Jean Michel Jarre

Sessions 2000, Jean-Michel Jarre's first Stateside release after a maddening drought, is essentially a year in the life of the mind of the master who wowed the world with his seminal "Oxygene" suite in 1976. Jazzier than early fans would probably expect, but as interesting as he's always been, Jarre's six-track view of a year is energetic, invigorating, and after-dinner-drink smooth.
Eschewing song titles for a deceptively simpler system of dates, Jarre has both taken away outside meaning from each song, but has also imbued each one with the sensory synapse each season brings. So, then, "January 24" is shot through with the ambience of ice and wind, becoming a chilled "Auld Lang Syne" of sorts, leaving "March 23" to open up sunnier vibes with jazz trumpet and down beat synths…

One might have expected that Silva Screen Records, here operating through the subsidiary label Silva Classics, would be more interested in Jean Michel Jarre's father Maurice Jarre than in the younger musician. After all, Reynold da Silva's record company specializes in making new recordings of music from film scores, and it's Maurice Jarre who's the famous screen composer, while Jean Michel Jarre is the synthesizer player who stages spectacular concerts and sells records in the millions with his new age music. But that's the point: this is The Symphonic Jean Michel Jarre, an attempt to take his music and play it as though it had been written like his father's. As usual, Silva employs the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, with the Crouch End Festival Chorus along to provide the "ah" sounds as appropriate…

Limited CD and Blu-ray edition. 2021 release of Jean-Michel Jarre's ground-breaking New Year's Eve live performance Welcome To The Otherside which combined life-like concert visuals in VR with a real live studio performance, introduced a mixed-media approach which was the first of it's kind. The performance includes tracks from his recent Grammy-nominated opus Electronica, as well as new reworked versions of his classics, Oxygène and Equinoxe.

This set features 41 works "hand-picked" by Jarre himself and re-mastered to deliver what the label describes as "a new and sparkling freshness to the sound of the package".
Jarre has divided the audio offering into four different sections and he explains the methodology: "Going through the body of my existing work for this project, I realised that I have four quite different styles of composition. There is this common idea that people are focusing on shorter and shorter moments of music by zapping constantly. This is not necessarily true. We are also spending more and more time in our day-to-day life listening to playlists. Wherever we are and whatever we do. This is the reason why I decided to divide this project into four different parts, four different worlds that make up my own world… my own planet. And I hope that you will enjoy the journey"…

French electronic music guru Jean Michel Jarre returns to recording after a seven-year studio hiatus. Many have accused Jarre of being in a musical rut since the '90s, but as evidenced by Téo and Téa, he may be retro but he's far from tired. This album includes the bad-ass title track single that has been taking over dancefloors in Europe since the end of 2006; its four on the floor house rhythm is shaded and textured with all manner of narrated voices, programmed analog synths, polythrythms and all manner of slamming, over the top house. Its cheesy sounds blend seamlessly with the more substantive ones. Jarre collaborates with string arranger and guitarist Claude Samard who also uses all manner of digital equipment to get delays on orchestral textures and sonically enhanced analog sounds to behave…

This pleasant techno hybrid remixes mostly Chronologie with a few sustainable classics (Equinoxe 4 & 7, Magnetic Fields 2, Calypso, Revolutions) and tries to bridge the gap between contemporary Jarre and late 90s dance. This is better considered a B-side of Chronologie, and so long as you loved that, or old skool techno, you might take to this.

As the title implies, the music here is presented as an organic continuation of the original album, and Jarre manages to skilfully revisit the old stomping ground with instrumentation that doesn't sound too out of place (perhaps a happy side-effect of the original Oxygene sounding so far ahead of its time) and sprinkles on a few more modern electronic influences (including a bit of trance here and there) which refresh the sound of the album whilst keeping its character recognisable. Motifs from the original album come back to play here and there, but there's enough new material to make the album more than a mere exercise in nostalgia.

While it can be easy to dislike and dismiss some cookie-cutter electronic music, the challenge lies in finding reasons to listen to it again. Such is the case with Revolutions by Jean Michel Jarre. One reviewer wrote, simply, "(This) is not revolutionary." That is true; Jarre breaks no new ground with the release of this album. He does, however, continue to create original music in his own style. He is often imitated and that is the sincerest form of flattery…

The Concerts in China is a live album by Jean Michel Jarre, recorded in 1981 and released in 1982 on Disques Dreyfus. It was recorded during Jarre's Concerts in China tour of Autumn 1981, which consisted of five Beijing and Shanghai concerts in China; this was the first time a Western pop artist performed in China after the Cultural Revolution. The album is a balance of previously released tracks by Jarre, new compositions inspired by Chinese culture, and one rearranged traditional Chinese track ("Fishing Junks at Sunset"). The album consists mainly of live material, plus ambient sound recordings and one new studio track "Souvenir of China". Other new compositions recorded live include "Night in Shanghai", "Laser Harp", "Arpegiator" and "Orient Express". "Fishing Junks at Sunset" is a new arrangement of a very old traditional Chinese song known as the "Fisherman's Chant at Dusk", which was performed and recorded with The Peking Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra and is often wrongly attributed as being composed by Jean Michel Jarre, misled by the album inlay.