Jean Michel Jarre | Artist
Jean-Michel Jarre is a French composer, performer and record producer born 1948 in Lyon, France. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and new-age genres, and is known for organising outdoor spectacles featuring his music, vast laser displays, large projections and fireworks. Jarre's parents were Francette Pejot, a French Resistance member and concentration camp survivor, and composer Maurice Jarre, who is best known for his film scores, particularly for his collaborations with film director David Lean, including Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, for which he was awarded three Academy Awards. As a young man, Jean-Michel Jarre studied piano, and earned money by selling his paintings, exhibiting some of his works at the Lyon Gallery. In the sixties he began to use tape loops, radios and other electronic devices, and joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1969, then under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer, an early exponent of "musique concrète". Jarre was introduced to the Moog modular synthesizer and spent time working at the studio of influential German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1971 he began composing music for ballet, theatre, advertisements and television programs. Jarre's breakthrough came in 1976 with his low-budget solo album Oxygėne, recorded at his home studio, which made him famous internationally. The follow-up album, Équinoxe, released in 1978, was composed with sequencers, particularly on the bass, and featured a more baroque and classical style than Oxygène, with more emphasis on melodic development. The following year Jarre held a large open-air concert on Bastille Day, at the Place de la Concorde. The free outdoor event set a world record for the largest number of spectators ever at an open-air concert, drawing more than 1 million spectators. The extravagant event, which used projections of light, images and fireworks, served as a blueprint for Jarre's future concerts. Jarre has gone on to release 25 studio albums to-date, but it's safe to say none have surpassed the mastery of those two early releases. Other albums of note include Les chants magnétiques, Zoolook, and the excellent 1982 live album, The Concerts in China. In November 2019, Jarre released an App named EōN which contains morphing graphics and AI code which generates 7 hours of music from recordings by Jarre. The music is always unique on every different device it is played.
Artist Website: jeanmicheljarre.com
Featured Albums: Jean Michel Jarre
Related Artists: Maurice Jarre
Video Clips: Live Compilation, Live in Houston, Stardust
