Jean-Michel Jarre, master of the mega-concert, to tour the US at last
The first Western musician to perform in China after the Cultural Revolution, Jarre will play his first full-fledged concert in New York this weekend, part of a tour that will take him across the country to Los Angeles
Electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre, who has performed some of history’s largest concerts over a four-decade career, is finally touring the United States. And at last he feels at home.
The French artist, who sees music as a form of “emotional counterforce” in a turbulent era, plays on Saturday at Radio City Music Hall, his first full-fledged concert in New York. He was the first Western musician to perform in China after the Cultural Revolution, playing a series of concerts in Beijing and Shanghai in 1981.
He recalls fantasising about playing the storied venue from his first trip to New York. But he traces a reluctance toward the United States to his father, Maurice Jarre, a giant of Hollywood music who scored classic films including Lawrence of Arabia.
“I had a difficult relationship with my father,” who split with Jarre’s mother when he was a child, the youthful 68-year-old says.
“He lived in the United States for 60 years, in Los Angeles, and it was difficult for me to go to California because I always thought it was my father’s territory. Probably psychologically this is the real reason […] why I didn’t tour here early.”
With his father’s death in 2009, that issue is gone. Jarre closes his North America tour in Los Angeles on May 27. “I have the feeling that coming here is a continuation of what he was doing,” Jarre says. “I feel, in a strange way, a bit at home now.”
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Jarre had played only one previous concert in North America – a massive citywide light and music show in Houston in 1986 to celebrate the Nasa space programme and the state of Texas.
