Jean-Michel Jarre - Original Album Classics (2017)

5 Classic albums in mini LP-style card sleeves; Magnetic Fields (1981), Zoolook (1984), Rendez-Vous (1986), Revolutions (1988) & Waiting for Cousteau (1990).

Jean-Michel André Jarre is a French composer, performer, and record producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient, and new-age genres, also known for organising outdoor spectacles featuring his music, vast laser displays 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 those of street performers, jazz musicians, and the artist Pierre Soulages. He played guitar in a band, 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 12 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, and he is now perhaps as well known as a performer as he is as a musician.

Les Chants Magnétiques (English title: Magnetic Fields) is the fifth studio album by French electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre, released on Disques Dreyfus on 22 May 1981. The album was one of the first records to use sampling as a musical element and represents a departure from the sound of Jarre's previous efforts.

The long first track consists of three distinct movements, the slower second movement being heavily laden with sample work. It was also used as the interval signal of a numbers station of the same name.

The album reached #6 in the UK charts and #98 in the U.S. charts.

The album has official titles in both French and English. The French title, Les Chants Magnétiques is a play on words. Literally translated into English this means "Magnetic Songs" or "Magnetic Singing". Spoken aloud however, it sounds as "Les Champs Magnétiques" (literally: "Magnetic Fields"), due to the French words chants (songs or singing) and champs (fields) being homophones. As this is not the case in English, the more straightforward title "Magnetic Fields" was used in English. In the caption for picture 5 on the album's inner sleeve, the word "champs" in "champs magnétiques" is crossed out and the word "chants" is written above it.

Zoolook is the seventh studio album by French electronic musician and composer Jean Michel Jarre, released on the Disques Dreyfus label in 1984. It makes extensive use of digital recording techniques and sampling. Much of the music is built up from singing and speech in 25 different languages, along with synthesizers (such as the Fairlight CMI), as well as more traditional instruments.

Parts of the album, like the tracks "Blah Blah Café" and the second half of the track "Diva", were reworkings of material that had already appeared as sections of the album Music for Supermarkets, released the previous year. The track "Moon Machine" was recorded for inclusion on Zoolook but did not appear on the final release; it later appeared, first on a flexidisc included with Keyboard Magazine (March 1986 issue), the 12-inch single of the Special Remix of "Fourth Rendez-Vous" (1986), and the much later Images compilation album (1991).

The voices heard on this album were based on recordings of speech and singing in numerous languages: Aboriginal, Afghan, Arabic, Balinese, Buhndi, Chinese, Dutch (Ethnicolor II - 3:15), English, Eskimo, French, German, Hungarian, Indian, Japanese, Malagasy, Malayan, Pygmy, Polish, Quechua, Russian, Sioux, Spanish, Swedish, Tibetan and Turkish.

The album spawned two singles: the title track and "Zoolookologie". Both were released in remixed forms as both 7" and 12" singles, the latter format including extended remixes by François Kevorkian. A further extended remix version of "Zoolook", produced by Razormaid!, has also been released.

After the initial album release, subsequent ones for Polydor and Dreyfus in 1985 included these remixed 7" versions as the canonical album tracks (see track listings below). However, when Jarre's catalogue was remastered and re-released by Sony's Epic label in the mid-1990s, the original versions were once again reinstated. The track "Diva" is also slightly shorter on the second release.

At the time of its release NME said, "Strangely simplistic, this LP is like a union between Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) and Kraftwerk on speed". In a retrospective review, Allmusic described the album as "interesting throughout".

Rendez-vous is the eighth studio album by electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre released on Disques Dreyfus, licensed to Polydor, in April 1986. It sold some three million copies worldwide and remains Jarre's longest-running chart album in both the U.S. and UK, with a 20-week run in the U.S. and an impressive 38-week run in the UK. The album art of the album was created by long-time collaborator Michel Granger.

The last track on the album was originally scheduled to include a saxophone part recorded by astronaut Ron McNair on the Space Shuttle Challenger, making it the first piece of music to be recorded in space, but on 28 January 1986, 73 seconds after lift-off, the shuttle disintegrated and the entire Challenger crew were killed. The track was dedicated to McNair and the other astronauts on board Challenger. On the album the saxophone part is played by saxophonist Pierre Gossez.

The album reached #9 in the UK charts and #52 in the U.S. charts.

The album was nominated for Grammy Award for Best New Age Album in 1987, although it didn't win the award.

In April 1986, Jarre performed the large-scale outdoor concert Rendez-vous Houston in Houston, Texas, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the founding of Texas. The show attracted a then-world-record live audience of 1.3 million people. The concert was originally to have included a video projection of Ron McNair's performance, recorded in space.

Jean-Michel returned to the stage in October for another concert, the Rendez-Vous Lyon, marking the Pope John Paul II visit to Jarre's hometown (Lyon).

Revolutions is the ninth studio album by electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre, first released in August 1988. The album spans several genres, including symphonic industrial, Arabian inspired, light guitar pop and ethnic electro jazz. The album reached number #2 in the UK charts, Jarre's best chart position since Oxygène. The Destination Docklands concert in London coincided with the release of the album.

There are two versions of the album, each containing a different version of the track "Revolutions". On the original release, the introduction to the tune is played on a Turkish flute, whereas the later reissue of the album uses an Arabian string orchestra for the introduction. This version also has a different vocal accompaniment, as sung by an Arabian vocalist.[citation needed] "Revolutions" contains reworked samples of an unpublished composition by Turk Kudsi Erguner, which Jarre had acquired from ethnologist Xavier Bellenger. Erguner took his case to court and won a modest indemnity. Jarre removed the Ney part from new releases of the record and from live performances.

The song "London Kid" was a collaboration with Hank Marvin. Hank was living in Perth, Australia at the time and he and Jean-Michel composed the song with each other over the phone.

As noted in the liner notes, the track "September" is named after and dedicated to South African ANC activist Dulcie September, who was assassinated in Paris on 29 March 1988.

The majority of the album was played with a Roland D-50 synthesizer, with the majority of sound programming gathered from custom sound banks, compiled into a single bank and later released for French Keyboards magazine.

En attendant Cousteau (English title: Waiting for Cousteau) is the tenth studio album by French electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre, released on Disques Dreyfus, licensed to Polydor, in 11 June 1990. The album was dedicated to Jacques-Yves Cousteau and was released on his 80th birthday 11 June 1990. Allmusic described the album as "groundbreaking stuff", due to its extreme stylistic differences from his other albums. The album reached Number 14 in the UK charts.

The title track is a composition in the ambient style and an edited version of the music he produced for Concert d'Images (English: Concert of Images), an exhibition which contained photographs and selected objects from Jarre's concerts. The original plan was to release the album edit of the track as a promo CD single, but those plans were abandoned. On vinyl and cassette tape the title track was edited to only 22 minutes due to the lack of space on the formats.

Jarre utilised the unedited version as an ambient audience "warm-up" in the hours prior to the Paris la Defense concert in 1990 (and also in many concerts after this "first"), played on the specially installed public address sound system scattered throughout Paris for this event.

Early promos for the album had the title track named "Cousteau on the Beach", but was renamed later, because Jacques-Yves Cousteau thought beaches are an environmental disaster.

Calypso Part 1 contains samples previously heard in The tracks Zoolookologie and Moon Machine, the former appearing on his 1984 album Zoolook, and the latter as the B-side to the single Fourth Rendez-Vous and later appearing on the compilation album Images.

The last track En Attendant Cousteau was also used in the soundtrack to a documentary entitled "Palawan: Le Dernier Refuge" by oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau.