Trivia / Jean-Michel Jarre

• Ascended Fanon: The first Rarities bootleg album had a cover based on that of the extremely rare La Cage/Erosmachine 7" single with some of the tracks listed at the top and bottom margins. Being a bootleg, it has never been official. Then came the 2011 Essentials & Rarities compilation. The Rarities CD got its own cover—based on the Rarities bootleg.
• Breakthrough Hit: Oxygène as an album, "Oxygène 4" as a single/a song. Most people aren't even aware that Jarre has made music before Oxygène already.
• Bury Your Art:
  • Jarre's first two albums, Deserted Palace and the soundtrack to The Burned Barns, went out of print by the time Oxygène released and were never reissued for decades. Jarre himself chose to ignore the existence of both records, instead treating Oxygène as his true debut album. Dreyfus Records would eventually reissue The Burned Barns on CD in 2003, but Deserted Palace remains AWOL.
  • Enforced as an artistic decision for Music for Supermarkets. Jarre printed just one copy of the album and auctioned it off before destroying the master tapes and pressing plates, intending to treat the album like a work of fine art (as it was based around music Jarre composed for an art exhibit). Keeping in line with this intention, Jarre refuses to re-release the original album apart from reusing the multitrack recordings in other songs and including a demo version of "Music for Supermarkets Part I" on the Greatest Hits Album Planet Jarre, instead encouraging the circulation of pirate copies sourced from a single radio broadcast in 1983.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Although Disques Dreyfus has always been a jazz label, Francis Dreyfus clung to his rights on Jarre's recordings as hard as he could because the immense amount of money they made. And they still do—Oxygène was released in 1976, but it still sells well enough that whatever number of sales one might read somewhere that isn't declared recent has long been surpassed.
• Channel Hop: Jarre's debut single was released on Pathé Records before he moved to Sam Fox for his debut album, kickstarting his longstanding working relationship with music executive Francis Dreyfus. After the first album, Dreyfus moved him over to Eden Roc, then to Motors Records for Oxygène. Once that album became a success, Jarre was shifted over to Dreyfus' larger eponymous label, partnering with Polydor Records to distribute his work internationally. In 1997, Jarre would switch to Epic Records for international distribution, and after completing his contract with Dreyfus, he moved over to Warner Music Group in France, first signing onto EastWest before sticking to Warner Music France until 2007, when he briefly moved over to Capitol Records and EMI. Eventually, Jarre would settle down on Columbia Records in The New '10s, remaining there to this day.
• Completely Different Title: The Japanese title for Oxygène is 幻想惑星, Fantasy Planet.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • Mass media sometimes love to mention a Moog synthesizer in conjunction with Jarre's classic albums. Jarre didn't own a Moog before he made the 1984 album Zoolook, and the next time he used one was the 1993 album Chronologie. What they hear instead is most likely an ARP 2600.
  • Also, the use of the term "digital" on Jarre's famous classic albums to describe how futuristic and high-tech they may seem. Actually, Jarre had only two and only partly digital instruments in The '70s, the RMI Harmonic Synthesizer and the RMI Keyboard Computer which have digital oscillators for maximal tuning precision and stability and for special waveforms respectively. Everything else is analog. Jarre wouldn't really start focusing on digital technology as a core feature of his music until Les Chants Magnétiques in 1981, which made considerable use of the Fairlight CMI to experiment with then-emerging sampling techniques.
  • For the same reason, referring to Oxygène as all-analog is wrong, but it keeps happening.
• Creator Couple: Jarre and his second wife, the British actress Charlotte Rampling. She is responsible for the vast majority of official photographs of her husband, including those on album covers. Jarre even sampled the shutter and winder noises of her camera and used them in "Souvenir Of China".
• Cut Song: "Moon Machine" was intended to be part of Zoolook, but was ultimately excluded from the album. It would first appear on a promotional flexi-disc included with Keyboard magazine and would serve as a B-Side to the 12" single release of "Fourth Rendez-vous" before eventually being included on the Greatest Hits Album Images in 1991. Also, the many songs left out of most of Jarre's official live albums and videos.
• Died During Production: The NASA astronaut Ron McNair was to record a piece of music composed for this purpose aboard the space shuttle and even play it live at Rendez-vous Houston. Then came the 1986 Challenger disaster with McNair on board.
