Jean-Michel Jarre has paid tribute to his late mentor on his new album.
The 74-year-old electronic music pioneer was mentored by composer Pierre Henry – who died in 2017 at the age of 89 -while he was studying in Paris, France in the late 1960s and has credited him with creating an “organic approach to music” that influenced all his later work and he wanted to collaborate with him on a track for new record ‘Oxymore’ but Henry died before work could begin.
He told Prog magazine: “With ‘Oxymore’, I had the idea to collaborate with Pierre Henry for a previous project called ‘Electronica’ but he got ill and passed away.”
However, the dream collaboration didn’t evaporate as Henry’s widow gave Jarre some material he’d wanted to use.
He added: “I was surprised when his widow gave me some sounds that he’d said he wanted me to use one day. In the end I didn’t use too many of Pierre’s sounds, but I used them as spice, as seasoning, here and there. You can hear his voice on the track ‘Zeitgeist’. But he was more important to me as a source of inspiration.”
Jarre credits Henry as well as his musicologist collaborator Pierre Schaeffer with having the biggest impact on his own work, and he told the magazine about their innovative use of sound that inspired him.
He said of the pair: “Until the two Pierres began their experiments, music was done only with notes. Suddenly, you had these guys saying that music is also about sounds. They were recording noises and mixing them, by taking the sound of an engine and missing it with a clarinet, or taking the sound of a bird and mixing it with an electric guitar. They created this organic approach to music that, in my opinion, has not really been recognised properly.
“It’s really the origin of the way we make music today.”