J A R R E   A C O U S T I Q U E

Back in 1978, when I was about 7 years old, my 6 years older brother had bought the single of Equinoxe 5. This was my first encounter with French synthesizer pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre. I was immediately intrigued with these new spacy sounds. His melodies were simple but the whole atmosphere of the work was, me to, something totally new, something I´d never heard before. I remember staring at this strange character on the sleeve staring back at me through his binoculars, while the single was playing on my record-player, over and over, back-to-back. I started to listen to other tracks and soon I started covering some of his tracks on our family Hammon-organ.

Around 1985 I started to develope an interest in this new kind of NASA space rocket that was able to go up in space and return back to earth, landing like a regular aeroplane; The Space Shuttle. And since the first launch I started to collect newspaper articles and pasted them in a scrapbook. Early 1986 I witnessed the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger on TV and was, obvious, in shock. Shortly after I heard about the Jean-Michel Jarre concert in Houston, Texas and I was surprised to see two of my interests getting combined, how cool! Of course I had to buy Jarre´s new work, first the maxi-single of ‘Fourth Rendez-Vous’ and not much later the whole album. From that moment I was a truly Jarre-fan and I started to follow his career until the present day.
Due to my age and not having the right people around me, sharing the same interest in Jarre as I did, I was unable to see Jarre live until 1993. In 1990 I was thinking about going to the ´La Defense´ concert in Paris in July 14^th, but at the last minute I decided not to go. I still regret that decision…

In the meantime I kept on following Jarre´s career, went to his Europe En Concert tour in Brussels at the Atomium in 1993. I visited the Concert Pour Tolerance at the Eiffel Tour in Paris 1995, and I was in Ahoy Rotterdam to witness the Oxygene 7-13 tour in 1997. I also had bought a ticket for the 1994 Dusseldorf-Germany show but that show got cancelled.

In all those years I was always intrigued by the thought of how Jarre´s music would sound when played by a symphony orchestra, especially pieces such as ‘Enthicolor’, the ‘Industrial Revolution’ suite, or the first 3 parts of ‘Chronologie’. I always fantasized how I would re-arrange the parts and translate sections to the orchestra, giving it a changeover to a real classical symphony piece. But then in 2006 ´The Symphonic Jean Michel Jarre´ was released, damn they beat me to it!

After the ´The Symphonic Jean Michel Jarre´ album, I let the idea of transforming Jarre´s music into a real classical symphonic suite go, as if I would ever get access to a symphony orchestra. And then, not so long ago, I saw this video on YouTube by Eric Aron who played a very interesting adaption of the ‘Oxygene 1-4’, which was very inspiring. That video planted the seed in my creative mind and the idea of transforming Jarre´s electronic music into piano music was born. It took some time to develop that idea to a concrete concept. I started to think in what direction the mood of the music should go, should I stick to the original arrangement or should re-arrange the arrangement? I was already an admirer of Claude Debussy´s piano works for years but around this time I also started to listen to the piano music by Dustin O´Halloran and Yann Tierssen and I started to realise that that was exactly the direction I wanted to go to, dreamy with a lot of warm feelings and emotions. Sadly enough some people call electronic music ´cold´ and ´programmed´ and therefore regarded ´emotionless´, like without a ´soul´. So I asked myself the question: will it actual be possible to accomplish that with the music of Jean-Michel Jarre? Well, yes. And I took on the challenge to proof just that. I first selected a few songs that were obvious for me to be transformed into a piano version and that were on my ´must´ list, songs like ‘Equinoxe 3’, ‘Chronologie 3’ and ‘Souvenir Of China’. Then I selected a few more of Jarre songs that might do the trick. ‘Gloria Lonely Boy’, ‘Rendez-Vous 1 & 2’, ‘Magnetic Fields 2’ and ‘Equinoxe 4’, and they did. But somehow, to me, it was all too easy, it came too naturally. So I took a couple of songs that sounded like the total opposite of being dreamy and emotional, the ones with the beat, the dance songs, let´s face the challenge and go for the next level! And to my own surprise, after some work, re-arranging and adding a load of passion, it worked, turning songs like ‘Gloria Lonely Boy’, ‘Oxygene 17’ and ‘Stardust’ into to beautiful piano pieces! What a surprise!

