Sessions 2000

Sessions 2000 is Jarre's fourteenth studio album, and the one that comes closest to hearing him think out loud.

It grew out of improvisational ideas and jam sessions rather than written pieces, and the titles keep that honest: every track carries the date of the session that produced it, from "January 24" through to "December 17".

The music sits between ambient and jazz. Acoustic instruments, live and sampled, rest over a bed of seamless ambient electronics and soft trip hop, and the textures run denser and warmer than the spacious atmospheres he's best known for. It's the most overtly jazz music in his catalogue — a lineage worth hearing, given whose son he is.

Recorded at Croissy studio with Francis Rimbert on additional keyboards, sampler and programming, and mixed by Joachim Garraud at Square Prod. Released 4 November 2002; US release 7 January 2003.