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Jean Michel Jarre — Fotopedia
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Jean Michel André Jarre (born 24 August 1948) is a French composer, performer and music producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and New Age genres, and known as an organiser of outdoor spectacles of his music featuring lights, laser displays, and fireworks.

Jarre was raised in Lyon by his mother and grandparents, and trained on the piano. From an early age he was introduced to a variety of art forms, including those of street performers, jazz musicians, and the artist Pierre Soulages. He played guitar in a band, but his musical style was perhaps most heavily influenced by Pierre Schaeffer, a pioneer of musique concrète at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

His first mainstream success was the 1976 album Oxygène. Recorded in a makeshift studio at his home, the album sold an estimated 12 million copies. Oxygène was followed in 1978 by Équinoxe, and in 1979 Jarre performed to a record-breaking audience of more than a million people at the Place de la Concorde, a record he has since broken three times. More albums were to follow, but his 1979 concert served as a blueprint for his future performances around the world. Several of his albums have been released to coincide with large-scale outdoor events, and he is now perhaps as well known as a performer as a musician.

The Moog Liberation was the first commercially produced keytar synthesizer released in 1980 by Moog Music. The instrument is comparable to the Moog Concertmate MG-1 and the Moog Rogue but it is most closely related to the Moog Prodigy; however, as a keytar the Liberation was designed to be played in the same posture as one would play a guitar.

The Liberation featured two monophonic VCOs and a polyphonic section that could play organ sounds. Both oscillators could be set to triangle, sawtooth, or square waveforms and switched over a 3-octave range. The Liberation's keyboard was aftertouch-sensitive and on its neck featured spring-loaded wheels for filter cutoff, modulation, and volume as well as a ribbon-controlled pitch bend. The Liberation had a single VCF and two ADS envelope generators. A 40-foot cable could connect the Liberation to its rackmounted half which housed the power supply and CV/Gate output sockets.

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