Jean Michel Jarre is one of the biggest musical bad-asses you probably don't know.
He has been one of my favorite musicians/artists since I discovered him at the age of 15. He's single-handedly responsible for me learning music theory, playing the keyboards (and then piano) and the guitar, and getting on stage to perform music.
Jarre has released 17 studio albums and 5 live albums, along with 8 compilation albums. As of 2004, he had sold over 80 million albums and singles. Unfortunately, I can't find more updated figures.
Not too shabby...
Beyond his music, he's famous for huge outdoor shows which feature lights, projections, lasers and fireworks.
He holds four Guiness World Records for biggest concert audience:
- Place De La Concorde - 1979: 1 million people
- Rendez-Vous Houston - 1986: 1.5 million people
- Paris La Defense - 1990: 2 million people
- Oxygen in Moscow - 1997: 3.5 million people
In 1995, he was awarded Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur from the French Government and since 1993 he's been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. An asteroid, 4422 Jarre, has been named in his honor.
Guy's a bad-ass. If you enjoy electronic music (not just techno or house), look him up.
One of the keys to his success, in my view, was a key distinction he learned from one of his early mentors — founder of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer.
Schaeffer didn't view music as made of notes. He viewed it as made of sounds. From that perspective, he started sampling sounds from nature and synthesizing them into various frequencies he then used as the building blocks of his music.
Today, it may not sound like much. Every artist and their mother samples sounds from nature, the city, public transportation, and every other environment available.
At the time, though, it was a revolutionary idea.
In my opinion, the Grinder and Bandler Brothers Band brought a similar distinction to the table when they decomposed thought and behavior into encoded sensory sequences in our nervous system. It offered a whole new way of analyzing and designing behavior.
If you want to understand the evolution of NLP, don't study the evolution of techniques.
Study the evolution of the code.
For a coach with a modicum of creativity and thoughtfulness, it opens the doors to unlimited new ways of adding value to your clients' experience.
