Electronica Pioneer Jean Michel Jarre Returns With "Sessions 2000," His First North American Release In Five Years

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 introduces his music to a new breed of Jarre fan the young raver who's less likely to know Oxygene, but who may have danced to recent Jarre remixes by top techno and dance artists such as Eiffel 65, Funkstorung, Hybrid, and The Orb.

Six tracks comprise the disc, each simply titled with the date of the recording session. Sessions 2000 could be called a year in the life of Jarre. It arrives following a two-year recording hiatus (Metamorphoses, was released in Europe in 2000 but was held back in North America for contractual reasons. Dreyfus will release the disc in late 2003). Replete with the drum loops, samples, delays, and ambient synthesizer sounds that characterize many Jarre compositions, the disc also features less common elements such as acoustic slide guitar, piano and muted trumpet. Some may call the new sound “Chillout". Others may call it “Ambient Electronica". Call it what you want, Sessions 2000 is pure Jean Michel Jarre - hypnotic, sophisticated, cerebral, mysterious, and percolating with changing musical moods.

Jarre, the son of famed film composer Maurice Jarre, was born in France in 1948 and began studying piano at age five. In 1977, after abandoning his earlier forays into classical, jazz and rock music, he achieved astounding success with his breakthrough album, Oxyg