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Jean Michel Jarre in Concert: Houston-Lyon

By: Jean-Michel Jarre
Label: Dreyfus
Released: 01 Feb 1994
RRP: £16.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

His best album - By: Mr. M. Randall, 20 Jul 2006
I have to confess that I have loved & cherished this album for a long time - probably the last 20 years. I still count it as one of my favourites, even now that I find some of Jarre's other works stale & dated.
This album captures the spectacle & atmosphere of the record breaking concerts at Houston, Texas & Lyon, France - with the majority of the incidental commentary & sound bites coming from the Houston concert. Jarre is a concert genius. He brought the whole of major city to a standstill whilst he treated them to a spectacular show of fireworks, lazers & music.
The musical performances are spirited & full of depth. There's even a tribute to the crew of the Challlenger Space Shuttle (Ron's Piece). My absolute favourite bit of the album is the massive choir that fill in the vocals of the Rendez-Vous pieces.
My only regret is that I wished I had been there.
Pretty sound, hollow lights. - By: , 31 Aug 2001
The problem with many live albums is that they usuallly fail to capture the magnificence & grandeur of the event they set out to preserve. This is especiallly apparent on some of Jarre's other live recordings, the Destination Docklands live album a case in point.

However, this earlier recording from the concerts in Houston & Lyon in 1987 is perhaps one of Jarre's better live efforts. The music starts with Oxygene 5 playing beneath quotes recorded from various Americans in the weeks before the concert. Following this interesting lead in comes the atmospheric Ethnicolor in a shortened form, & the next three tracks detail some of his more popular earlier works. Next we have a bombastic 'live' rendition of Laser Harp where you can almost feel Jarre plucking lasers from the air, after an introduction from Pope John Paul. All subsequent tracks are 'live' versions of tracks from his (at the time) new album Rendezvous, including Ron's Piece, played as a tribute to the astronauts who died in the Challlenger shuttle disaster earlier that year, one of whom was Ron Mcnair who was to have played live from space for the Houston concert.

This is a fantastic live album capturing the mood of Jarre's work & is a great showpiece for his analogue sound used so heavily at the time. The album itself is probably better than the annoying video of these two concerts, purely because most of the extraneous guff is avoided.