Jarre and Sevilla meet 32 years later giving meaning to an iconic festival
The French composer and interpreter of electronic music, Jean Michel Jarre has performed in Seville conquering a dedicated audience.
They say at the Icónica Santalucía Sevilla Fest that, when they program their billboard each year, they are looking for, above all, iconic artists, people who, for whatever it is, are much more than music, people like Jean-Michel Jarre, who thanks to this festival has returned to Seville 32 years later.
French is much more than music. It is an emblem of how to turn a show with keyboards into a visual phenomenon that does not understand ages, elevating visual effects to the category of art in score.
And he is much more than a musician. It designs its shows taking care that a detail does not escape the ears and the public's eyesight. Some of the 18,000 who have gone to see Seville tonight were in their twenties or a little more when he performed in the Andalusian capital in 1993, and, in reality, what they have seen is a show that evolves at every step that technology does. As the world progresses, Jarre advances.
A cook who makes music
Tonight he has defined himself as "a cook who mixes the ingredients of music in a kitchen," and has explained to the public that electronic music, European as it alone, has no influence of the United States, like jazz or soul, and that, for him, it has "Spanish and Latin influences", which he has said are very important in their compositions.
And it has been presented in Seville with the highest laser light game in the world, "to reach Mars even before Elon Musk", and with eight impressive columns of light effects and that have acted as image projection screens, to add this point to the list of unique scenarios where it has performed, such as the Acropolis of Athens, the Palace of Versailles or the pyramids of Egypt.
And it has not been only to see its display in Seville, since the concert has been recorded by the Arte Channel in high definition, to be broadcast in full next September, under the generic name of Jean-Michel Jarre, Live in Seville.
"Thanks to this concert, we are going to go around the world from Seville," Jarre said to his audience, while explaining details of how he works to perfect his art, in a whole practical class in the middle of a monument that in 1929 will celebrate its first hundred years of life.
Oxymore, Sex In The Machine, Arpegiateur, Zoolookology..., their icons have been coming out of their keyboards in a perfect choreography with their equipment, while drones and several cameras, one of them in a crane, recorded everything for posterity.
A concert in which, in addition, the lasers have traveled throughout the park of María Luisa, the environment that crowns the impressive Plaza de España, and have been able to be seen from all over the city and much of its metropolitan area.
An artist who is much more
Jarre is a composer, performer, producer and cultural ambassador, a tireless creator, a researcher who has opened, from technological innovation, new paths for music. And he has the enormous ability to transfer his studio productions to the live concert.
And he does it as if he were a DJ who animates his audience from his plates (in this case keyboards), only that this particular animator is a score detective who has given 76 turns to the sun, playing with multichannel audio productions, using virtual reality or the metaverse.
But Jarre is not just an artist. He is Commander of the Legion of Honor and UNESCO Ambassador for Education, Science and Culture, and, as an unconditional defender of the planet and the environment, he has been awarded the Stephen Hawking Medal.
If you have to look only at the musical aspect, his current catalog includes 22 studio albums, of which more than 85 million copies have been sold worldwide, and have earned him countless awards and nominations, a list of recognitions that surely not even he himself will know how to list concretely.
And with all those wicker he has prepared a recital that he has crowned with Stardust, Rendez-Vous 4 and Magnetic Fields 2, to say goodbye with his little Spanish from Seville, to which he hopes to return soon, who knows if again to a festival that, for at least six more years, will continue on the same stage and with the same iconic spirit. An article by Fermín Cabanillas.
Source:
https://amp.hablandoenplata.es/vida/jar ... 596ca.html
He's only gone and done it! Broken away from the "black box" festival stage and starting to draw in the surrounding architecture into the show design experience. That hybrid approach I was advocating he use in Brussels. It looks great! I know this was the date on the tour when the TV crew was there, so maybe that's why there was a slightly more ambitious approach? But it shows it can be done. Love it!
A shame it didn't happen in Brussels (where I was) but so pleased this particular show took that old school JMJ attitude and applied it to today's modern staging.