• Executive Meddling: It's more like Political Meddling, but Jarre had to replace every instance of "revolution" in "Revolution, Revolutions" for the Twelve Dreams of the Sun because the word "revolution" is banned in Egypt.
• Fan Community Nicknames: In French, Jarre fans call themselves and each other "Jarriens".
• He Also Did:
  • Jarre has been a painter since he was a kid. Back then, he sold his paintings on Paris' famous flea market claiming his big brother had made them. He doesn't even have a big brother.
  • He once broke the 100-meter-dash record at the Sorbonne.
  • He can play the guitar. In the late 60s, his role model was mostly Hank Marvin of The Shadows (little did he know that both the band and Marvin as a soloist would later cover his own big hits, or that he'd even collab with Marvin). There's even a French film, Des garçons et des filles, in which Jarre can be seen playing with his band—and singing. Almost half a century later, during the Electronica tour, he brought the guitar back, but this time heavily distorted.
  • Not only did he compose the very first electronic ballet for the Paris Opera (Aor, 1971), but he was also the youngest composer ever featured at the Opera back then.
  • He made a movie soundtrack for Les granges brûlées in 1973. It was re-released on CD in 2013 after having been a sought-after rarity for decades. (His contributions to other films have been taken from his regular albums.)
  • He played not exactly a small part in the French music of The '70s. He composed songs and wrote lyrics for even more, catering to artists like Christophe (whose big and often-covered hit "Les mots bleus" got lyrics from Jarre), Françoise Hardy, Patrick Juvet or Gérard Lenorman. He sometimes even produced albums for them.
  • The alarm sound of the very first Swatch MusiCall generation was composed by Jarre. In fact, he included a sample directly from the watch in "Chronologie 4", "5" and "8".
  • He has been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador since 1993. He played his 2006 Merzouga — Water For Life concert in Morocco in this role.
  • He was elected CISAC president in 2013.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Anything pre-Oxygène was produced and originally sold in comparatively small numbers and without any re-issue. Not only are these items hard to find today, they're also outrageously expensive. Jarre's first single release, La Cage/Erosmachine of which not many more than 100 have survived, sells for four-digit Euro prices. His first album, Deserted Palace, and the Les Granges Brûlées soundtrack grew similarly expensive. The first of a series of Rarities bootleg records was produced to compensate this and bring these treasures to the average Jarre fan (with good enough connections to be able to obtain one, that is), but even these are long-out-of-print and costly items. For many years, Jarre fans had to literally circulate and copy audio tapes and then distribute MP3 files ripped from said audio tapes to hand them over to other fans until they were at least partly Rescued: Les Granges Brûlées was re-released on CD in 2003, and 2011 saw the release of the Essentials & Rarities compilation with one CD full of rare pre-Oxygène tracks (including "Happiness Is A Sad Song" and "Hypnose" which are even older than "La Cage").
  • Of Music For Supermarkets, only one copy was ever made, Jarre doesn't intend to produce any more, going so far as to publicly burn the master tapes and master plates to prove that he was serious (the original multitracks and digital samples are still intact and have been repurposed in several later albums). A bootleg is the only way to get it, and even the bootlegs are of abysmal quality since they're all recordings of the same AM radio broadcast.
  • There have only ever been two official concert recording which contains a complete Jarre show with no tracks left out or shortened. One is the Concert pour la tolérance LaserDisc; this item was available in France only and neither on VHS nor later on on DVD. The other one is the Jarre In China CD/double-DVD box, and even this only thanks to thousands of fans' outrage about the drastically shortened Live In Beijing single DVD. Most Jarre concerts, including every single tour since 1997, have never seen an official release. The few official concert recordings don't really represent the actual show well. Tracks are missing (Rendez-vous Houston, for example, has been cut down from a two-hour show to about 40 minutes), have been edited in length (Paris La Défense, for example, has only a few unedited tracks, some others are only half as long as they were at the show; also compare the old In Concert Houston-Lyon with its Cities In Concert re-release), or have been remixed or even re-recorded (Rendez-vous Lyon is an offender of this), and the Hong Kong album doesn't even contain a second of music from the actual concert (Souvenir Of China is from Paris La Défense, Fishing Junks At Sunset was taken from the rehearsals, the whole rest comes from the Europe In Concert tour, mostly the Barcelona show which was—incompletely—released on VHS). Even today, the only way to obtain a full-length Jarre concert recording is a bootleg. Fortunately, Jarre encourages this.
