tiananmen Square.
The 59-year-old French composer has had four entries in the Guinness Book Of Records for concert attendances, breaking his own total three times ? the largest being in 1997 when he performed to 3.5 million people in Moscow.
Jarre was married for 20 years to the English actress, Charlotte Rampling, before they divorced in 1998.
They have one son, David Jarre, an internationally renowned magician.
Oxygène was turned down by all the record companies. It was like a UFO ? it was made in the middle of the disco and punk eras and the record companies said, "What is it? No singer, no proper song titles? And, on top of that, it's French!" Even my mum asked, "Why are you giving your music the name of a gas?" Yet people talk of Oxygène now as my "masterpiece". When it became such a success, it was strange ? a very exciting period and kind of innocent. You find you have a lot of new friends around you and it's almost as if they want the success to continue more than you do.
Making my music is like being a chef. It's no coincidence that Oxygène was recorded in my kitchen in Paris.I had to find the right ingredients, bringing everything to the right temperature. don't like the preconceived idea about electronic music that it is cold, futuristic or robotic. I want my music to sound warm, human and organic. I'm not a scientist working in a laboratory ? I'm more like a painter, Jackson Pollock for example, mixing colour and light, experimenting with textures.
I'm really playing those instruments: I don't just click a mouse and sit back. They are not fake instruments. The beauty is that you can create the sound of the Moon, the sound of light. Nothing is repeated. It's music that breathes.
To me, the original VCS3 synthesizer is like a Stradivarius. All these old analogue instruments are very poetic.I have a huge emotional relationship with them. My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3. You also have the Minimoog, which is very famous, and a Dutch invention called the Eminent, which was patented in the late Sixties. The sound of Oxygène is based on the fantastic string effects of the Eminent.
To play some of these old instruments you need the Force to be with you. The theramin, for example ? it's totally intuitive. It looks like a Thirties radio with two antennae ? just by moving your hands towards the antennae you control the volume and the pitch, producing this fantastic sound like a soprano vocal. Stravinsky used one, as did the Beach Boys on Good Vibrations. It's very tricky to play.
I own some of the world's most unusual synthesizers. They include the ARP 2600, a huge modular synthesizer. That's the instrument Pete Townshend created The Who's Baba O'Riley on. There are only about 30 left.
Back in the Seventies we had a romantic, poetic vision of the future, like it was in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It felt as if everything was still ahead of us. Today, it is all behind us. That is not to say that my music is attached to sci-fi. I see my music as more attached to the biosphere than the stratosphere.
I collect robots. They're mainly Japanese, American and especially Russian ? small robots, big robots and old toy robots made between 1910 and the Fifties. That period was all about futurism, from the art of Kandinsky to crazy guys building strange robots and sci-fi creatures, utopian-type things. In those days there were lots of dreamers about the future.I got into all that.
Going to the US or China and hearing your music on the radio is like signing your soul to the devil. You can start to lose your own identity when your image becomes bigger than who you actually are. There are so many temptations, so many excesses, it can kill you. America is the worst. I was voted People magazine's Man Of The Year in the Seventies, and the women? well, you have to be clear in your mind what these things mean or your brain will implode.
Pope John Paul II had big feet. The first thing I noticed when I met him was the size of his shoes. I thought to myself, "My God, this man has his head in the sky but his feet solidly on the ground."
I'll never forget the day of Princess Diana's funeral. We had been quite close friends, and on that day I was doing a concert in Moscow for 3.5 million people. I knew she was keen on one song I'd written called Souvenir Of China. So I decided to dedicate it to her and ask the audience for a minute's silence. You can imagine the scene in Moscow with more than three million noisy people, the amount of vodka, craziness everywhere? But the entire city remained silent. It was so moving that everyone started crying. The tears were running down my face so much I couldn't even start to play again. Even now, just talking about it makes me emotional.
