Jean-Michel André Jarre (; 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.
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. 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 Equinoxe, 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 followed, 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. He was the first Western musician officially invited to perform in the People's Republic of China and held the world record for the largest-ever audience at an outdoor event for his Moscow concert on 6 September 1997, which was reputed to have been attended by about 3.5 million people.
Biography
Early life, influences, and education
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. When Jarre was five, his parents separated and his father moved to the United States, leaving him with his mother. He did not see his father again until reaching the age of 18. 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.
Jarre struggled with 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, 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".
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 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: