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Jean Michel Jarre: Biography
Jean-Michel Jarre began studying piano at the age of five, but he abandoned his classical training. During his youth he formed a band called Mystere IV. In late 1960s he started experimenting with tape loops, radios and other electronic devices, until, in 1968, he joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer, the "father" of the musique concrète, where he was introduced to synthesizers.
His album
Oxygene launched in 1976 was a big success worldwide, the song Oxygene Part IV becoming one of the best-known pieces of electronic music ever.
In 1978, his second album
Equinoxe was released, followed by a concert in Paris on the Place de la Concorde in Paris in 1979. This concert attracted 1 million people, which was Jarre's first entry in the Guiness Book of Records for the largest crowd for an outdoor concert.
In 1983 he created the album
Musique pour supermarchés (Music for supermarkets), which had a print run of only a single copy. Jarre destroyed all the master records from his studio work, allowed a Luxembourg radio to broadcast the album once and auctioned it to raise money for French artists. People recorded the album using their tape recorders while it was broadcasted on the radio, so we can listen to that album, at a very poor quality though (the radio station was an AM station).
In October 1981, Jarre was the first Western pop-artist who was granted to give concerts in the People's Republic of China.
In 1986 NASA and the city of Houston asked him to do a concert to celebrate NASA's 25th anniversary and the city of Houston 150th anniversary. During that concert, astronaut Ronald McNair was to play the saxophone part of Jarre's piece
Rendez-Vous VI while in orbit on board the Space Shuttle Challenger. It was to have been the first piece of music recorded in space, for the album
Rendez-Vous. After the Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986, the piece was recorded with a different saxophonist, retitled
Ron's piece and the album dedicated to the seven Challenger astronauts. The Houston concert entered the Guinness Book of Records for the audience of over 1.5 million.
July 14, 1990, Jean Michel broke his own record in Guiness Book of Records again with a concert in La Defense, Paris. 2 and a half million people watched Jarre light up the business district of Paris.
In 1999 he created a spectacular music and light show in the Egyptian desert, near Giza. The show, called The 12 Dreams of the Sun, celebrated the new millennium and 5000 years of civilization in Egypt. It also offered a preview of the new Jarre album,
Metamorphoses.
In 2001 he performed a concert in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke and Tetsuya Komuro in the Okinawa beaches, to celebrate the "real" beginning of the new millennium. The concert was called Rendez-vous in Space and the group called itself The ViZitors. Later that year, he plays at the Acropolis in Greece.
In 2002 he performed the AERO concert at Grammel Vrå Enge wind farm, just outside Aalborg in Denmark, to a rather wet audience of approximately 50000.
On October 10 2004 he gave a big concert in the Forbidden City and the Tiananmen Square in China, due to the "Year of France in China". The audience was of about 15,000 spectators, most of them special guests, but also a small number of international fans. No fireworks were used due to security concerns. This concert was broadcasted in HDTV with 5.1 sound by some satellite channels. 5.1 sound was also used on the stage. It included music from the AERO compilation album, as well as some songs not by Jarre.
Jarre was married to British actress and photographer
Charlotte Rampling. In 2002 he became engaged to French actress
Isabelle Adjani, but later she
ended this relationship. Currently, Jarre is engaged to French actress Anne Parillaud. He has three children: Emilie (from Jarre's first marriage in early 1970s), Barnaby (
Charlotte Rampling's son from a previous marriage) and David (Charlotte and Jean-Michel's son).
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