• Late Export for You: Métamorphoses didn't see a US release until 2004, four years after the original French release.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition:
  • The golden Original Master Recording edition CDs of Oxygène and Equinoxe.
  • The limited box set The Laser Years exclusively contained Cities In Concert, an In Concert Houston-Lyon special variant with all music in full length — that is, until In Concert Houston-Lyon was replaced by Cities In Concert as part of the regular back catalog during the 1997 remastering.
  • The original eleven-track Jarremix with an additional Laurent Garnier remix has inofficially become that.
  • The Complete Oxygène is Oxygène and Oxygène 7-13, the latter with a bonus track called "Oxygen In Moscow", in a tall black cardboard case. Today, the case is the only reason to buy The Complete Oxygène because the bonus track is actually Claude Monnet's "Oxygène 12" remix also available on Odyssey Through O2, and even then you'll have a hard time fitting that box anywhere into your collection as it's even taller than a DVD case.
  • Aero came out as a CD, a CD with a video DVD of Anne Parillaud's eyes while listening to the album (as seen on the cover) and a CD with a 3-D video DVD of Anne Parillaud's eyes.
  • Oxygène – New Master Recording also came along with a DVD containing the Oxygène – Live In Your Living-Room performance recording.
  • Planet Jarre is also available in a special edition box with either two CDs or two long-play records, two cassette tapes, download codes for high-quality audio and a special booklet.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • Rendez-vous Houston celebrated both the state of Texas' and the city of Houston's 150th anniversary and the 25th anniversary of NASA. Jarre even joked about returning another 150 years later.
  • The mini-gig Destination Trocadéro honored the Eiffel Tower's 100th birthday.
  • Paris La Défense, breaking Jarre's Rendez-vous Houston audience record, was exactly one year late for celebrating the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution and the 10th anniversary of Jarre's already record-breaking debut concert. That said, he had plans for a big Paris concert in 1989 in order to also celebrate the Eiffel Tower's birthday, but these had to be nixed. Instead, he played the small Destinatin Trocadéro and delayed the big show by one year.
  • At Jarre's Europe In Concert gig in Brussels, the fans celebrated his 45th birthday. A concert bootleg actually contains "Happy Birthday" sung by the audience.
  • Oxygen In Moscow, breaking Jarre's Paris La Défense audience record, was part of the city of Moscow's 850th anniversary celebrations.
  • The album Oxygène 7-13 was originally scheduled to be released 20 years after Oxygène, but it came several months later when it was already 1997.
  • Oxygène – New Master Recording was even worse. It was first largely re-recorded in a studio. Then it was completely re-recorded by Jarre and his three live co-keyboardists at that time in front of running cameras which became Oxygène – Live In Your Living-Room to be bundled with the album. When that was completed and the Oxygène remake could finally be released, it was 2008 already.
  • Oxygène 3, however, came out on December 2nd, 2016, precisely 40 years after Oxygène.
  • This continued with Jarre's next album, Equinoxe Infinity, which came out on November 16th, 2018, precisely 40 years after Equinoxe which thereby got its first Milestone Celebration ever.
• No Export for You: Taken to the extreme with the Oxygene Moscow DVD, of which only two versions were released in the USA and Brazil respectively. Also, the Concert pour la Tolérance LaserDisc was released in France only, and the concert itself has never been officially available on any other media, neither video nor audio (bootlegs notwithstanding).
• Prop Recycling:
  • The monstrous "musical instrument" from Destination Docklands named "Central Station", custom-made by Lag, had two semi-circular keyboards stacked upon one another as a central element, one with 97 normally-spaced black and white keys, one with big illumiated keys. These two ended up as a much smaller controller at Paris La Défense. The normal black-and-white keyboard, in turn, was used at the Europe In Concert tour, standing on two regular X-shaped keyboard stands with no special external casing.
  • Also, the gigantic "Merry Monarch" puppets from Paris La Défense returned at Oxygen In Moscow.
