Jean-Michel Jarre

There is a figure in Jean-Michel Jarre's biography that is not an attendance record or a sales number. It is this one: twenty or twenty-five. That is the number of times he saw his father in his whole life. The father was Maurice-Alexis Jarre, three-time winner of the Oscar for best original score —Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, Doctor Zhivago in 1965 and A Passage to India in 1984—, and the comfortable version has it that the son inherited from him a vocation for the monumental. The documented version says the opposite: Maurice left home when Jean-Michel was five, they did not see each other again until the son was eighteen, they never talked about music with each other, and when the father died he left him nothing.

Five years, and then thirteen of silence

The one who raised the boy was his mother, France "Francette" Pejot, born in Lyon on the seventeenth of October 1914. In January 1942 she joined Jean-Pierre Lévy's Franc-Tireur resistance network; she was arrested on the twenty-fourth of October that year and held in the Saint-Joseph prison in Lyon until February 1943; the German police arrested her again on the thirtieth of June 1944 and on the twenty-fifth of August she was deported to Ravensbrück, from which she escaped with five companions when the camp was evacuated, in April 1945. She married Maurice Jarre in March 1946. She died in 2010, and Lyon gave her name to a passageway under the vaults of Perrache. The father, by contrast, settled in the United States in the fifties and lived there for some sixty years, with four marriages along the way.

There is no escaping the quotation that sums it all up: "My father and I never really achieved a real relationship. We probably saw each other twenty or twenty-five times in our lifetime. When you are able, at my age, to count the times you have seen your father, it says something." These were not decades of fighting, which is what people usually imagine. They were five years together, thirteen of absolute silence until the son turned eighteen, and then half a century of countable meetings in which, by tacit agreement, the one thing they shared went unmentioned.

On the fifteenth of October 2013, in a masterclass at the Festival Lumière held at the Institut Lumière in Lyon, Jarre spoke at length about his father in public for the first time, four years after his death. He said that from the divorce, when he was five, he stopped seeing him for a long time, and that the absence ate away at him. He said that when they later had the chance to see each other again, they did not talk about music, out of reticence. And he said the sentence that explains better than any biography why this man spent his life filling the sky with sound: it had always been said that an open conflict with the father is better, because at least there is something that exists and something to rebel against; an absence is worse, because you are in the void, facing a black hole. The relationship improved somewhat at the end of Maurice's life, but it never became close.

The kitchen on the rue de la Trémoille

Before he was the man of the synthesisers he was a student at the Paris Conservatoire —harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Jeannine Rueff— and in 1969 he joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the ORTF, the laboratory run by Pierre Schaeffer, the father of musique concrète. Out of that came his first single, "La Cage" and "Erosmachine", in 1971, and in 1972 a first library-music album, Deserted Palace, which he always treated as work for the rent. But the idea that Jarre did not write songs, only atmospheres, is false at the root: before Oxygène he was a hit lyricist of French chanson. He wrote the words to "Les Mots bleus", by Christophe, released in 1974 on the Motors label, number nine in France and more than two hundred thousand copies; and the words and the production of "Où sont les femmes?", by Patrick Juvet, which came out on Barclay in July 1977 and reached number six in France and number one in Quebec, with more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies sold in French territory.

And there is a detail in "Les Mots bleus" that dismantles the myth of the lone inventor: the string organ that opens the song is an Eminent 310 Unique, exactly the machine that two years later defines the floating timbre everyone identifies with Oxygène. The sound that supposedly inaugurated mass electronic music made its debut on a chanson hit, with Jarre as lyricist, and on the same label.

Oxygène was recorded between August and November 1976 in the former kitchen of Jarre's flat, at number twelve on the rue de la Trémoille in Paris, with an eight-track Scully tape machine and a home-built mixing desk. He himself has told it this way: he made the first album in six weeks with very limited tools, and in 2026 he capped it off even better: the foundations of this whole career were laid in that kitchen, with a broken Mellotron and ideas for eternity. The Mellotron really was broken. The drum machine, a Korg Mini-Pops 7, was not designed to play several patterns at once, so Jarre stuck sticky tape over several of the selectors to force it to layer them. Nor was he entirely alone: the main sound of "Oxygène Part IV" was programmed by Michel Geiss on an ARP 2600 and the mix was signed by Jean-Pierre Janiaud.

Several labels turned it down, and one of them has a name: Chris Blackwell, of Island, who later confessed that the two professional mistakes of his life were saying no to Oxygène and no to Empty Sky, the first record by Elton John. But there was no endless pilgrimage: Francis Dreyfus, of Disques Motors, said yes immediately and announced that he had a worldwide hit on his hands. It came out in December 1976. It was number one in France, number two in the United Kingdom and number seventy-eight on the Billboard 200; the single "Oxygène (Part IV)" reached number four in Britain in January 1977. The cumulative sales Jarre and his label work with today are some eighteen million copies.

A single copy, and "Piratez-moi!"

In 1983, between February and May, he recorded an album for the Orrimbe art exhibition in Paris and decided to treat it not as a worthless commercial product but as a painting, in protest at what he called the stupid industrialisation of music. A single vinyl copy of Musique pour supermarché was pressed. It was auctioned on the sixth of July 1983, at eight in the evening, at the Hôtel Drouot: it opened at sixty francs and was knocked down at sixty-nine thousand, with the proceeds going to charity. It was bought by an estate agent, a Monsieur Gérard whose name was kept confidential at first. After the sale, the pressing plates were destroyed.

What nobody foresaw came straight away. Radio Luxembourg broadcast the whole album once, and Jarre asked listeners to tape it with a phrase that became famous: "Piratez-moi!", pirate me. Out of that came all the bootlegs in circulation: the record that exists in a single copy exists in thousands of home-made cassettes. Material from those sessions reappeared on Zoolook, in 1984, and on Rendez-Vous, in 1986, and a demo of the first part was finally released on the compilation Planet Jarre in 2018.

The saxophone that was going to play in orbit

Ronald Erwin McNair, born in Lake City, South Carolina, on the twenty-first of October 1950, held a doctorate in physics from MIT and was a jazz saxophonist, an astronaut and a friend of Jarre's. The plan the two of them had was of an ambition that is still hard to believe today: McNair would record on board the shuttle Challenger, on mission STS-51-L, a saxophone solo that Jarre would work into the last piece of Rendez-Vous and project at the Houston concert. It would have been the first original piece of music recorded in space. Jarre would recall that just before the launch Ron called him in Paris to say that everything was ready, that they would see each other in a week and that he should watch it on television. On the twenty-eighth of January 1986, seventy-three seconds after lift-off, Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic. McNair and his six crewmates died.

Jarre cancelled nothing, and it was not his decision alone: it was the astronaut Bruce McCandless II who insisted that he go ahead, in memory of the crew. The sixth and last track of Rendez-Vous is called "Last Rendez-Vous (Ron's Piece)" and is dedicated to McNair and the other six. On the record the saxophone was recorded by the Frenchman Pierre Gossez; at the concert it was played, in the place that belonged to McNair, by the Houston saxophonist Kirk Whalum.

The concert was on the fifth of April 1986, in downtown Houston, for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the city and of Texas and the twenty-fifth of NASA. Some two thousand projectors turned the skyscrapers into screens with images up to three hundred and sixty-six metres high, with lasers and fireworks on top. The glare was such that Interstate 45 filled with stopped cars and the police had to close it for as long as the show lasted. The audience is put at a million and a half people according to Wikipedia and his own website, and at more than one million three hundred thousand according to the Houston Chronicle.

Houston was not an accident but the second chapter of a habit. On the fourteenth of July 1979, on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, between ten thousand and twenty thousand people were expected: a million turned up, and Jarre played Oxygène and Équinoxe in full, alone on stage with his synthesisers, with the Eurovision broadcast on top. On the fourteenth of July 1990, at La Défense, he drew two and a half million. And on the sixth of September 1997, for the eight hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Moscow, he played on the esplanade of the State University —not on Red Square, which is the most repeated error on the internet— before a declared figure of three and a half million: half a million tickets sold, according to the Guinness breakdown, and some three million more on the surrounding hills, estimated by the city authorities. With that he entered the Guinness Book of Records four times and for years he was the artist with the attendance record, but the current entry for the largest attendance at a free concert belongs today to Rod Stewart for the Copacabana of the thirty-first of December 1994, with Jarre mentioned right there as the only one capable of rivalling that figure. That the free concert by Lady Gaga on the same beach, in May 2025, was presented as the best-attended in history with two million one hundred thousand in attendance shows just how much all of this depends on how it is counted.

Fifteen years of litigation, and nothing

Maurice Jarre died of cancer in Los Angeles on the twenty-eighth of March 2009. He had been living in California for decades and had left all his assets to his fourth wife, Fui Fong Khong, through a family trust, a device of Californian law that allows children to be disinherited completely; in France there is forced heirship, a legitimate and non-waivable share, and in California there is not. The matter blew up when the widow claimed the composer's royalties from SACEM: the society notified the children, and Jean-Michel and his half-sister Stéphanie went to the Nanterre court.