So in the period between spring 2022 and spring 2023 I worked on arranging and recording the music to the goal I had set. And there I had 11 songs, transposed and adapted to pure piano music, dreamy and with emotion. But now what? What to do with them? My wife was of course present during the whole process and she acted as my first sounding board, and she loved every bit of it. Once I was finished with all the 11 pieces I gave my fellow Odyssice band member and my audio-recording mentor Bastian Peeters a listen. I know Bastian since 1995 and I know he can be critical when it comes down to music, especially about the type of music and the recording sound quality, but even he was very charmed by my performances, stating that he could play this very well when need to relax or just enjoy a beautiful piece of music. And after I´d gotten a couple more reactions like that, I decided to do more with these recordings and I wanted to share it with the fans but not only with the Jarre fans but proof the whole world that the music by Jean-Michel Jarre does has ´warmth´, ´emotion´ and a ´soul´. So I decided I wanted to release them as an album. But since we´re talking about re-arranged work by another artist, and not about a simple one-on-one cover, I needed to get permission from the original author to do that, in this case Jean-Michel Jarre. So I boldly contacted Aero Production, Jarre´s management in Paris. And they re-directed me to BMG Copyrights Paris, since they administer the publishing rights of Jarre´s work. And after a friendly email conversation with Clara, one of the employees of BMG Publishing, spread over one or two weeks, she collected all the legal information about the 11 songs, noted my wishes upon the new recordings publishing rights, included my motivation on the new versions and sent the whole package of my request to the Jean-Michel Jarre office in Paris. Three weeks later I´d got the green light on my request. Jean-Michel Jarre had approved and the legal documents were drawn up!

In the meantime I was brainstorming about what the cover should look like. I wanted to see if I could, somehow, continue the Michel Granger style on the cover but I had no budget for a real Michel Granger. I did found a picture online that fascinated me and it would be the inspiration for the artwork. I asked my wife if she could make a commissioned painting, based on that picture I´d found online and with additives by me to make it more connected with Jarre´s catalogue, having the ´Chronologie´ artwork as main inspiration. And she managed to do it!

While waiting for the cover artwork to be finished, something started to grow in my mind. For some reason I felt the album needed something extra, something really cool, something that would make this album unique. And then one morning the idea was there: how cool would it be if Patrick Rondat would play his part on ‘Chronologie 3’! On acoustic guitar! Wow, what a crazy idea, but how cool would that be?! How do I get Patrick to do that, how do I even get in touch with him? So I phoned Ian Parry as he was already befriended with Patrick and Ian told me to just write him, “tell him who you are, tell him you co-wrote the songs he played guitar on and just wait for him to reply”. So I did. A couple of days later Patrick replied and said he that although he was rather busy, he was intrigued by my request, if I could send him my version of the song so see if he could work with it. Shortly after he answered that he loved my version, but he wasn´t sure if he could come up with a fitting solo since my version is slower and he had to play acoustic guitar instead of an electric guitar, as he did on the ´Chronologie´ album and during the live performances, a huge difference! We agreed that he would simply give it a try and see if what he came up with would actually work. Two weeks later he wrote me to check the download link my email. And what I heard was amazing. He had managed to pull it off! It was exactly what I was hoping for, perhaps even better! Now the album is perfect, no, more than perfect, at least in my opinion.

And now we’re at the end of this incredible journey. Looking (and listening) back I feel tremendously proud when I hear and feel the warmth and emotions in Jarre’s melodies. And I can only hope that you, the listener, will feel the same, cause in the end it´s for the listeners, the musicians create their music, to give you the emotion, the memories and the joy of experiencing music, with the hope it will touch your soul.

NiMO - 2024