Happy birthday to a man whom I learn may be, by a rational measure, the greatest live performer in history, holding four records for largest number to see a single performance In 1979 Jarre performed to a record-breaking audience of more than a million people at the Place de la Concorde, a record he has since broken three times, on 5 April 1986 when 1.5 million see le Rendevous in Houston, on Bastille Day 1990, when he performed a concert at La Défense in Paris, attended by about 2.5 million people and finally (to date), By 3.5 million at the 850th birthday of Moscow.. In 1981 the British Embassy gave Radio Beijing copies of Oxygène and Équinoxe, which became the first pieces of foreign music to be played on Chinese national radio in decades. The republic invited Jarre to become the first western musician to play there, with The Concerts in China. The performances were scheduled to run from 18 October to 5 November 1981. The first, in Beijing, was initially attended mostly by officials, but before the concert began technicians realised that not enough power was available to supply the stage and auditorium. Chinese officials solved the problem by temporarily cutting power to the surrounding districts. The stadium was almost full when the concert began, but as Beijings buses stopped running at about 10 oclock, about half the audience left before it finished. To boost the audience attendance for the second night, Jarre and his production team purchased some of the concert tickets and gave them to children on the streets (Jarre originally wanted the concerts to be free, but the Chinese authorities decided to charge between £0.20 and £0.50 per ticket). The event was notable for its lack of audience involvement; the Chinese were apparently nonplussed by both the music and the light show, and applause was muted. The second venue, in Shanghai, was a different matter. Jarre actively encouraged audience participation by stepping into the crowd, which became much more exuberant than that in Beijing. Recordings of the concerts, which featured one of Jarres signature electronic instruments, the laser harp, were released as a double-disc LP in 1982. Musique pour Supermarché was created for a planned performance at the Supermarché art exhibition. Jarre allowed Radio Luxembourg to broadcast it uninterrupted, in its entirety, before he auctioned off a single vinyl print on 5 July 1983, at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. The sale raised about 70,000 francs, and in protest at the silly industrialisation of music, Jarre promised to burn the original tapes in the presence of a bailiff. Parts of the destroyed album were reworked into his next release, Zoolook. It makes heavy use of the Fairlight CMIs ability to sample audio, featuring snippets of words and speech from languages across the globe. Laurie Anderson provided the vocals for the track Diva. A long list of musicians, including Adrian Belew and Marcus Miller, also made significant contributions. https://youtube/watch?v=FXOFXy6s5vg
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 23:30:52 +0000
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