From there they moved to the Versailles court of appeal, and from there to the Cour de cassation, which on the twenty-seventh of September 2017 ruled that ignoring forced heirship is not in itself contrary to French international public policy. They carried on to the European Court of Human Rights, which dismissed them on the fifteenth of February 2024 with two arguments: that it has never recognised the existence of a general and unconditional right of children to inherit, and that the French courts had established that the applicants were not in a situation of economic precariousness. He was seventy-five; she was fifty-eight. The inheritance, of several million euros, went entirely to the widow. They announced that they would appeal to the Grand Chamber. It was fifteen years of litigation to receive nothing.

What to remember

Jean-Michel Jarre is the man who gave electronic music the scale of a monument, and it is worth saying how he did it, because it was not by inheritance. He did it from the kitchen of a Paris flat, with an eight-track tape machine and a drum machine rigged with sticky tape; he did it after having earned a living writing lyrics for French chanson, from where he brought the organ that later sounded across half the world; and he did it by taking it out to the squares and the esplanades, as far as four entries in the Guinness. In between he pressed a single copy of a record and gave it away over the radio to anyone with a cassette to hand, and he kept the place of a saxophone solo for a physicist friend who died seventy-three seconds short of recording it.

At seventy-eight he is still working: in June 2026 he launched his summer tour in Radom, Poland, for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1976 protests in that city; on the twenty-ninth of October he publishes Machines: A History of Electronic Music, an illustrated history of electronic music made with more than eighty instruments from his own collection; and on the twentieth of November the fiftieth anniversary edition of Oxygène comes out, remastered from the original stereo tapes, which had been given up for lost and turned up again. When "Oxygène Part IV" plays and that organ seems to open the sky, there is a kitchen on the rue de la Trémoille with a broken Mellotron. And when the end of Rendez-Vous plays, there is the gap left by a saxophone that never got recorded, on the record of a man who could count on his fingers the times he had seen his father.