Why do I play these big events? First, it's the fact that electronic instruments are not really made for live performance, so long tours are not feasible. And I became inspired by Italian opera, working with carpenters, painters, costumiers and, in my case, video artists, light-show specialists and architects. Also, because I've always considered my music to be attached to the immediate environment, I wanted to perform outdoors, to hijack one whole place for a night ? something where, as an artist, you have no second chance. At the Place de la Concorde [in 1979], one guy came up afterwards ? he had a long beard like Fidel Castro's ? and he said, "I've never seen anything like that before in my life." I thanked him and someone said, "Do you know who that was? Mick Jagger"
My favourite concert nearly didn't happen. I thought it was a joke when Lech Walesa phoned me to play at Gdansk in 2005. I just didn't believe him. The concert was a kind of Blade Runner experience because it was in exactly that spot that the world had changed, leading to the eventual collapse of the Soviet system.
Arthur C Clarke thought aliens would respond to my music. He told me, "We must do something in outer space ? perhaps a concert on the Moon." He thought it would be a good point of contact.
My favourite thing to spend money on used to be cars ? especially old British and American ones. I had a Bugatti, which I bought in England, an old XJ140 Jaguar and a Cadillac Eldorado, which I bought in the US. I had cars all over the world. I drove them all, including the Bugatti. I was keener, though, on the XJ140 and the Cadillac. I'd put the family in them and off we'd go. Of course, you had to stop from garage to garage, because they kept breaking down, but I didn't care.
Oxygène made me rich ? but not as rich as you might think. Back then managers and record companies were getting too much money. Having said that, I was able to buy a large house in Paris where I built my own studio, plus a house in London.
It has been very moving playing Oxygène again. In Paris I was playing to small audiences of only about 500. I love using all the old equipment.
It's been quite an experience.
Crying all the way to the bank
He's huge in open-air music spectaculars and big on sharing his feelings about tax, drugs, rock'n'roll - and his ex-partner, Charlotte Rampling.
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The Guardian, Monday 10 January 2000
Article history
To the cynical English ear, Jean Michel Jarre, the 51-year-old French musician, talks enough rot to sink a cross-channel ferry. He spent Millennium night in Egypt, lighting up the Pyramids with "an electronic opera" entitled the Twelve Dreams of the Sun, at which he and his audience were not "trapped by their day-to-day life, with tools around their arms", but "in front of themselves, not just in front of the past, but in front of time", and also "in front of timelessness". It was "a physical experience, a bit painful". They felt "the rust, the dust". It was, despite the multi-million-dollar equipment, 100%"organic".
He has a new album out this month, Metamorphoses, "a blank page, a new chapter", in which for the first time in his career he has fully "experimented" with the voice, his own and others, using it naturally "as an instrument", the words as "audio-pictograms". It has an Oriental feel this album (it is also "organic"), and Jarre believes more and more that the next metamorphoses of Europe, in which "we grow up enough to succeed as Europeans", may come not from inside but from outside, from this Oriental connection, "this glue", we all share: "The Turkish connection for Germans, the north African connection for France, Pakistani or Indian for Britain."
He has a sensitive nature, he says. "At the end of the day the saddest thing for me was clowns. I used to cry. The more the other children around me were laughing, the more I was crying."
But Jarre is French after all. And handsome. And so charming. And so tiny. He sits in a recording studio in Paris, surrounded by crates ("Pink Floyd World Tour") and boys in Hard Rock cafe T-shirts, and all the wires and chrome and leads and cables and titanic speakers that attend his career as the man who brought the musical extravaganza, the techno tirade, to your local city centre (Paris, Beijing, Houston, Moscow... Docklands), like a Gallic Wizard of Oz.
He looks like a spaniel, with his puppydog brown eyes and dark hair falling around his line-free face like two floppy ears, a lean Dudley Moore with his easy grin and shiny school boy trousers. His hands are pale and slim and a bit damp looking and always on the move, scratching his eyebrows, tweaking the flies of his trousers.
"Oh, you English women, you are so cheeky," he says. "The guys in England are more cynical. It's funny, in France it is the reverse. English woman is more open and much less cynical, less knowing is the word, than the French woman. On my side I have this love affair with the UK..."
He has, however, separated from his wife, the English actress Charlotte Rampling; newspaper reports in 1997 said he'd left her for a 31-year-old French civil servant called Odile Froment. But he says he and Charlotte "are like twins. Really, we are closer than ever. Really, she is the woman of my life." So you are living together again? "Er, not really. We have separate lives but we will live together forever. Life is a long way..."
