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.
Friday, April 29, 2011
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.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
And So It Begins...
So I got a nice message from a fellow named Joe in Ireland about how we the fans can possibly network to bring Jean-Michel to the States. I replied.
Hello Ireland! My family is originally from Donegal. You're lucky, indeed. :)
As we've seen--especially this year--word of mouth and the use of social networks can change the world. I agree completely that the way to make a concert/tour happen is to take the initiative ourselves. Fortunately we're living in an age where communication and networking are better facilitated than ever.
Anyway, your message has gotten me thinking. As fate would have it, I'm actually very familiar with the whole process of drumming up publicity and interest among my stateside neighbors. I've done large-scale social networking with great results. I'm also thinking that this year is the 25th anniversary of the Houston spectacular. Now if we can introduce Jarre as the intriguing personality he seems to be (and the accent will have people swooning, no joke) in addition to the unparalleled music and amazing concert performances, I think we have something that will appeal not only to American fans, but to Americans who don't know they're fans yet.
At the moment I'm shopping around the idea as an arts and entertainment features article, which if I'm lucky enough could go national. But we know that Internet press has about as strong of a presence in the media as anything in print, so I'm also looking to expand the effort online. I suspect that there are many fans who haven't even thought of the role they could play.
But this is a worthwhile project, and it's something for which I'm willing to contribute my time and resources. After all, in 1986 I was just a silly kid nowhere near Houston, even though I'd grown up with Jarre's music. I'm also looking to make this happen for people who have been good to me and who would be over the moon about seeing Jarre live, even once--most notably my parents.
Thanks for getting me thinking. Take care!
Hello Ireland! My family is originally from Donegal. You're lucky, indeed. :)
As we've seen--especially this year--word of mouth and the use of social networks can change the world. I agree completely that the way to make a concert/tour happen is to take the initiative ourselves. Fortunately we're living in an age where communication and networking are better facilitated than ever.
Anyway, your message has gotten me thinking. As fate would have it, I'm actually very familiar with the whole process of drumming up publicity and interest among my stateside neighbors. I've done large-scale social networking with great results. I'm also thinking that this year is the 25th anniversary of the Houston spectacular. Now if we can introduce Jarre as the intriguing personality he seems to be (and the accent will have people swooning, no joke) in addition to the unparalleled music and amazing concert performances, I think we have something that will appeal not only to American fans, but to Americans who don't know they're fans yet.
At the moment I'm shopping around the idea as an arts and entertainment features article, which if I'm lucky enough could go national. But we know that Internet press has about as strong of a presence in the media as anything in print, so I'm also looking to expand the effort online. I suspect that there are many fans who haven't even thought of the role they could play.
But this is a worthwhile project, and it's something for which I'm willing to contribute my time and resources. After all, in 1986 I was just a silly kid nowhere near Houston, even though I'd grown up with Jarre's music. I'm also looking to make this happen for people who have been good to me and who would be over the moon about seeing Jarre live, even once--most notably my parents.
Thanks for getting me thinking. Take care!
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The Sanctity of Laughter
"He who laughs last didn't get the joke."
I've encountered a growing number of people who seem to have misplaced their sense of humor. It's my hope that I'm just running into killjoys and not a representative population. We're not really in a humor crisis, are we? One of the things I like about my path is the sense of humor and the idea that spirituality should be fun. I like being able to laugh at myself. There's nothing so serious that an injection of good humor won't improve it. That being said, is it any wonder that I just have to shrug at folks full of their own importance, people who won't deign to have a good laugh?
Laughter is a gift from the divine. It is the divine expressing joy and elation through us. Every laugh is a thank-you to the Powers That Be for life and the ability to enjoy life. Through laughter, not only is the divine served, but we serve ourselves as well. We've all heard the adage about laughter being the best medicine. Humor is good for us. A good chuckle reduces stress and raises the level of endorphins in the body, leaving us to feel especially good. Perhaps best of all, humor helps to keep the episodes of life in good perspective.
When I was learning the path I had the benefit of a close-knit group and circle elders who understood the sanctity of humor. The woman who was both priestess and mentor always reminded us to laugh at ourselves. If I forgot the words to my Full Moon oration, I learned to have a good "D'oh!" and then go back to dip into the endless cauldron of inspiration. Ritual may be sacred, but it is also a circus begging for messes to occur. People are going to spill the libation and knock over candles. Rain can soak the most devoted of celebrants, turning a grand outdoor observance into an ad libbed indoor rite. Maybe the person baking the esbat cakes used the driest recipe possible.
This is all part of what makes the celebration dynamic and personal. There are a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, in that the Powers That Be have given us built-in openings for humor and laughter. To err may be human, but to be able to get up and laugh at one's self is a gift.
All right then, so somebody explain to me why someone - anyone - would abandon the gift of humor. You can be serious about your path without taking yourself too seriously. Are people choosing to give up humor in exchange for dry observation and almost mechanical experience? I cannot tell if people are not getting subtle humor or if they are refusing to roll in the mud of laughter and silliness. Recently, I've come to wonder if this isn't the price all of us as a community must pay after decades of endless challenges from more orthodox religious traditions. Has all the fighting knocked the laughter out of us? I don't believe it.