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Sources

Jean-Michel André Jarre was born on 24 August 1948 in Lyon, France, and is alive: he turned 78 in 2026. His father was Maurice-Alexis Jarre (Lyon, 13 September 1924 – Los Angeles, 28 March 2009, cancer), a film composer with three Oscars for best original score for "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), "Doctor Zhivago" (1965) and "A Passage to India" (1984), married four times (Francette Pejot, 1946-1964; Dany Saval, 1965-1967; Laura Devon, 1967-1984; Fui Fong Khong, 1984-2009) and resident in the United States from the fifties onwards. His mother was France "Francette" Pejot (Lyon, 17 October 1914 – 2010), a member of the Resistance: she joined Jean-Pierre Lévy's Franc-Tireur network in January 1942, was arrested on 24 October 1942 and imprisoned in the Saint-Joseph prison in Lyon until February 1943, arrested again by the German police on 30 June 1944 and deported to Ravensbrück on 25 August 1944; she escaped with five companions during the evacuation of the camp, in April 1945. Lyon gave her name to a passageway under the vaults of Perrache. Jean-Michel stated that he had seen his father "twenty or twenty-five times in my whole life"; in a masterclass at the Festival Lumière held at the Institut Lumière in Lyon, on 15 October 2013, he stated that his father's absence from the divorce onwards, when he was 5, ate away at him, that when they met again they did not talk about music "out of reticence" and that "an absence is worse, because you are in the void, facing a black hole". His half-sister is Stéphanie Jarre, daughter of Maurice and Dany Saval; his stepbrother was the screenwriter Kevin Jarre ("Glory", "Tombstone"), who died in 2011. Training: piano in Lyon, the Paris Conservatoire (harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Jeannine Rueff) and, from 1969, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the ORTF run by Pierre Schaeffer. First single: "La Cage" / "Erosmachine" (1971, Pathé-Marconi); first album, "Deserted Palace" (1972, library music); soundtrack for "Les Granges brûlées" (1973). He wrote the words to "Les Mots bleus" by Christophe (music by Daniel Bevilacqua; 1974 single on Motors, recorded at the Studios Ferber in Paris; no. 9 in France, no. 7 in Wallonia, more than 200,000 copies; the opening organ is an Eminent 310 Unique), and the words and the production of "Où sont les femmes?" by Patrick Juvet (July 1977, Barclay, recorded at Devonshire Sound Studios in Los Angeles; no. 6 in France, no. 1 in Quebec, no. 2 in Switzerland, more than 250,000 copies in France). "Oxygène" was recorded between August and November 1976 in the former kitchen of his flat at 12 rue de la Trémoille in Paris, with an 8-track Scully tape machine, Revox tape machines, a home-built mixing desk, ARP 2600, EMS VCS 3 and EMS Synthi AKS synthesisers, an Eminent 310 Unique organ, an RMI Harmonic Synthesizer, an RMI Keyboard Computer, a faulty Mellotron, a Farfisa Professional organ and Korg Mini-Pops 7 and EKO ComputeRhythm drum machines; Jarre stuck sticky tape over several of the Mini-Pops selectors in order to layer patterns. Michel Geiss programmed the main sound of "Oxygène Part IV" on the ARP 2600; Jean-Pierre Janiaud mixed it, with Patrick Foulon as assistant, and it was mastered at Translab. The cover is a 30 × 40 cm watercolour by Michel Granger and the back-cover photograph is by David Bailey. Among the labels that turned it down was Chris Blackwell's Island Records, who identified turning down "Oxygène" and Elton John's "Empty Sky" as the two professional mistakes of his career; it was released by Francis Dreyfus's Disques Motors in December 1976 (Polydor internationally in 1977): no. 1 in France, no. 2 in the United Kingdom, no. 78 on the Billboard 200, platinum in France (1.5 million) and in the United Kingdom (300,000), platinum in Canada and Australia, gold in Germany, and some 18 million copies in total according to Jarre and BMG in 2026. The single "Oxygène (Part IV)" (January 1977) was no. 4 in the United Kingdom, no. 3 in France and no. 1 in Wallonia and Spain. It was followed by "Équinoxe" (1 December 1978, Disques Dreyfus, cover by Michel Granger, no. 11 in the United Kingdom and no. 126 on the Billboard 200), "Les Chants Magnétiques" (20 May 1981, no. 1 in France and no. 6 in the United Kingdom), "Les Concerts en Chine" (5 May 1982, recorded at the five concerts of October 1981 in Beijing and Shanghai with the Beijing Conservatory Symphony Orchestra conducted by Huang Feili), "Zoolook" (1984), "Rendez-Vous" (1 April 1986, no. 9 in the United Kingdom, no. 52 on the Billboard 200, 2× platinum in France, Victoire de la Musique for instrumental album of the year and a 1987 Grammy nomination for best New Age album), "Revolutions" (1988), "En attendant Cousteau" (1990), "Chronologie" (1993), "Oxygène 7-13" (1997, dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer), "Oxygène: New Master Recording" (26 November 2007 in France, EMI), "Electronica 1: The Time Machine" (2015, no. 8 in the United Kingdom) and "Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise" (2016, nominated for a 2017 Grammy), "Oxygène 3" (2016), "Equinoxe Infinity" (2018), "Amazônia" (2021) and "Oxymore" (21 October 2022, a tribute to Pierre Henry). Declared total sales: some 80 million albums and singles. "Musique pour supermarché" was recorded between February and May 1983 for the Orrimbe exhibition in Paris, with a single vinyl copy pressed; it was auctioned on 6 July 1983 at 20:00 at the Hôtel Drouot, opening at 60 francs and knocked down at 69,000 francs (some 8,300 to 8,960 dollars of the time) in aid of charity, and it was bought by an estate agent by the name of Gérard; the pressing plates were destroyed after the sale. Radio Luxembourg broadcast the whole album once and Jarre asked listeners to tape it with the phrase "Piratez-moi!"; that is where the bootlegs in circulation come from. There are 7 tracks plus an overture, 29:49 according to the bootlegs; material from the album was reused on "Zoolook" and "Rendez-Vous", and