• Refitted for Sequel: As the original multitrack recordings and digital assets (i.e. audio samples) for Music for Supermarkets have remained intact since they were first put to tape in 1983, they've been given new lives as parts of songs on later Jarre albums. In particular, Part III was reused, appropriately enough, as "Fifth Rendez-Vouz (Part III)" on Rendez-Vouz, Part IV was reused on Zoolook as the track "Blah Blah Café", and Part VI appeared as the second half of "Diva" on the same album in a reworked version, featuring a redone bassline, some digital samples removed, and new vocals recorded by Laurie Anderson. An excerpt of Part I would also appear on the Planet Jarre compilation in 2018.
• Sequel Gap:
  • Oxygène 7-13 was released almost 21 years after the original Oxygène, Oxygène 3 came exactly 40 years later.
  • Equinoxe didn't have a follow-up until exactly 40 years later again with Equinoxe Infinity.
• Similarly Named Works:
  • Jarre played a two-part piece of music named "Aero" at the concert of the same name in Denmark 2002. Two years later, the album Aero was released with an entirely different track named "Aero"—and the live version of "Rendez-vous 4" which had been played right after the original "Aero" at the concert.
  • There have been three different Jarre compilations titled The Essential so far, not counting Essentials & Rarities.
• Throw It In!: The white noise used throughout "Oxygéne 4" was used to cover up the hum of the tape recorders.
• Troubled Production:
  • The China concerts in 1981 were the first time ever that live music was electronically amplified, let alone produced, in the People's Republic of China. Among other things, it turned out that there was simply not enough electricity in Beijing for the concerts and the surrounding city quarter. Solution: Everything around the concert venue was blacked out in order for Jarre to have sufficient electricity.
  • Also in Beijing, Jarre noticed that the entire audience of his first concert consisted only of government and military officials and the like. Normal people were completely absent because they simply couldn't afford the tickets although these were comparatively dirt cheap. Not a single ticket had been sold. Solution this time: Jarre and his team went out the next day, bought all the tickets for what amounted to a few hundred dollars and gave them away for free. Outcome: epic celebration the same evening.
  • The China Concerts were meant to get a live album release, and so they were recorded. But it wasn't before Jarre and his crew had returned from China that they discovered that these recordings were largely so bad that they were mostly useless. So Jarre and his co-musicians had to re-record the music in the studio on top of whatever could still be used. In other words, most of what you hear on The Concerts In China, including Dominique Perrier's legendary synth solo on "Magnetic Fields 2", was recorded in a studio and not in front of a live audience.
  • Rendez-vous Houston (1986) was difficult not only because nobody had ever staged a concert of that sheer size before, but also because fireworks are banned in Texas, not to mention the Challenger disaster which made Jarre question the whole project, Ron McNair's death aboard the Shuttle (he was planned to play his saxophone in space which was to be transmitted live) and street traffic in large parts of the city coming to a grinding halt, especially after the concert when more than 1.5 million people wanted to drive back home all at once. As if that hadn't been enough, a heavy thunderstorm went down on the city just before the concert, causing worries that the show would have to be canceled upon short notice because too many not exactly waterproof electronic devices had been destroyed.
  • Destination Docklands (1988) was planned to be the biggest concert ever by audience count. A staggering four million people were to watch it live. For this very reason, the show was originally blocked by the authorities because it would have been impossible for a rescue team to get through the audience quickly enough in case of an emergency.
  • Even when Destination Docklands was finally greenlit, it actually had to be delayed by almost a month because of the horrible rain and storm on its originally scheduled date, and then it had to be played twice. When the two shows finally took place, the weather wasn't that much better, though, and more and more equipment fell victim to water damage so that the concerts eventually turned into mostly playback shows.
  • Jarre wanted to play a concert during the total solar eclipse in Teotihuacan, Mexico, in 1991. The reason why this didn't happen was that the ship from Europe with the special custom-made stage aboard sank while crossing the Atlantic.
  • Mont Saint-Michel (Europe In Concert, 1993) proved to be too difficult for the audience to reach during the Europe In Concert tour. That said, this was the very first tour concert Jarre had ever played, and Mont Saint-Michel was the first concert of that tour. Nonetheless, the traffic to the rather remote venue jammed so badly that people with valid tickets couldn't get to the location in time, and it got even worse after the show when the crowd left again.
