The short version
- In October 1981 Jean-Michel Jarre played two concerts in Beijing and three in Shanghai.
- It started with radio. Records the British embassy handed to Radio Beijing went out on Chinese national radio.
- Jarre said he took 15 tons of equipment. These were also the first concerts where he used the laser harp.
- In Beijing, when the buses were about to stop, half the audience left. The live recordings came out as a double album in 1982.
Beijing's buses stopped running at about ten at night. In October 1981, with Jean-Michel Jarre's Beijing concert still going, that hour came round. According to a New York Times report cited on Wikipedia, about half the audience got up and left before the end. By Jarre's own count, he had brought thirty synthesizers.
It started on the radio
Jarre's records are covered in Jean-Michel Jarre: where to start, which puts the China live album among the records for after you have heard the five. This is the story of the place it was made.
As the piece on Les Chants Magnétiques says, it started with radio. According to Wikipedia, the British embassy in Beijing gave Radio Beijing copies of Oxygène, Équinoxe and Les Chants Magnétiques, and they became the first foreign music on Chinese national radio in decades.
In a 2016 interview Jarre remembered it this way. Someone at the British embassy gave his albums to Chinese radio. He was invited to give a masterclass introducing synthesizers. Then came the invitation to play Beijing and Shanghai. "To be honest with you, I never knew who took the decision," he said. In a 1982 interview he said that on an earlier visit he had brought the first synthesizers into China and lectured at the music school in Beijing.
Sources put his place in history in slightly different words. His official biography calls him the first Western musician invited to perform in post-Mao China. French Wikipedia calls him the first Western artist to perform in the People's Republic since the Cultural Revolution.
Fifteen tons
In a 1982 interview with the British magazine Electronics & Music Maker, Jarre counted the load. Around 300 boxes, 15 tons of equipment: 30 synthesizers, 35 amplifiers, 120 speakers, 8 lighting towers and 3 laser tubes. Sixty people went, including a television crew.
Three musicians shared the stage with him: Frédéric Rousseau, Dominique Perrier and Roger Rizzitelli. Only the sound effects were on tape, Jarre said, and everything else was played live. According to French Wikipedia, this tour was the first time he played the laser harp, the instrument you sound by breaking beams of light with your hands.
Then there was the power supply. According to Jean-Louis Remilleux's 1988 book, cited on Wikipedia, Chinese officials solved the problem by cutting the electricity to the surrounding districts for a while. Jarre's own memory, in 2016, was that they had to shut off an entire district of Beijing.
- Concerts
- October 1981, two in Beijing, three in Shanghai. The official site gives 21 and 22 October for Beijing, 26, 27 and 29 October for Shanghai
- Musicians
- Jean-Michel Jarre, Frédéric Rousseau, Dominique Perrier, Roger Rizzitelli
- Equipment
- by Jarre's count about 300 boxes, 15 tons
- First outing
- the laser harp (French Wikipedia)
- Album
- Les Concerts en Chine, May 1982, Disques Dreyfus FDM 18110 (France, double LP)
- UK chart
- 6
The audience
Wikipedia describes a quiet first response. Tickets cost the equivalent of 20 to 50 pence, and Jarre's team gave spare ones to children in the street. The applause was muted. His official site says the audience at the first show was made up entirely of military personnel. It was in Shanghai that the crowds warmed up.
How many came is a matter of whose count you use. The magazine's interviewer in 1982 put it at over 150,000 across the five shows.
Chinese musicians took part too. According to Wikipedia, "Fishing Junks at Sunset" was played and recorded with the Peking Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra. It is not a Jarre composition but an arrangement of a traditional Chinese piece, "Fisherman's Chant at Dusk". In the same interview Jarre spoke of playing with a 34-piece Chinese orchestra.
The record and the film
The concerts came out in May 1982 as the double album Les Concerts en Chine, known in English as The Concerts in China. According to Wikipedia it is mostly live material mixed with sounds recorded around the cities, plus one new studio track, "Souvenir of China". It reached number 6 in the UK.
Side three includes "Magnetic Fields 1", which lasts 30 seconds. A 2018 interview cited on Wikipedia says it is nothing but the sound of table tennis, put there as a joke.
The shows were filmed as well. A 1982 British review names the director as Andrew Piddington, and Jarre said the film would be shown on British television on 3 May.
How to listen
- Start with side three. Listen for how the parts of "Magnetic Fields" changed on stage.
- In "Fishing Junks at Sunset", find the place where the synthesizers and the Chinese orchestra blend.
- Do not skip the street sounds between tracks. They hold the album together like a day in a city.
The one track to send a friend
Send "Fishing Junks at Sunset". It runs 9:38. Add one line: Jarre did not write it. It is a traditional Chinese piece about fishing boats at dusk, and in the autumn of 1981 he played it with the Peking Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra.
Where to get it
The 1982 French original on Disques Dreyfus, FDM 18110, two records, is how this live set first appeared. In the UK it came out on Polydor as PODV 3. Put it on and turn off the light. When it gets near ten o'clock, glance at the door.