Sessions 2000

Jean Michel Jarre | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (January 21, 2003)
• Original Release Date: 2000
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Dreyfus
• ASIN: B00007G786
• Also Available in: Audio CD
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #389,510 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. January 24

2. March 23

3. May 1

4. June 21

5. September 14

6. December 17

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Since his hit debut, Oxygene, nearly three decades ago, Jean Michel Jarre's music has been fairly predictable. With the notable exception of Zoolook, in 1984, he's continued to create variations on his electronic space music sound. Don't look for that on Sessions 2000, though. Instead, Jarre plugs into the vernacular of ambient electronica, using drum loops and grooves to create a postmodern, electro-jazz noir sound. Jarre's earliest musical memories from his childhood were of sitting on the knees of jazz musicians like avant-garde trumpeter Don Cherry. That influence emerges here in languid electro-improvisations. Jarre plays samples of Hammond B-3 organs, jazz vibes, mutating trumpets, and upright basses in cyber nightclub in a Blade Runner city. But the synthesist's improvisations seem spiritless, an aimless, wandering jam session of one, amid squiggly electronic bloops and bleeps with non sequitur robot voices popping out now and then. Sessions 2000 is a daring move for the venerated synthesist, but there is a difference between chilling out and nodding out. --John Diliberto

Product Description

To anyone with more than a passing interest in the history of popular music, Jean Michel Jarre is one of the pioneering musical greats. With his 1976 album, the groundbreaking "Oxygene", he took popular music into an entirely new realm, one that hadn't existed before his arrival. Using the studio as an instrument – an 8-track tape machine, a Mellotron, a home organ, crude home-made sequencers and a range of analogue synthesizers – Jarre created the first truly commercial, mass-market album of electronic music. Jarre took his synthesized sound to the charts, the nightclub dance floors, the car stereos and the FM radios of the world.

Now, almost 30 years, 55 million albums, and several world-record-setting concert performances later, Jean Michel Jarre returns with Sessions 2000. The long-awaited new disc offers up otherworldly electro-theatrics with some decidedly human elements to his legions of fans around the world. Sessions 2000 is pure Jean Michel Jarre - hypnotic, sophisticated, cerebral, mysterious, and percolating with changing musical moods.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jean-Michel continues to innovate, January 22, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Sessions 2000 (Audio CD)

Jean-Michel Jarre explores new ground - an electro-jazzy, mellow feel. This album is a real treat for the those who welcome Jarre exploring new sound, it's real low-key and great to "chill-out" to.
Turn it on, close your eyes, and allow your imagination to take you!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Surprise, January 20, 2003

By 

Dragos Sabau "Dragos" (Bronx, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sessions 2000 (Audio CD)

Jean Michel Jarre continues to surprise his fans. In this album he explores different styles and the jazz influence can be clearly felt. There are no "Oxygene/Equinoxe"-like tunes in it, but the atmosphere created is realy cool. What I like about the album is that one can realy feel the fact that Jean Michel Jarre and his "partner in crime", Mr Francis Rimbert, had a lot of fun playing and recording "Sesions 2000". Anyway, for me at least, it is much better than "Metamorphoses".

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not as different as you think, June 8, 2003

By 

R. Reich "Author" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sessions 2000 (Audio CD)

In response to those reviewers who sense Sessions is "new" Jarre, I can steer them to Rareties, GEMA CT03, a truly rare mix of Jarre's very early work: Zig-Zag Dance, La Cage, Eros Machine, Les Grange Brulees... when I first heard this pre-Oxygene stuff, I couldn't believe this came from the same guy! How did THIS lead to Oxygene and Equinox? If anything, Sessions represents a return to Jarre's truest and most authentic musical impulses; it's the most like his early inclinations as anything I've heard since, but with the added depth that comes from thirty years of experience. Sessions, then, strikes me as a culminating album and so much more authentic and honest to my ears than, say, Revolutions or Metamorphoses will ever be. Hearing Sessions ties it all together for me; I begin to understand Jarre's whole artistic arc a little better. Oxygene and Equinox, in this context, are the rare and odd soufflés that rose from magic and will never rise again. And I see Sessions not as the oddball effort, but a fascinating bookend to complement who Jarre was as a young artist decades earlier. Highly recommended. Worthy of deep and careful listening. Beautifully recorded.