Jean Michel Jarre

Jean Michel Jarre biography

Jean Michel André Jarre (born 24 August 1948 in Lyon) is a French composer, performer and music producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and New Age genres, and known as an organiser of outdoor spectacles of his music featuring lights, laser displays, and fireworks.

Jarre was raised in Lyon by his mother and grandparents, and trained on the piano. From an early age he was introduced to a variety of art forms, including those of street performers, jazz musicians, and the artist Pierre Soulages. He played guitar in a band, but his musical style was perhaps most heavily influenced by Pierre Schaeffer, a pioneer of musique concrí¨te at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

His first mainstream success was the 1976 album Oxygí¨ne. Recorded in a makeshift studio at his home, the album sold an estimated 12 million copies. Oxygí¨ne was followed in 1978 by Équinoxe, and in 1979 Jarre performed to a record-breaking audience of more than a million people at the Place de la Concorde, a record he has since broken three times. More albums were to follow, but his 1979 concert served as a blueprint for his future performances around the world. Several of his albums have been released to coincide with large-scale outdoor events, and he is now perhaps as well known as a performer as a musician.

As of 2004 Jarre had sold an estimated 80 million albums. He was the first Western musician to be allowed to perform in the People's Republic of China, and holds the world record for the largest-ever audience at an outdoor event.

Biography

Early life, influences, and education

Jean Michel Jarre was born in Lyon on 24 August 1948, to composer Maurice Jarre and French Resistance member and concentration camp survivor France Pejot. His father moved to the United States when Jarre was five, leaving him with his mother; the two did not meet again until he was eighteen. From his vantage point high above the pavement, the young Frenchman was able to watch street performers at work, an experience he later cited as proving influential on his later art.

Jarre struggled with his classical piano studies, although he later changed teachers and worked on his scales. A more general interest in musical instruments was sparked by his discovery at the Saint-Ouen flea market of a Boris Vian Trumpet Violin. He often accompanied his mother to Le Chat Qui Píªche (The Fishing Cat), a friend's Paris jazz club, where saxophonists Archie Shepp and John Coltrane, and trumpet players Don Cherry and Chet Baker were regular performers. These early Jazz experiences suggested to him that music may be "descriptive, without lyrics". He was also influenced by the work of French artist Pierre Soulages, whose exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris he attended. Soulages' paintings used multiple textured layers, and Jarre realised that "for the first time in music, you could act as a painter with frequencies and sounds." He was also influenced by more traditional music; in a 2004 interview for The Guardian, he spoke of the effect that a performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring had upon him:

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