Everybody, listen up! We're not like the traditions that focus more on the negative aspects of being human. The spiritual world touches us all, and engaging with the spiritual world is fun! Celebrate with laughter the hours of the day and the seasons of the year. Giggle at what strikes you funny. Take a good look at yourself and ask if you might be taking yourself too seriously. Does a question from a newcomer inspire you to a relaxed explanation or to indignant frustration?
Somewhere you have your own bling bling. You have your own story to tell of a path-related incident that made you laugh. This is the Powers That Be touching you and letting you know of their love. Embrace that sense of humor and laugh out loud to the stars. Laugh until you don't have the power to laugh anymore. This is message sent and received. This is the appreciation of the cosmic gift.
I've encountered a growing number of people who seem to have misplaced their sense of humor. It's my hope that I'm just running into killjoys and not a representative population. We're not really in a humor crisis, are we? One of the things I like about my path is the sense of humor and the idea that spirituality should be fun. I like being able to laugh at myself. There's nothing so serious that an injection of good humor won't improve it. That being said, is it any wonder that I just have to shrug at folks full of their own importance, people who won't deign to have a good laugh?
Laughter is a gift from the divine. It is the divine expressing joy and elation through us. Every laugh is a thank-you to the Powers That Be for life and the ability to enjoy life. Through laughter, not only is the divine served, but we serve ourselves as well. We've all heard the adage about laughter being the best medicine. Humor is good for us. A good chuckle reduces stress and raises the level of endorphins in the body, leaving us to feel especially good. Perhaps best of all, humor helps to keep the episodes of life in good perspective.
When I was learning the path I had the benefit of a close-knit group and circle elders who understood the sanctity of humor. The woman who was both priestess and mentor always reminded us to laugh at ourselves. If I forgot the words to my Full Moon oration, I learned to have a good "D'oh!" and then go back to dip into the endless cauldron of inspiration. Ritual may be sacred, but it is also a circus begging for messes to occur. People are going to spill the libation and knock over candles. Rain can soak the most devoted of celebrants, turning a grand outdoor observance into an ad libbed indoor rite. Maybe the person baking the esbat cakes used the driest recipe possible.
This is all part of what makes the celebration dynamic and personal. There are a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, in that the Powers That Be have given us built-in openings for humor and laughter. To err may be human, but to be able to get up and laugh at one's self is a gift.
All right then, so somebody explain to me why someone - anyone - would abandon the gift of humor. You can be serious about your path without taking yourself too seriously. Are people choosing to give up humor in exchange for dry observation and almost mechanical experience? I cannot tell if people are not getting subtle humor or if they are refusing to roll in the mud of laughter and silliness. Recently, I've come to wonder if this isn't the price all of us as a community must pay after decades of endless challenges from more orthodox religious traditions. Has all the fighting knocked the laughter out of us? I don't believe it.
Everybody, listen up! We're not like the traditions that focus more on the negative aspects of being human. The spiritual world touches us all, and engaging with the spiritual world is fun! Celebrate with laughter the hours of the day and the seasons of the year. Giggle at what strikes you funny. Take a good look at yourself and ask if you might be taking yourself too seriously. Does a question from a newcomer inspire you to a relaxed explanation or to indignant frustration?
Somewhere you have your own bling bling. You have your own story to tell of a path-related incident that made you laugh. This is the Powers That Be touching you and letting you know of their love. Embrace that sense of humor and laugh out loud to the stars. Laugh until you don't have the power to laugh anymore. This is message sent and received. This is the appreciation of the cosmic gift.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Pranic Priestess Needs New Lifeforce
The irony.
Even as I've been talking and explaining and teaching others how to tap into the living energy of the universe I've been losing my own--or the quality of it, anyway.
Sure, there are remedies, but nothing so strong as the pure essence of the sounds that have been at the heart of my life. It simply pours into me, joining body, mind, and soul, and giving me the feeling of existing at full power and capacity. I am lifted away from this shell, leaving behind the complexities of repair and ascending into a stratosphere of my own creation. I am healing, but also I am allowed to experience the wonder that awaits me at the end of this (yet another) long road.
Mark me. I will overcome this, too. My spirit is too strong to quit.
Even as I've been talking and explaining and teaching others how to tap into the living energy of the universe I've been losing my own--or the quality of it, anyway.
Sure, there are remedies, but nothing so strong as the pure essence of the sounds that have been at the heart of my life. It simply pours into me, joining body, mind, and soul, and giving me the feeling of existing at full power and capacity. I am lifted away from this shell, leaving behind the complexities of repair and ascending into a stratosphere of my own creation. I am healing, but also I am allowed to experience the wonder that awaits me at the end of this (yet another) long road.
Mark me. I will overcome this, too. My spirit is too strong to quit.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Inspired by Jean-Michel
Music becomes the motivation for movement...
I am sovereign.
I am my own thinker regnant.
No more will I dread fear or consequence. I will act, and when I act, I shall act boldly.
I am strong enough to value others, and so I will let those dearest to me know the depths of my appreciation. I will not give up on anyone, but I will encourage them to greater achievements.
The trappings and standards of the world do not apply to me, not age nor beauty nor demeanor.
I will embrace change as I take up the charge to fight for rights and to fight for what is right.
Embrace me. I shall not doubt.
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