  • The Madrid concert of the Europe In Concert tour had to be cancelled hours before it would have gone ahead due to heavy rain. The weather itself wasn't so much of a problem, but the ground under the stage was so soaked that the gigantic welded stage had begun to sink in.
  • Oxygen In Moscow (1997). Try to get the biggest concert in Russian history off the ground in Moscow less than six years after the end of the Soviet Union while the whole city is busy preparing for its 850th anniversary. Most of it ended up being sheer luck.
  • The Twelve Dreams Of The Sun (1999-2000) became problematic not because Egyptian authorities ordered Jarre to change the lyrics of "Revolution, Revolutions", but mostly because of the fog that appeared during the show, rendering the fireworks and the projections on the pyramids practically invisible. Some suppose that it was the unprecedented excess heat from all the electronics installed in the desert that caused the water in the desert sand to evaporate.
  • Aero took place in the Gammel Vrå Enge Windmill Park near the city of Aalborg in Denmark. There were no buildings at the concert location, not even any paved surfaces of any kind. And it rained like crazy. Everything in front of the stage turned into a mudfest, and after the concert, cars would get stuck in the mud in the Danish outback in the middle of the night. The promoters had to call local farmers to assist spectators with getting their cars out of the mud by pulling them out with their tractors.
  • The only German concert during Jarre's 2009 In>Doors tour was played at the Sporthalle Oberwerth in Koblenz which has three large skylights and no walls between the actual hall and the glass front. The show was scheduled to start at 9:00 pm, but it was a sunny day in late May, so it wasn't nearly dark enough inside the building for a Jarre concert. The show had to be delayed by 40 minutes, and even then there was a rest of light coming in from outside for another ten minutes or so.
• Vanilla Edition: Live In Beijing seems to be this in hindsight because all songs on it are shortened whereas Jarre In China contains exactly the same double-concert uncut and with THX-certified surround sound plus an excerpt audio CD. The truth, however, is that Jarre In China came into existence because thousands of fans protested against Live In Beijing being cut like all Jarre concert releases (except for the France-only Concert pour la tolérance LaserDisc) before.
  • More recent album releases coming in a Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition came in a Vanilla Edition with only an audio CD as well.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Jarre was approached by Mick Jagger after his 1979 debut concert in Paris and asked if he could play the keys on The Rolling Stones' next album, Emotional Rescue. Jarre turned the offer down, but would eventually provide synth parts for another British rock band: Gorillaz (as a session musician on Humanz).
  • Paris La Défense was originally planned to take place in 1989 for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. Good thing it was delayed, otherwise it wouldn't have included Waiting For Cousteau.
  • Jarre wanted to play a third mega-concert including a skyscraper cityscape as its backdrop, namely in Frankfurt/Main in Germany for the 1991 IAA opening. The project went far enough for the BILD to announce the show. It ended up being canceled because it would have been way too expensive.
  • A 1994 live album was planned to be recorded at a stand-alone concert in Düsseldorf, based on the Europe In Concert tour and scheduled for June. Alas, the show was canceled six days before it would have happened, and so the live album couldn't be recorded. In order to have a new live album nonetheless (the last one was Jarre Live from 1989), Hong Kong was pieced together from whatever could pass as the 1994 Hongkong stadium inauguration show for those who hadn't been there.
  • The 1995 Concert pour la tolérance was originally to be staged at the Hôtel des Invalides and eventually relocated to the Champ-de-Mars with a stage in front of the Eiffel Tower.
  • Jarre asked Little Boots, already a Promoted Fangirl since her collab with him on his Electronica project, to also become a regular keyboardist/synth player in his live band for his Electronica Tour.
  • In The New '10s, Jarre expressed interest in collaborating with Mike Oldfield, of whom he was a fan. However, he quickly backed out of the idea before he could ask Oldfield, believing that their styles were incompatible with one another (specifically describing Oldfield's work as "too acoustic").
  • Jarre expressed interest in collaborating with Kraftwerk and Vangelis, but both projects never materialized. While the door is still tentatively open for Kraftwerk, any chance of Jarre working with Vangelis ended with the latter's death in 2022.
  • Also see the other canceled concerts under Troubled Production.

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