At about the same time, I stumbled across a Roland HS-60 at a local music store—a home-market version of the now famed Juno 106, but with built-in speakers—and became obsessed with this powerful synth. I immediately bought several issues of Keyboard magazine circa 1985, and immersed myself in the inherent differences between analog and digital synthesis, and then-new technologies such as sampling and MIDI (all of which would later inform my purchase of a CZ-1000, one of Casio’s early attempts at pro synths). It was within the pages of Keyboard that I first read of Jean Michel Jarre, the French electronic musician. Oddly enough, it was a seemingly incongruous event that allowed me to actually discover his music.A few months later while at an out-of-town swim meet in Atlanta sans parents, my aunt and uncle picked me up for lunch between prelims and finals. We headed back to their suburban home where a plate of club sandwiches and a bottomless glass of Coke awaited. As we finished off those sandwiches in the family room that was slightly darkened by an overcast sky, my uncle—an engineer and inventor with artistic abilities as well—stood up and causally placed a record on the turntable.
God knows what I expected to hear—they were unfortunately (and still are) huge freakin’ Elton John fans—but suddenly their high-end stereo was reproducing the deep-space throb of Jarre’s Equinoxe (1978). Though I had never heard those opening sequenced notes before, there was something familiar here, something I immediately grasped onto and understood. I knew it was Jarre, it all matched up: the dreamy synth washes, the sparkling arpeggios, and the winding melodies and early drum machine rhythms. This was also the first time I was conscious of something else entirely that I still draw upon today—listening to music that I have never heard before and then correctly translating those sounds based solely on a previously-read description like a review.Jarre’s mid-’70s space-pop symphonies like Oxygene (1976) would soon lead me to Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, and to discover the nuances of gear produced by Moog, Sequential Circuits and ARP. Though heavily influenced by early Tangerine Dream, his space music traveled in a more melodic direction. And like Eno, Jarre created an entire library of unique tones—such as the heavily-phased, detuned string patch he often deployed as a swirling drone—which eventually became standard sonic tools for many e-musicians
(then and now).
His melodic-pop flair and strong compositional skills—as well as an appreciation of contemporary dance music genres, from disco and acid-house to breaks and jungle—have seemingly kept him from serious discussions of merit. I once asked a DJ at a house party who happened to be from France what he thought of Jarre, and his dismissive response was “cheesy.” I suppose it doesn’t help that
Jarre is also inadvertently credited with producing among the first new-age recordings—again like Eno—because no one seemed to know exactly how to label his overtly electronic, but emotional music. Whatever.
To put Jarre in a modern context for those who may have never heard his music is actually quite easy: Think Air. No one has carried on his melodic traditions (and sounds) into the present day and made them their own more than those Parisian sexy boys. Or maybe even progressive house/trance producer BT, whose bittersweet melodies and knob-twiddling share a similar aesthetic.
For my uncle’s 65th birthday, family and friends were invited to write about a shared memory with him over the years to be included in a photo album. I was never especially close to him, and initially as the self-styled writer, had nothing to say. But I remembered that cloudy Atlanta afternoon 20 years earlier, and the needle-drop that introduced me to Jarre. And I thanked my uncle for unknowingly launching me on a journey that I’m still exploring to this day.
No comments:
Post a Comment