Jean-Michel Jarre
Les Concerts en Chine Vol 1
Dreyfus
FDM 36143-2
(1982)
Electronic
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01 | L'ouverture | Jean-Michel Jarre | 04:51 | ||||||
02 | Arpegiateur | Jean-Michel Jarre | 06:53 | ||||||
03 | Equinoxe IV | Jean-Michel Jarre | 07:47 | ||||||
04 | Jonques de pecheurs au crepuscule | Jean-Michel Jarre | 09:42 | ||||||
05 | L'orchestre sous la pluie | Jean-Michel Jarre | 01:25 | ||||||
06 | Equinoxe VII | Jean-Michel Jarre | 09:55 | ||||||
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Notes
Jean-Michel Jarre performed a handful of concerts in Peking and Shanghai in 1981, marking the first time that a modern Western musical artist had played in communist China. Sensing the historical importance of the event (and the career milestone it represented), a double album of live music from these concerts was released the following year as Les Concerts en Chine. The release is half musical travelogue (featuring new pieces presumably inspired by China) and half career retrospective, with faithful reproductions of excerpts from Equinoxe and Les Chants Magnetiques (Magnetic Fields) interspersed with new works and snippets of Chinese dialogue. There has always been a strong visual component to Jarre's live shows, which the listener is left out of on these recordings (small pockets of applause during some of the songs allude to the graphic goings-on), but even without the lights and lasers this is engaging stuff. Highlights from the show include "Jonques de Pecheurs au Crepuscule" (Fishing Junks at Sunset), a welcome respite from Jarre's ultra-modern music that features a traditional Oriental arrangement, and new works like "Arpegiateur" and "Nuit a Shangai" that compare favorably with the brisk, streamlined sound of Tangerine Dream in the early ‘80s. Connecting these sections with dialogue and street noises (some of which, in the case of "Les Chants Magnetiques," have always been there) breaks up the concert nicely, although two lighthearted intermissions ("L'Orchestre Sous la Pluie" and "La Derniere Rumba") make too fine a point of it. Owners of Equinoxe and Les Chants Magnetiques expecting to hear a new interpretation of these albums won't find any surprises on Les Concerts en Chine except a short ping-pong match inexplicably billed as "Les Chants Magnetiques I." The real attraction is the new music, and the newness that all of this must have held for its audience. [Regrettably, when Dreyfus reissued the concert on compact disc in 1992, it opted to split the original double LP into two separate discs as Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.]More + anecdotes about this Album:
- "L'Ouverture" ("The Overture") is in fact the first movement of "Magnetic Fields Part 1" slowed down.
- "Jonques De Pêcheurs Au Crépuscule" ("Fishing Junks at Sunset") is a new arrangement of a very old traditional Chinese song known as the "Fisherman's Chant at Dusk", and is wrongly attributed as being composed by Jean Michel Jarre, misled by the album inlay.
- During this "Tour", Jean-Michel Jarre played for the very first time Laser Harp on the eponymous track " Harpe Laser" ("Laser Harp")
- The album was originally released as a double-disc LP, then as a double-disc CD.
- "Arpegiateur" ("Arpegiator") was used in the soundtrack of the cult film 9½ Weeks as well as in several mid-1980s episodes of the American soap opera Santa Barbara.
More generally:
This album is a balance of previously released tracks by Jarre, new compositions inspired by Chinese culture, and one rearranged traditional Chinese track "Jonques De Pêcheurs Au Crépuscule" ("Fishing Junks at Sunset"), see above about that track. The album consists mainly of live material, plus ambient sound recordings and one new studio track "Souvenir of China". Other new compositions recorded live include "Nuit À Shangai" ("Night in Shanghai"), "Harpe Laser" ("Laser Harp"), "Arpegiateur" ("Arpegiator") and "Orient Express".