Jarre, who was born in Lyon, has been around almost as long as the Pyramids. He was experimenting at the Paris Conservatoire in 1966. Oxygene, his first international hit, was released in 1976, the same year he was voted Personality of the Year by People magazine. His first open air concert was on Bastille Day in Paris in 1979. (He fell into the whole outdoor scene by accident - in an attempt to make the performance of music based around a synthesiser interesting: "the instruments were not so sexy," he says.)
He's sold more than 50m albums along the way, but he found the 80s a bit lonely: "I followed my way more or less by myself." But the raves of the 90s have caught him up. "A lot of people joined the boat." He says he is a regular fixture on the rave scene. Does he take ecstasy when he's there?
"Er, no. But you know it is unfair to trap a movement with drugs. It is a never-ending story. Every movement has been linked with drugs, the beginning of jazz, the beginning of rock'n'roll, the beginning of heavy metal, punk, grunge, techno. Drug dealers have an impact when people are just starting a new way of expression, when they are fragile and vulnerable, but what is most interesting in the rave scene is the attempt to find an alternative to rock'n'roll."
He could never have been a rock'n'roll star himself. He's adamant about that. He uses painting or writing analogies for what he does, not musical. It's a question of humility. "I know that I'm a bit odd, or eccentric. But I never consider myself a pop star obsessed by my image. This image problem is a very 80s attitude, linked with a certain cynicism, that the image is more important than whoever you are. But mine is a more humble approach, to be part of a big picture, rather than going into a small theatre just with your guitar with a spotlight on yourself, thinking you are going to excite an audience for two hours."
Jarre is not short of theories, and he's generous with them too. He has a complicated family - he and Rampling have a son; she had a son from a previous marriage, he had a daughter (he had custody of her from the time she was 18 months). They're all in their 20s now - a magician, a graphic designer, the movie business: a perfect division of the family talent - but he's happy to share his tips for domestic harmony. "The 60s generated this silly attitude to leaving the kids to do whatever they want, which created a big mess.
"Charlotte and I always considered that you should give a framework where they could be as free as possible and then enlarge the framework as long as they are growing up. We are all very close, even among these mad crazy schedules. Yesterday I was with David. We had dinner at one in the morning until three. I had no other time and he was the same." As for he and Rampling: "We will never divorce. The whole family is very close."
There is one exception: his father, Maurice Jarre, who wrote the soundtrack to Dr Zhivago and lives in Los Angeles, "trying... I mean continuing to do his work". His son thinks he has met him about 20 times. "As long as you can count the number of contacts with one member of your family, it is not a good thing. I am only now starting to cope with this. A blank space instead of a father is not a good thing. It means nothing. It's sad because apart from the personal things, it is quite unusual from a professional point of view when a French person is internationally successful in music, but to have two in the same family, it is crazy not to share that."
His father has another son from a more recent relationship. "I think it's even worse with this one than with me." Have you met him? "No. Er, yes... I've met him, but, you know, I have enough responsibility with my own children. I'm not taking care of children from my father!"
For most of our encounter, Jarre fits easily into the role of the ageless celebrity, one of the most successful post-Beatles musicians. Everyone around him bangs on about how wonderful he looks for his age ("Fit, 50 and not a firework in sight!" begins his press pack). And he does. He was on "a silly" French version of This Is Your Life recently, and "suddenly you are in front of your mates of when you were 14 and they were these old, established people. I had the feeling they belonged to the generation of my father."
But, after talking for a while, he begins to act his age, giving a nice rant at the French tax system when I asked how rich he was (he and Rampling brought their children up in a 14-bedroom chateau at Versailles; he still lives nearby). "I am not at all like these English pop stars who are not paying taxes by having these big tours and avoiding any traps with the tax," he said crossly. "I am a victim of the highest tax in Europe.
"It's a joke in France. If you have so many people unemployed it's because people are living on this system, working to just the limit and getting paid in black [economy] money, while a small percentage of people are working day and night for really the rest of the country."
