The short version
- From 12 to 26 December 2007, Jean-Michel Jarre played Oxygène ten times at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris, a theatre of about 1,000 seats.
- The shows launched a new recording of the album for its 30th anniversary. Oxygène was the whole programme.
- In 1976 Jarre had built the record alone, one layer of tape at a time. This time four people split it between them on the old instruments.
- A fan site recorded one moment: during "Oxygène 4" a huge mirror came down from the ceiling.
Wednesday 12 December 2007, eight in the evening, at the Théâtre Marigny just off the Champs-Élysées. On the stage sat synthesizers more than thirty years old. In a room of about a thousand seats, four people were going to play one album from start to finish. The album was Oxygène, which Jean-Michel Jarre had recorded by himself in the kitchen of a Paris flat in 1976.
How the show came about
In 2007 Jarre re-recorded Oxygène from scratch for EMI. The result was the 30th anniversary edition, Oxygène: New Master Recording. English Wikipedia dates its release to November 2007; the cover is a 3D model by Giovanni Bourgeois, built on Michel Granger's original painting. Before that, on 19 September, Jarre had played the whole album in the Alfacam studios in Lint, Belgium, for a handful of invited guests, filmed with 3D cameras. That became the DVD Live in Your Living Room. Nothing came off tape or a hard disk. Every note was played by hand.
The Marigny run came next. French Wikipedia lists the dates: 12, 13, 14 and 15 December, five nights from the 18th to the 22nd, and the 26th. Ten shows in all. Jarre's official site calls the Marigny a beautiful old-world theatre and says the staging was kept minimal so that all the attention went to the music and to what it calls a living museum of rare instruments.
From one man's kitchen to a stage for four
The 1976 Oxygène was one man's work. In a makeshift studio in his kitchen Jarre stacked the sounds onto tape, layer by layer. On a stage the layers all have to sound at once. At the Marigny three players stood with him: Francis Rimbert, Claude Samard and Dominique Perrier, the same line-up as on the DVD.
Four players meant more instruments. In words English Wikipedia quotes from Jarre, even one of the main string sounds on Oxygène was several Eminent string machines together, because the same sound was often stacked two or three deep with different phasing and processing on each layer. He tried as far as he could to avoid anything built after Oxygène, and finding the equipment was "quite a headache". By his count, 95 percent of the instruments dated from that period.
What one man had layered up over a few months in 1976, four people untangled in a single evening in 2007.
The running order, and the mirror
The British fan site Jarre UK kept the running order for the Paris shows. A "Prelude" opens, and "Variation" pieces are slipped in between the six parts of Oxygène, none of them on the original record. The last piece is "Oxygène 12", from the 1997 sequel Oxygène 7–13.
Another fan site, jmjarrefan, describes the stage in a little more detail. Jarre used only analogue synthesizers and a theremin, and no computer. When "Oxygène 4" began, a huge mirror came down from the ceiling so the audience could see the set-up from above. "Oxygène 12" was the encore.
That mirror says what the shows were about. Anyone who heard the 1976 record had no way to see where the sound came from. At the Marigny, the audience looked up into the mirror and saw four pairs of hands on the knobs and keys. On the record the beat comes out of a machine; on that stage, people had to keep the machines going.
What came next
According to the official site, the format then went round Europe: seventy more concerts in theatres such as the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Liceu in Barcelona and the Kremlin in Moscow. The Marigny was where it started. English Wikipedia adds that in 2008 the British paper The Mail on Sunday gave away more than two million copies of the new recording to its readers. A sound that came out of a kitchen in 1976 landed on doormats as a newspaper freebie some thirty years later.
Put on "Oxygène 4" and close your eyes. The rhythm machine taps out two patterns laid over each other, and the tune rises on top. At this point in December 2007 the audience looked up at the mirror. In it, four people had set up the 1976 kitchen again on a stage.
Where to get it
The four musicians from the Marigny stage can be seen on the DVD Live in Your Living Room. The original is the 1976 Oxygène, and which pressing to pick is covered in our Oxygène review.