Jean Michel Jarre’s principal talent is perhaps to catalyse creatively sounds, ideas and people. Like a traveller curious of everything, he moves on, his senses alert, taking in and absorbing what he discovers before integrating it into his music and his performances. He synthesises and reconstitutes contemporary music as well as traditional music, impressions from his travels and current events.

His name came to the forefront of popular music in the mid-1970’s with the planetary success of “Oxygene”, a pro-environment instrumental opus created with electro-acoustic instruments until then reserved for the elite of experimental modern music. Jarre creates soundscapes, composes musical landscapes much like an abstract painter. His palette of sounds is composed of classical and electronic instruments along with samples of sounds borrowed from nature and everyday life. With these he creates his melodies, colours, textures and builds his own architecture of music: this new genre, in breaking away from the traditional rock trends, opened the door to what has today become the fastest growing trend in music, the electronic music scene.

The environment and technology have always been a source of inspiration for Jarre’s creativity, as is the notion of old meets new. His unique concert performances are the encounter of soundscapes with landscapes, whether natural or man-made. Taking a skyline, a building or a hillside as his canvas, Jarre creates the view for his music. He enjoys the freedom of hijacking open spaces, urban or other and bringing fantasy and poetry to the surrounding stone, steel or flora. As for his musical compositions his unique blend of traditional theatrics with state-of-the-art technology has given birth to an accomplished art-form, where architectural lighting and giant image projections, complete the musical fresco: here the electronic world of sound meets its visual equivalent.

His influences are those of today and those of all time, from every place, every culture. He is a composer of our epoch, his music and performances delving deep into the roots of history and geography, into time and space. Architect of music, architect of colours, Jean Michel Jarre is undoubtedly an alchemist of our times and one of the world’s most successful recording artists with over 60 million albums sold worldwide.