He's gone off America: "It's an old-new concept. It's a dated country." He's fed up with being associated with lasers. "I don't like lasers. I think it's very disco. I'm not a fan." He's against cosmetic surgery. "All these silly things people are doing. Charlotte thinks exactly the same. It's too much." And he gets a bit hot under the collar about cigarettes too. "Really I am fed up. In record institutions you have four people smoking around you, it's really affecting. I really hate this more and more." He screwed up his nose.
"But what I hate the most, I must say, particularly in London, is noisy restaurants. I can't stand that any more. More and more restaurants are like gymnasiums. This Conran is like a railway station.
"I was in this restaurant the other day and I looked around and it was like people were having arguments with one another and I thought to myself we should organise intercoms for people to talk to one another at lunch!"
By now he had completely forgotten himself. "The next step, the next luxury," he said, "will be to have a quiet place, and to shoot the pianist."
By MICK WALL
Last updated at 17:27 12 January 2008
Next week The Mail on Sunday is giving away Oxygène, that triumph of Seventies pioneering electronica. Here, Jean Michel Jarre reveals why the original is still the best (but didn't make him as rich as you think)
Jean Michel Jarre recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of his best-known work, the 12 million-selling Oxygène, with a ten-night run at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris.
The album, consisting entirely of electronic instrumental music, recorded at Jarre's home, was the surprise hit of 1977, producing a memorable single, Oxygène (Part IV).
In Paris last December, Jarre performed the entire work using the original equipment, including more than 50 vintage synthesizers, and he is due to bring the show to London's Royal Albert Hall this March.
It will be a relatively intimate event for Jarre, who is better known for huge, globe-straddling multimedia events.
The first was before a million people in Place de la Concorde in Paris, in 1979. The most recent was the Water For Life concert in the Sahara in 2006. Then there have been historic one-night stopovers such as the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Acropolis and Tiananmen Square.
The 59-year-old French composer has had four entries in the Guinness Book Of Records for concert attendances, breaking his own total three times ? the largest being in 1997 when he performed to 3.5 million people in Moscow.
Jarre was married for 20 years to the English actress, Charlotte Rampling, before they divorced in 1998.
They have one son, David Jarre, an internationally renowned magician.
Oxygène was turned down by all the record companies. It was like a UFO ? it was made in the middle of the disco and punk eras and the record companies said, "What is it? No singer, no proper song titles? And, on top of that, it's French!" Even my mum asked, "Why are you giving your music the name of a gas?" Yet people talk of Oxygène now as my "masterpiece". When it became such a success, it was strange ? a very exciting period and kind of innocent. You find you have a lot of new friends around you and it's almost as if they want the success to continue more than you do.
Making my music is like being a chef. It's no coincidence that Oxygène was recorded in my kitchen in Paris.I had to find the right ingredients, bringing everything to the right temperature. don't like the preconceived idea about electronic music that it is cold, futuristic or robotic. I want my music to sound warm, human and organic. I'm not a scientist working in a laboratory ? I'm more like a painter, Jackson Pollock for example, mixing colour and light, experimenting with textures.
I'm really playing those instruments: I don't just click a mouse and sit back. They are not fake instruments. The beauty is that you can create the sound of the Moon, the sound of light. Nothing is repeated. It's music that breathes.
To me, the original VCS3 synthesizer is like a Stradivarius. All these old analogue instruments are very poetic.I have a huge emotional relationship with them. My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3. You also have the Minimoog, which is very famous, and a Dutch invention called the Eminent, which was patented in the late Sixties. The sound of Oxygène is based on the fantastic string effects of the Eminent.
To play some of these old instruments you need the Force to be with you. The theramin, for example ? it's totally intuitive. It looks like a Thirties radio with two antennae ? just by moving your hands towards the antennae you control the volume and the pitch, producing this fantastic sound like a soprano vocal. Stravinsky used one, as did the Beach Boys on Good Vibrations. It's very tricky to play.
I own some of the world's most unusual synthesizers. They include the ARP 2600, a huge modular synthesizer. That's the instrument Pete Townshend created The Who's Baba O'Riley on. There are only about 30 left.
Back in the Seventies we had a romantic, poetic vision of the future, like it was in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It felt as if everything was still ahead of us. Today, it is all behind us. That is not to say that my music is attached to sci-fi. I see my music as more attached to the biosphere than the stratosphere.
