Known to many as the godfather of modern electronic music, French composer and performer Jean-Michel Jarre has always pursued new horizons both in his music and his concerts. Since the early 1970s, he has sold an estimated 80 million albums, collaborated with everyone from Brian Eno to Pete Townshend to Hans Zimmer, and played around the world. Jarre has performed five of the biggest concerts ever before a million or more attendees. In fact, he ties the Guinness record with Rod Stewart for largest concert attendance—3.5 million people at a 1997 concert in Moscow celebrating the city’s 850th birthday.
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Now the renowned, genre-spanning electronic musician is embarking on a new concert adventure that is both very intimate and very public. On Christmas Day 2023, Jarre will perform many of his biggest hits as he celebrates the 400th anniversary of the Château de Versailles during a mixed-reality concert from its Hall of Mirrors. The visual elements of the show will be inspired by the dark vibes of Tim Burton’s oeuvre, the world of the ‘80s sci-fi movie Tron, and elements of Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast.
While the in-person attendance for the performance will be limited, the live show will simultaneously be broadcast via virtual reality on VR platform VRROOM at 8 p.m. CET on Christmas Night. (That is 2 p.m. Eastern time and 11 a.m. Pacific time in America.) The show will also be broadcast on French TV on W9 & French Radio RTL RADIO at 11:10 CET (5:10 p.m. EST), soon followed via a YouTube stream to the rest of the world. The virtual audience will be plugged in by VR or on tablets and smartphones. Click here for more info.
Jarre recently told Agence France Press (AFP) that the concept for his mixed reality performance “is to surround oneself with the French digital savoir-faire as a tribute to the continuation of creativity.” He added that Versailles was a destination for “the dreamers who created automatons, the ancestors of robots, for example.” Appropriately enough, he will be wearing a VR headset from Lynx during the show which will allow him to “connect with the audience in the hall and on social media.”
The iconic musician will use AI as an extension of his imagination for the show. He elaborated to AFP that, “In this case, when it comes to graphics, AI is the extension of my imagination. It’s a super-collaborator which I keep under control.” Jarre has been fascinated with virtual reality and the Metaverse in recent years; he focuses on the positive aspects to both.
Early in his career, Jarre became an international sensation when his 1976 album Oxygène became an international bestseller. It has sold an estimated 18 million copies worldwide. The follow-up, Équinoxe, sold 3 million. He has released 22 studio albums over 50 years, and his new album Oxymoreworks features reworked compositions from last year’s Oxymore.
In a 2015 feature on Jarre, Mojo looked back on Oxygène and wrote, “Jarre’s debut was his conscious attempt to unite the worlds of avant-garde, electronic, classical, and progressive music. A suite in six parts, its dynamic, warm sound is intoxicating, the composer’s pop sensibilities evident on Oxygène Part IV—an unlikely UK Top 5 hit from what remains an elegant cornerstone of electronic music.”
In 1981, Jarre became the first Western musician to play in China after the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in the live release The Concerts in China. The Peking Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra appeared on the performance of “Fishing Junks at Sunset.”
Another major milestone occurred when Jarre broke his second Guinness record for concert attendance before an estimated 1.5 million people at his Rendez-Vous Houston concert amid the downtown skyscrapers of that Texas city in April 1986. The concert served both as a celebration of Houston’s 150th anniversary and NASA’s 25th anniversary, and it commemorated the astronauts of the Space Shuttle Challenger, who had perished in an explosion just after take-off less than three months prior. One of the crew, Ron McNair, had been slated to play his saxophone live from space during a performance of “Last Rendez-Vous.” Jarre’s Versailles 400 show should become another milestone in his already storied career.
Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Coachella
