Jean-Michel Jarre
Jean-Michel André Jarre[note 1] (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl ɑ̃dʁe ʒaʁ]; born 24 August 1948) is a French composer, performer and record producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and new-age genres, and is known for organising outdoor spectacles featuring his music, accompanied by vast laser displays, large projections and fireworks.
Jean-Michel Jarre
Jean-Michel André Jarre
24 August 1948
Lyon, France
- Composer
- performer
- record producer
- Synthesizer
- piano
- organ
- laser harp
- accordion
- guitar
- bass guitar
- theremin
- keytar
1969–present
-
Flore Guillard(m. 1975; div. 1977)
- Francette Pejot
- Maurice Jarre
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 street performers, jazz musicians and the artist Pierre Soulages; but his musical style was perhaps most heavily influenced by Pierre Schaeffer, a pioneer of musique concrète at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.
His first mainstream success was the 1976 album Oxygène. Recorded in a makeshift studio at his home, the album sold an estimated 18 million copies. Oxygène 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.
As of 2004, Jarre had sold an estimated 80 million albums and singles.[2] He was the first Western musician officially invited to perform in the People's Republic of China and holds the world record for the largest-ever audience at an outdoor event for his Moscow concert on 6 September 1997, which was attended by 3.5 million people.
Biography[edit]
Early life, influences, and education[edit]
Jean-Michel Jarre was born in Lyon on 24 August 1948, to Francette Pejot, a French Resistance member and concentration camp survivor, and composer Maurice Jarre.[3][4] His grandmother was Jewish.[5] When Jarre was five, his parents separated and his father moved to the United States, leaving him with his mother.[6] He did not see his father again until reaching the age of 18.[4] For the first eight years of his life, Jarre spent six months each year at his maternal grandparents' flat on the Cours de Verdun, in the Perrache district of Lyon. Jarre's grandfather was an oboe player, engineer and inventor, designing an early audio mixer used at Radio Lyon. He also gave Jean-Michel his first tape recorder.[7] From his vantage point high above the pavement, the young Jarre was able to observe street performers at work, an experience he later cited as proving influential on his art.[4][8]
Jarre struggled with classical piano studies, although he later changed teachers and worked on his scales.[9] A more general interest in musical instruments was sparked by his discovery at the Saint-Ouen flea market, where his mother sold antiques, of a Boris Vian trumpet violin. He often accompanied his mother to Le Chat Qui Pêche (The Fishing Cat), a Paris jazz club run by one of her friends from her resistance years, 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".[4][10] 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."[4] He was also influenced by classical, modernist 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:
Personal life[edit]
Jarre was married to Flore Guillard from 1975 until 1977.[141] He met his second wife, actress Charlotte Rampling, at a dinner party in St Tropez in 1976.[142] The two married, and Jarre gained custody of his daughter Émilie Charlotte,[142] while Rampling got the same of her son Barnaby; together Jarre and Rampling had a son, David.[143] Jarre and Rampling separated in 1996[144][145] and divorced in 2002.[146] He had a brief relationship with Isabelle Adjani,[147] and married French actress Anne Parillaud in May 2005.[148] In November 2010 the couple announced their divorce.[149]
Jarre started dating Chinese actress Gong Li in 2016.[150][151] They got married in 2019, and have kept the relationship private.[152][153]
Jarre has a half-sister, Stéphanie Jarre, from one of Maurice Jarre's other marriages.[154] His stepbrother, Kevin Jarre, died in 2011.[155] Although Maurice and Jean-Michel remained estranged, following Maurice's death in 2009, Jarre paid tribute to his legacy.[156]
Jarre said about his father: "My father and I never really achieved a real relationship. We probably saw each other 20 or 25 times in our lifetime. When you are able, at my age, to count the times you have seen your father, it says something. (...) I think it's better to have conflict, or, if you have a parent who dies, you grieve, but the feeling of absence is very difficult to fill, and it took me a while to absorb that".[6]