All about the laser harpist, fantastic showman, and Electronic ambient music pioneer,

Jean-Michel Jarre

born in Lyon, France, 1948

Written by Massimiliano Galli

his years prior to composing

His mother was a French Resistance member. His father, Maurice Jarre, was a composer. When he was five years old, his parents separated, and his father moved to the US. He met him again only when he was 18 years old. His relationship with his parents influenced his life in many ways, and he grew up surrounded by music.

Jarre's grandfather, an oboe player, engineer, and inventor, gave Jean-Michel his first tape recorder to experiment with. The area where he lived with his grandparents was full of street performers at work, an experience he later cited that influenced his vision of arts and live performances.

Another profoundly formative experience for him was visiting the modern jazz club Le Chat Qui Pêche (The Fishing Cat) in Paris. A live music venue a friend of his mom ran where saxophonists John Coltrane and trumpet player Chet Baker were regular performers. 

Jarre started studying piano, but like many other musicians, he showed a similar, if not more significant interest, in painting and visual arts. During his teenage years, he made money selling his paintings, exhibiting some of his pieces at the Lyon Gallery – L'Œil écoute, and playing in a band called Mystère IV.

His love for music and painting started blending when he realized he could use sounds and frequencies in the same way French artist Pierre Soulages, another of his significant influences, did with colors.

His early days in music

He took lessons in harmony, counterpoint, and fugue with Jeannine Rueff of the Conservatoire de Paris. He spent the rest of the 1960s playing guitar in a band called The Dustbins. He started mixing instruments like the electric guitar and the flute with tape effects and loops, radios, and other electronic devices. 

This impressive musical formation was completed when he joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1969. He studied with Pierre Schaeffer, considered the father of musique concrète, and with his introduction to the Moog modular synthesizer while working at the studio of influential composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany.

Jean-Michel Jarre goes solo

Like other early producers in the history of electronic music, Jarre started to properly focus on his musical career after setting up his home studio when he moved to Paris. Initially, the studio consisted of an EMS VCS 3 and an EMS Synthi AKS linked to Revox tape machines. After producing music for ballet, theatre, advertisements, and television programs, as well as music and lyrics for other artists, in 1972, he released his first studio album Deserted Palace, followed by Les Granges Brûlées in 1973. The second album was the soundtrack for the movie with the same name by Jean Chapot.

These first two releases were the prelude to a more considerable commercial success which started with the albums Oxygène (1976) and Équinoxe (1978). Jarre produced the two albums in his home studio, which expanded with new gears:

• An eight-track recorder

• An Eminent 310 electronic organ

• Korg Minipops drum machine

• ARP 2600 synthesizer

• RMI Harmonic synthesizer

• Farfisa organ

• A Mellotron

I might sound a bit nostalgic, but as previously discussed in many of our articles about the history of electronic music, it's pretty stunning to think about the massive success of albums that weren't created with that purpose but to explore new forms of expression and gears.

Oxygène was initially ignored and gained popularity in France thanks to the work of an additional of Schaeffer's students, Hélène Dreyfus. They persuaded her husband to publish the album on his label, Disques Motors. Electronic music in the late 1970s was exquisite for music lovers that, tired of rock music, were ready to embrace the innovative sounds of albums like Oxygène, the new Ambient Music, or the German Krautrock music scene. The album slowly gained commercial results selling an estimated 12 million copies and becoming the best-selling French record of all time.

Attention around Jarre exponentially grew, with Oxygène reaching number 2 in the UK charts. His career started shifting towards large-scale live shows in 1979 after the release of Équinoxe. Jarre held a concert on Bastille Day at the Place de la Concorde in Paris to support the album. 

The free outdoor event set a world record for the most significant number of spectators ever at an open-air concert, drawing more than 1 million spectators. Thanks to the projection of lights, images, and fireworks, the show became a blueprint for Jarre's future concerts (and probably electronic festival organizers for decades to come).

Jarre started a collaboration with French musician and composer Francis Rimbert, who joined him for two decades and released his fifth studio album Les Chants Magnétiques in 1981. He started using another innovative instrument, the Fairlight CMI, becoming one of its early pioneers. The arrival of the 1980s and the new technologies are particularly noticeable listening to this album, and Jarre's success even expanded to China. When the British Embassy gave Radio Beijing copies of Oxygène and Équinoxe, Jarre's music became the first foreign music to be played on Chinese national radio in decades and led him to become the first western musician to perform in China. Recordings of the concerts, which featured Jarre's signature electronic instrument, the laser harp, were released as a double-disc LP in 1982.

In 1983 Jarre was asked to compose background music for the supermarket-themed art exhibition Orrimbe show. The music recorded became the album Musique pour Supermarché. Since all the pieces of artwork in the show were to be auctioned off after the show, Jarre decided that the album should consist of a single copy to be auctioned off afterward, just like the artwork, with the master tapes and plates publicly destroyed. The only existing copy of the album was finally sold for approximately $10.000 and broadcasted only once by Radio Luxembourg, with Jarre encouraging listeners to tape the broadcast. Like many other successful artists, Jarre became skeptical of what he described as a "silly industrialization of music" and explained this was his way to protest.

Things came back to normality with the following album Zoolook (1984), which featured contributions from a long list of musicians, including Laurie Anderson, Adrian Belew, and Marcus Miller. The album also contained snippets of words and speech from languages across the globe.

In 1985 Jarre was invited to perform for the Texas 150th anniversary and invited by NASA to perform for the 25th anniversary of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. Jarre worked with several astronauts, including Bruce McCandless II and Ronald McNair, who was a saxophone player and was supposed to record the first piece of music ever recorded in outer space. Unfortunately, plans changed when McNair died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28th, 1986. The tragic event led to the concert's cancellation, but McCandless contacted Jarre and convinced him to perform in memory of the shuttle's crew. The recordings led to the release of the album Rendez-Vous (1986). For some time, the show, performed on April 5th of 1986, held a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest outdoor "rock concert" in history, with figures varying from 1 to 1.5 million in attendance beating his earlier record, set at Place de la Concorde, in 1979. 

Another epic show happened in 1988 after the release of the industrial album Revolutions. Jarre thought the architecture of the Royal Victoria Dock in east London was the ideal location to perform his new album live. After many complications with local officials and problems with safety measures, two concerts were finally authorized. A floating stage, the sizeable purpose-built display screens, World War II searchlights to illuminate the sky, and the surrounding architecture were set for these memorable shows. But the first-night inclement weather had threatened to break the stage from its moorings, and wind speeds were so high that even television cameras were blown over. On the second night, conditions were slightly better, but the 200.000 people audience, including Diana, Princess of Wales, was inundated with rain and wind.

The series of record-breaking events went on throughout Jarre's career. In the 1990s, another Bastille Day show at La Défense in Paris was attended by about two million people. His concert in Moscow in 1997 was attended by 3.5 million people, setting the still unbeaten record for the largest audience attending an outdoor event. 

In the following decades, Jarre continued releasing new electronic, synthpop, ambient, and new-age albums, the last one being Amazônia, released in 2021 and sold an estimated 80 million albums and singles.