29 Sep 2010
The synthesizer maestro talks to Neil McCormick about his new tour - and his painful relationship with his composer father.
Jean Michel Jarre wants to go back to the future. The French synthesizer
maestro arrives in the UK this weekend with his 2010 tour, named to evoke
the “hopes and dreams of my friend Arthur C Clarke”, author of the
science-fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“We have lost our vision for the future,” says Jarre, his strong accent
lending a romantic flair to his every pronouncement. “Before, we say,
'Nothing will be the same, cars will fly and we go to the end of the
universe’, we have this kind of naïve but exciting idea of the future. Now
the vision has been reduced to ways to select our garbage, and how to
survive global warming.
“Suddenly, we are putting ourselves as the next dinosaurs. It’s rather dark;
we have narrowed our dreams. It is time to restore our visions. And so it’s
not a nostalgic idea; it is based with this unconscious need to restore a
kind of dynamic for tomorrow.”
With long, flowing black hair and matinee-idol looks apparently suspended in
time (he is 62), Jarre has the charismatic presence of a rock star but talks
with the excitability and intellectual intensity of an eccentric professor.
“This kind of mad-scientist approach, I like very much,” he says and enthusiastically shows me a pair of glasses with cameras mounted on them, which he wears on stage so that audiences can see what it is like from his perspective, “surrounded by 71 instruments, machines that are part of the legend and mythology of electronic music”.
“This kind of mad-scientist approach, I like very much,” he says and enthusiastically shows me a pair of glasses with cameras mounted on them, which he wears on stage so that audiences can see what it is like from his perspective, “surrounded by 71 instruments, machines that are part of the legend and mythology of electronic music”.
Once the poster boy for Seventies electronica, Jarre is now a kind of elder
statesman of the first synthesizer generation. For what is actually his
first world tour of arenas (Jarre has previously concentrated on mounting
one-off spectaculars), he has forsaken digital technology in favour of using
original analogue instruments.
“There is such warmth, such depth, that we have lost somehow,” he says. “These instruments are quite special in the history of music. They just disappeared at the beginning of the Eighties when the Japanese created the DX7 and also with the explosion of the development of computers. These instruments didn’t even have the chance to become adults and occupy the future.
“So I want to be in a total live situation, with no computers on stage, exposing myself to accidents because these instruments were not necessarily made for performance. The challenge is that every concert should be different, something special.” There is something intriguingly paradoxical about the notion that electronic music, once so determinedly futuristic, has begun to venerate the retro sounds of the original synths. Yet Jarre always stood in opposition to the kind of cold, dystopian futurism of most early electronica. “I remember Stockhausen, when I was studying with him for a few months, saying, 'All that is close to emotion in music is suspect.’ Which is absolutely crazy. Emotions are the basics of any art form!”
The son of film composer Maurice Jarre, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where he came under the influence of “musique concrete” pioneer Pierre Schaeffer in the Sixties. “For the first time someone said, 'OK, music is not only made of notes; it is made of sounds, and all kinds of noises can become music. This simple idea changed music of the second half of the 20th century.”
After years of writing film music, advertising jingles, ballet scores and pop songs for other artists, Jarre recorded his groundbreaking electronic composition Oxygene in 1976. Buoyed by multi-million global sales, Jarre became known for mounting huge audio-visual spectacles with fireworks, lighting and lasers.
The populist nature of such events and dramatic qualities of his music led to his work being dismissed as a kind of symphonic pomp-rock vulgarisation of the electronic experiments being carried out by the likes of Kraftwerk or Philip Glass. His marriages to strikingly beautiful actresses, Charlotte Rampling (whom he was with for 20 years) and Anne Parillaud (whom he married in 2005) have helped maintain an image of showbiz glamour somehow at odds with the aestheticism of experimental music. Yet the warmer tones of the electronic explosion in techno and ambient music of the Nineties began to make Jarre look increasingly prescient and influential.
“For me, electronic music is like cooking: it’s a sensual organic activity where you can mix ingredients. It is the reason I still have this intact thrill, it’s almost sexual somehow, not cold at all.”
He equates this with the tactility of analogue synthesizers. “With the computer screen, you have a kind of abstract interface between your idea and the audio result. With analogue instruments, you have the direct interactivity between the sound and your hands. I think the future of music will involve cross pollination between analogue and digital.”
His retro futurism extends to a suspicion of the internet. “I think we’ve been very naïve with the internet, thinking it’s a great community where we can exchange and share ideas, and we are all holding hands in a very new hippie type of mood. I predict the rebels of the next generation will get very cautious. The cool thing in 10 or 15 years from now will be not being on the internet because they will consider that the biggest marketing exploitation machine ever.”
Jarre’s father, from whom he was almost completely estranged, died in 2009, and his mother died this year. They separated when Jarre was five, and he did not see his father again until he was 18, and rarely after that. This, he has come to realise, has been a driving force of his artistic life. “I never succeed to have a normal relationship with my dad. It’s a total failure in my life. It was worse than a conflict, just an absence, which is actually indifference because you have this open hole in your heart. It’s very difficult to fill it.
“I think that music or art or performance is a kind of remedy or therapy, probably more effective than psychoanalysis. Live performance helped me to survive, just to get on and do this.”
Jarre says he is perpetually unsatisfied with his work. “I more and more think if an artist has something to say, he is saying always the same thing, all his life, trying desperately to improve what he has as his own ideal. I have this kind of dream of trying to get the emotions you have in classical music or in jazz, where you have a kind of soundscape, getting rid of the narrative concept. You are inviting people to create something in their mind, which is quite difficult to achieve.
“When I listen to Oxygene, I know there is something quite interesting. And part of this is the kind of innocence and unconsciousness that you have when you are for the first time encountering your audience. We were really privileged, my generation, of opening doors on virgin territories, just because nothing was existing behind.”
The '2010’ tour starts in Glasgow on Sunday, then visits Dublin, Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester and London.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
“There is such warmth, such depth, that we have lost somehow,” he says. “These instruments are quite special in the history of music. They just disappeared at the beginning of the Eighties when the Japanese created the DX7 and also with the explosion of the development of computers. These instruments didn’t even have the chance to become adults and occupy the future.
“So I want to be in a total live situation, with no computers on stage, exposing myself to accidents because these instruments were not necessarily made for performance. The challenge is that every concert should be different, something special.” There is something intriguingly paradoxical about the notion that electronic music, once so determinedly futuristic, has begun to venerate the retro sounds of the original synths. Yet Jarre always stood in opposition to the kind of cold, dystopian futurism of most early electronica. “I remember Stockhausen, when I was studying with him for a few months, saying, 'All that is close to emotion in music is suspect.’ Which is absolutely crazy. Emotions are the basics of any art form!”
The son of film composer Maurice Jarre, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where he came under the influence of “musique concrete” pioneer Pierre Schaeffer in the Sixties. “For the first time someone said, 'OK, music is not only made of notes; it is made of sounds, and all kinds of noises can become music. This simple idea changed music of the second half of the 20th century.”
After years of writing film music, advertising jingles, ballet scores and pop songs for other artists, Jarre recorded his groundbreaking electronic composition Oxygene in 1976. Buoyed by multi-million global sales, Jarre became known for mounting huge audio-visual spectacles with fireworks, lighting and lasers.
The populist nature of such events and dramatic qualities of his music led to his work being dismissed as a kind of symphonic pomp-rock vulgarisation of the electronic experiments being carried out by the likes of Kraftwerk or Philip Glass. His marriages to strikingly beautiful actresses, Charlotte Rampling (whom he was with for 20 years) and Anne Parillaud (whom he married in 2005) have helped maintain an image of showbiz glamour somehow at odds with the aestheticism of experimental music. Yet the warmer tones of the electronic explosion in techno and ambient music of the Nineties began to make Jarre look increasingly prescient and influential.
“For me, electronic music is like cooking: it’s a sensual organic activity where you can mix ingredients. It is the reason I still have this intact thrill, it’s almost sexual somehow, not cold at all.”
He equates this with the tactility of analogue synthesizers. “With the computer screen, you have a kind of abstract interface between your idea and the audio result. With analogue instruments, you have the direct interactivity between the sound and your hands. I think the future of music will involve cross pollination between analogue and digital.”
His retro futurism extends to a suspicion of the internet. “I think we’ve been very naïve with the internet, thinking it’s a great community where we can exchange and share ideas, and we are all holding hands in a very new hippie type of mood. I predict the rebels of the next generation will get very cautious. The cool thing in 10 or 15 years from now will be not being on the internet because they will consider that the biggest marketing exploitation machine ever.”
Jarre’s father, from whom he was almost completely estranged, died in 2009, and his mother died this year. They separated when Jarre was five, and he did not see his father again until he was 18, and rarely after that. This, he has come to realise, has been a driving force of his artistic life. “I never succeed to have a normal relationship with my dad. It’s a total failure in my life. It was worse than a conflict, just an absence, which is actually indifference because you have this open hole in your heart. It’s very difficult to fill it.
“I think that music or art or performance is a kind of remedy or therapy, probably more effective than psychoanalysis. Live performance helped me to survive, just to get on and do this.”
Jarre says he is perpetually unsatisfied with his work. “I more and more think if an artist has something to say, he is saying always the same thing, all his life, trying desperately to improve what he has as his own ideal. I have this kind of dream of trying to get the emotions you have in classical music or in jazz, where you have a kind of soundscape, getting rid of the narrative concept. You are inviting people to create something in their mind, which is quite difficult to achieve.
“When I listen to Oxygene, I know there is something quite interesting. And part of this is the kind of innocence and unconsciousness that you have when you are for the first time encountering your audience. We were really privileged, my generation, of opening doors on virgin territories, just because nothing was existing behind.”
The '2010’ tour starts in Glasgow on Sunday, then visits Dublin, Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester and London.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
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