I collect robots. They're mainly Japanese, American and especially Russian ? small robots, big robots and old toy robots made between 1910 and the Fifties. That period was all about futurism, from the art of Kandinsky to crazy guys building strange robots and sci-fi creatures, utopian-type things. In those days there were lots of dreamers about the future.I got into all that.
Going to the US or China and hearing your music on the radio is like signing your soul to the devil. You can start to lose your own identity when your image becomes bigger than who you actually are. There are so many temptations, so many excesses, it can kill you. America is the worst. I was voted People magazine's Man Of The Year in the Seventies, and the women? well, you have to be clear in your mind what these things mean or your brain will implode.
Pope John Paul II had big feet. The first thing I noticed when I met him was the size of his shoes. I thought to myself, "My God, this man has his head in the sky but his feet solidly on the ground."
I'll never forget the day of Princess Diana's funeral. We had been quite close friends, and on that day I was doing a concert in Moscow for 3.5 million people. I knew she was keen on one song I'd written called Souvenir Of China. So I decided to dedicate it to her and ask the audience for a minute's silence. You can imagine the scene in Moscow with more than three million noisy people, the amount of vodka, craziness everywhere? But the entire city remained silent. It was so moving that everyone started crying. The tears were running down my face so much I couldn't even start to play again. Even now, just talking about it makes me emotional.
Why do I play these big events? First, it's the fact that electronic instruments are not really made for live performance, so long tours are not feasible. And I became inspired by Italian opera, working with carpenters, painters, costumiers and, in my case, video artists, light-show specialists and architects. Also, because I've always considered my music to be attached to the immediate environment, I wanted to perform outdoors, to hijack one whole place for a night ? something where, as an artist, you have no second chance. At the Place de la Concorde [in 1979], one guy came up afterwards ? he had a long beard like Fidel Castro's ? and he said, "I've never seen anything like that before in my life." I thanked him and someone said, "Do you know who that was? Mick Jagger"
My favourite concert nearly didn't happen. I thought it was a joke when Lech Walesa phoned me to play at Gdansk in 2005. I just didn't believe him. The concert was a kind of Blade Runner experience because it was in exactly that spot that the world had changed, leading to the eventual collapse of the Soviet system.
Arthur C Clarke thought aliens would respond to my music. He told me, "We must do something in outer space ? perhaps a concert on the Moon." He thought it would be a good point of contact.
My favourite thing to spend money on used to be cars ? especially old British and American ones. I had a Bugatti, which I bought in England, an old XJ140 Jaguar and a Cadillac Eldorado, which I bought in the US. I had cars all over the world. I drove them all, including the Bugatti. I was keener, though, on the XJ140 and the Cadillac. I'd put the family in them and off we'd go. Of course, you had to stop from garage to garage, because they kept breaking down, but I didn't care.
Oxygène made me rich ? but not as rich as you might think. Back then managers and record companies were getting too much money. Having said that, I was able to buy a large house in Paris where I built my own studio, plus a house in London.
It has been very moving playing Oxygène again. In Paris I was playing to small audiences of only about 500. I love using all the old equipment.
It's been quite an experience.
Crying all the way to the bank
He's huge in open-air music spectaculars and big on sharing his feelings about tax, drugs, rock'n'roll - and his ex-partner, Charlotte Rampling.
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The Guardian, Monday 10 January 2000
Article history
To the cynical English ear, Jean Michel Jarre, the 51-year-old French musician, talks enough rot to sink a cross-channel ferry. He spent Millennium night in Egypt, lighting up the Pyramids with "an electronic opera" entitled the Twelve Dreams of the Sun, at which he and his audience were not "trapped by their day-to-day life, with tools around their arms", but "in front of themselves, not just in front of the past, but in front of time", and also "in front of timelessness". It was "a physical experience, a bit painful". They felt "the rust, the dust". It was, despite the multi-million-dollar equipment, 100%"organic".
He has a new album out this month, Metamorphoses, "a blank page, a new chapter", in which for the first time in his career he has fully "experimented" with the voice, his own and others, using it naturally "as an instrument", the words as "audio-pictograms". It has an Oriental feel this album (it is also "organic"), and Jarre believes more and more that the next metamorphoses of Europe, in which "we grow up enough to succeed as Europeans", may come not from inside but from outside, from this Oriental connection, "this glue", we all share: "The Turkish connection for Germans, the north African connection for France, Pakistani or Indian for Britain."
He has a sensitive nature, he says. "At the end of the day the saddest thing for me was clowns. I used to cry. The more the other children around me were laughing, the more I was crying."
But Jarre is French after all. And handsome. And so charming. And so tiny. He sits in a recording studio in Paris, surrounded by crates ("Pink Floyd World Tour") and boys in Hard Rock cafe T-shirts, and all the wires and chrome and leads and cables and titanic speakers that attend his career as the man who brought the musical extravaganza, the techno tirade, to your local city centre (Paris, Beijing, Houston, Moscow... Docklands), like a Gallic Wizard of Oz.
He looks like a spaniel, with his puppydog brown eyes and dark hair falling around his line-free face like two floppy ears, a lean Dudley Moore with his easy grin and shiny school boy trousers. His hands are pale and slim and a bit damp looking and always on the move, scratching his eyebrows, tweaking the flies of his trousers.
"Oh, you English women, you are so cheeky," he says. "The guys in England are more cynical. It's funny, in France it is the reverse. English woman is more open and much less cynical, less knowing is the word, than the French woman. On my side I have this love affair with the UK..."
He has, however, separated from his wife, the English actress Charlotte Rampling; newspaper reports in 1997 said he'd left her for a 31-year-old French civil servant called Odile Froment. But he says he and Charlotte "are like twins. Really, we are closer than ever. Really, she is the woman of my life." So you are living together again? "Er, not really. We have separate lives but we will live together forever. Life is a long way..."
Jarre, who was born in Lyon, has been around almost as long as the Pyramids. He was experimenting at the Paris Conservatoire in 1966. Oxygene, his first international hit, was released in 1976, the same year he was voted Personality of the Year by People magazine. His first open air concert was on Bastille Day in Paris in 1979. (He fell into the whole outdoor scene by accident - in an attempt to make the performance of music based around a synthesiser interesting: "the instruments were not so sexy," he says.)
He's sold more than 50m albums along the way, but he found the 80s a bit lonely: "I followed my way more or less by myself." But the raves of the 90s have caught him up. "A lot of people joined the boat." He says he is a regular fixture on the rave scene. Does he take ecstasy when he's there?
"Er, no. But you know it is unfair to trap a movement with drugs. It is a never-ending story. Every movement has been linked with drugs, the beginning of jazz, the beginning of rock'n'roll, the beginning of heavy metal, punk, grunge, techno. Drug dealers have an impact when people are just starting a new way of expression, when they are fragile and vulnerable, but what is most interesting in the rave scene is the attempt to find an alternative to rock'n'roll."
He could never have been a rock'n'roll star himself. He's adamant about that. He uses painting or writing analogies for what he does, not musical. It's a question of humility. "I know that I'm a bit odd, or eccentric. But I never consider myself a pop star obsessed by my image. This image problem is a very 80s attitude, linked with a certain cynicism, that the image is more important than whoever you are. But mine is a more humble approach, to be part of a big picture, rather than going into a small theatre just with your guitar with a spotlight on yourself, thinking you are going to excite an audience for two hours."
Jarre is not short of theories, and he's generous with them too. He has a complicated family - he and Rampling have a son; she had a son from a previous marriage, he had a daughter (he had custody of her from the time she was 18 months). They're all in their 20s now - a magician, a graphic designer, the movie business: a perfect division of the family talent - but he's happy to share his tips for domestic harmony. "The 60s generated this silly attitude to leaving the kids to do whatever they want, which created a big mess.
"Charlotte and I always considered that you should give a framework where they could be as free as possible and then enlarge the framework as long as they are growing up. We are all very close, even among these mad crazy schedules. Yesterday I was with David. We had dinner at one in the morning until three. I had no other time and he was the same." As for he and Rampling: "We will never divorce. The whole family is very close."
There is one exception: his father, Maurice Jarre, who wrote the soundtrack to Dr Zhivago and lives in Los Angeles, "trying... I mean continuing to do his work". His son thinks he has met him about 20 times. "As long as you can count the number of contacts with one member of your family, it is not a good thing. I am only now starting to cope with this. A blank space instead of a father is not a good thing. It means nothing. It's sad because apart from the personal things, it is quite unusual from a professional point of view when a French person is internationally successful in music, but to have two in the same family, it is crazy not to share that."
His father has another son from a more recent relationship. "I think it's even worse with this one than with me." Have you met him? "No. Er, yes... I've met him, but, you know, I have enough responsibility with my own children. I'm not taking care of children from my father!"
For most of our encounter, Jarre fits easily into the role of the ageless celebrity, one of the most successful post-Beatles musicians. Everyone around him bangs on about how wonderful he looks for his age ("Fit, 50 and not a firework in sight!" begins his press pack). And he does. He was on "a silly" French version of This Is Your Life recently, and "suddenly you are in front of your mates of when you were 14 and they were these old, established people. I had the feeling they belonged to the generation of my father."
But, after talking for a while, he begins to act his age, giving a nice rant at the French tax system when I asked how rich he was (he and Rampling brought their children up in a 14-bedroom chateau at Versailles; he still lives nearby). "I am not at all like these English pop stars who are not paying taxes by having these big tours and avoiding any traps with the tax," he said crossly. "I am a victim of the highest tax in Europe.
"It's a joke in France. If you have so many people unemployed it's because people are living on this system, working to just the limit and getting paid in black [economy] money, while a small percentage of people are working day and night for really the rest of the country."
He's gone off America: "It's an old-new concept. It's a dated country." He's fed up with being associated with lasers. "I don't like lasers. I think it's very disco. I'm not a fan." He's against cosmetic surgery. "All these silly things people are doing. Charlotte thinks exactly the same. It's too much." And he gets a bit hot under the collar about cigarettes too. "Really I am fed up. In record institutions you have four people smoking around you, it's really affecting. I really hate this more and more." He screwed up his nose.
"But what I hate the most, I must say, particularly in London, is noisy restaurants. I can't stand that any more. More and more restaurants are like gymnasiums. This Conran is like a railway station.
"I was in this restaurant the other day and I looked around and it was like people were having arguments with one another and I thought to myself we should organise intercoms for people to talk to one another at lunch!"
By now he had completely forgotten himself. "The next step, the next luxury," he said, "will be to have a quiet place, and to shoot the pianist."
Monday, April 25, 2011
Unlikely Material for a US Standup Comedienne
Une petite histoire drôle en hommage à la coiffure de JMJ...
On est début juin et la 1ère partie de l'In Door Tour est terminée. Jean Michel est chez son coiffeur pour une -petite- coupe de routine.
Le ciseau virevoltant nerveusement sur l'imposante tignace brune, José, le coiffeur du musicien s'active.
- Quand je pense à tout votre armada de synthé que vous trimballez à chaque fois, c'est dommage qu'il y ait des pannes à chaque concerts. Comme avec votre harpe laser à Bruxelles.
- Mmmh, approuve laconiquement Jean Michel.
- De toutes façon, ces pannes devraient être moins fréquentes puisque vous révisez constamment les machines.
- Mmmh!
- Et puis d'où viennent toutes ces pannes? s'interroge José.
- Difficile à expliquer!
- Elles reviennent souvent en plus, panne par-ci, panne par-là, panne, panne, panne...
- Pourquoi me parlez-vous sans arrêt de ça? Demande soudain Jean Michel agacé.
- Parce qu'à chaque fois que je prononce le mot "panne", vos cheveux se dressent sur la tête et c'est plus facile à couper.
Or...
About Jarre's "hairstyle"...
It is early June and the first part of the In Door Tour is over. Jean Michel has gone to his hairdresser for a tune-up.
Jose, the hairdresser, is obviously nervous, and so he decides to engage his renowned client in conversation.
"When I think of the armada of keyboards that you drag with you every time you tour," Jose says, "it's a real pity you have so many failures in concert. Like what happened with your laser harp in Brussels."