a demo of "Part 1" was released on "Planet Jarre: 50 Years of Music" (2018). Ronald Erwin McNair (Lake City, South Carolina, 21 October 1950 – 28 January 1986), a doctor of physics from MIT in 1976, saxophonist and astronaut, was to record on board the shuttle "Challenger", on mission STS-51-L, a saxophone solo for the last piece of "Rendez-Vous": it would have been the first original work recorded in space. The "Challenger" broke apart 73 seconds after lift-off, on 28 January 1986, and McNair and his 6 crewmates died. The sixth track of the album is titled "Last Rendez-Vous (Ron's Piece)" and is dedicated to McNair and the other six astronauts; the saxophone on the record was played by Pierre Gossez and at the concert it was played by the Houston saxophonist Kirk Whalum. The astronaut Bruce McCandless II urged Jarre to keep the concert on. "Rendez-vous Houston" took place on 5 April 1986 in downtown Houston for the 150th anniversary of Houston and Texas and the 25th of NASA, with some 2,000 projectors that turned the skyscrapers into screens with images up to 366 metres high; Interstate 45 was closed by the police during the show. Attendance: 1.5 million according to Wikipedia and the official website, "more than 1.3 million" according to the Houston Chronicle. Other mass concerts: Place de la Concorde in Paris, 14 July 1979 (between 10,000 and 20,000 people were expected and a million attended; broadcast by Eurovision; first entry in the Guinness Book of Records); Lyon, 5 October 1986, for the visit of John Paul II (800,000); Royal Victoria Dock in London, 8 and 9 October 1988 ("Destination Docklands", 100,000 a night); La Défense, Paris, 14 July 1990, bicentenary of the Revolution (2.5 million); Eiffel Tower, 14 July 1995, 50th anniversary of UNESCO (1.25 million); esplanade of Moscow State University —not Red Square—, 6 September 1997, for the 850th anniversary of the city (3.5 million declared: 500,000 tickets sold plus some 3 million on the surrounding hills, according to the Guinness breakdown and the estimate of the Moscow authorities); Giza plateau, Egypt, 31 December 1999 (100,000); Merzouga, Moroccan Sahara, 16 December 2006 (25,000); Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, 25 December 2023; closing ceremony of the Paris Paralympic Games, 8 September 2024. Jarre entered the Guinness Book of Records four times and for years was the artist with the attendance record, but the current entry for "largest attendance at a free concert" belongs to Rod Stewart and the city of Rio de Janeiro (Copacabana, 31 December 1994, 3.5 million), where Guinness mentions Jarre as the only one capable of rivalling that figure and warns that the count might include people who came only for the midnight fireworks; the free concert by Lady Gaga at Copacabana, on 3 May 2025, was presented as the best-attended individual concert in history with 2.1 million in attendance. Inheritance: Maurice Jarre left all his assets to his fourth wife, Fui Fong Khong, through a Californian family trust, a device that allows children to be disinherited completely, as against the forced heirship of French law. After the widow's claim to SACEM, Jean-Michel Jarre and Stéphanie Jarre litigated before the tribunal de Nanterre, the cour d'appel de Versailles and the Cour de cassation, which on 27 September 2017 ruled that ignoring forced heirship "is not in itself contrary to French international public policy"; the European Court of Human Rights dismissed them on 15 February 2024, declaring that it "has never recognised the existence of a general and unconditional right of children to inherit" and that the French courts had established that "the applicants were not in a situation of economic precariousness". They were 75 and 58, and they announced that they would appeal to the Grand Chamber. Distinctions: Grand Prix du Disque of the Académie Charles-Cros (1976), honorary member of the Beijing Conservatory (1981), asteroid 4422 Jarre (1990), UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador (1993), Chevalier (1995), Officier (2011) and Commandeur (2021) of the Légion d'honneur, MOJO Lifetime Achievement (2010), Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication (2017) and the presidency of CISAC since 2013. In October 1981 he was the first Western pop artist to perform in China after the Cultural Revolution. Married to Flore Guillard (1975-1977), Charlotte Rampling (1978-2002), Anne Parillaud (2005-2010) and Gong Li (since 2019). In 2026: summer tour begun on 19 June at the Radomiak Radom stadium in Poland, for the 50th anniversary of the June 1976 protests in that city; the book "Machines: A History of Electronic Music" (Thames & Hudson, 29 October 2026), with more than 80 instruments from his own collection; and the 50th anniversary edition of "Oxygène" (BMG, 20 November 2026), remastered at 192 kHz/24 bit from the rediscovered original stereo tapes, with 180-gram vinyl cut at half speed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road and a Blu-ray mediabook with a Dolby Atmos mix. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from English and French Wikipedia (entries for Jean-Michel Jarre, his discography and the list of his concerts, "Oxygène", "Oxygène (Part IV)", "Oxygène: New Master Recording", "Equinoxe", "Musique pour supermarché", "Rendez-Vous", "Rendez-vous Houston", "Destination Docklands", "The Concerts in China", Maurice Jarre, Ronald McNair, Francis Dreyfus, "Les Mots bleus" and "Où sont les femmes?"), the Guinness World Records entry on the largest attendance at a free concert, cinezik.org (interview of 15 October 2013 in Lyon), aerozonejmj.fr, the Institut Lumière programme for the 2013 Festival Lumière, France 3 Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and franceinfo, La Presse, Le Matin, Legavox, Billboard, Music Business Worldwide, MusicRadar, Louder Sound, Super Deluxe Edition, Sonic State, That Eric Alper, Broadway World, Chartmasters, Medium, Dangerous Minds, Lost Media Wiki, the MIT Black History archive, the Houston Chronicle and the official site jeanmicheljarre.com.