An almost irritated grumble can be heard from Jean-Michel.
"Well, in any case, you'll be fixing these problems. You must check over your equipment all the time!"
Another grumble.
"So why do you have so many problems playing live, anyway?"
"It's hard to explain!" Jean-Michel snaps.
"I mean it's like your problems are getting worse--this failure here, power failure there, and on and on..."
"Why do you have to talk endlessly about it?" Jean Michel asked, completely annoyed.
Now Jose smiles. "Because every time I utter the word 'failure', your hair stands on end and it's easier to cut."
And...
At 40, Jarre looked 20. At 60, he looked 40. How would he look in light years?
People need oxygen to live. Some labels also.
Jarre did one album that sold one copy. Even Cindy Sander has not done better.
The problem with keyboards curves is for those with square fingers.
When Jarre wants a break from playing too much, he spends time creating MIDI files.
Gilbert Becaud calls himself the man to survive 100,000 volts, but he still won't shake the hand of Jean Michel Jarre.
Jarre is not more famous than the Pope by accident. He works miracles regularly. For example, each new place that Jarre plays becomes the most beautiful place in the world. That's the magic of the show.
Being a fan of Jean Michel Jarre at 18 today is about as easy as being a vegetarian and working as a butcher.
Teo and Téa is the record I want played at my funeral. I know it won't be worn out.
On est début juin et la 1ère partie de l'In Door Tour est terminée. Jean Michel est chez son coiffeur pour une -petite- coupe de routine.
Le ciseau virevoltant nerveusement sur l'imposante tignace brune, José, le coiffeur du musicien s'active.
- Quand je pense à tout votre armada de synthé que vous trimballez à chaque fois, c'est dommage qu'il y ait des pannes à chaque concerts. Comme avec votre harpe laser à Bruxelles.
- Mmmh, approuve laconiquement Jean Michel.
- De toutes façon, ces pannes devraient être moins fréquentes puisque vous révisez constamment les machines.
- Mmmh!
- Et puis d'où viennent toutes ces pannes? s'interroge José.
- Difficile à expliquer!
- Elles reviennent souvent en plus, panne par-ci, panne par-là, panne, panne, panne...
- Pourquoi me parlez-vous sans arrêt de ça? Demande soudain Jean Michel agacé.
- Parce qu'à chaque fois que je prononce le mot "panne", vos cheveux se dressent sur la tête et c'est plus facile à couper.
Or...
About Jarre's "hairstyle"...
It is early June and the first part of the In Door Tour is over. Jean Michel has gone to his hairdresser for a tune-up.
Jose, the hairdresser, is obviously nervous, and so he decides to engage his renowned client in conversation.
"When I think of the armada of keyboards that you drag with you every time you tour," Jose says, "it's a real pity you have so many failures in concert. Like what happened with your laser harp in Brussels."
An almost irritated grumble can be heard from Jean-Michel.
"Well, in any case, you'll be fixing these problems. You must check over your equipment all the time!"
Another grumble.
"So why do you have so many problems playing live, anyway?"
"It's hard to explain!" Jean-Michel snaps.
"I mean it's like your problems are getting worse--this failure here, power failure there, and on and on..."
"Why do you have to talk endlessly about it?" Jean Michel asked, completely annoyed.
Now Jose smiles. "Because every time I utter the word 'failure', your hair stands on end and it's easier to cut."
And...
At 40, Jarre looked 20. At 60, he looked 40. How would he look in light years?
People need oxygen to live. Some labels also.
Jarre did one album that sold one copy. Even Cindy Sander has not done better.
The problem with keyboards curves is for those with square fingers.
When Jarre wants a break from playing too much, he spends time creating MIDI files.
Gilbert Becaud calls himself the man to survive 100,000 volts, but he still won't shake the hand of Jean Michel Jarre.
Jarre is not more famous than the Pope by accident. He works miracles regularly. For example, each new place that Jarre plays becomes the most beautiful place in the world. That's the magic of the show.
Being a fan of Jean Michel Jarre at 18 today is about as easy as being a vegetarian and working as a butcher.
Teo and Téa is the record I want played at my funeral. I know it won't be worn out.
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