Cities in Concert

Two concerts, months apart, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, assembled into one record.

Houston came first, on 5 April 1986: Jarre playing among the skyscrapers of downtown Houston to mark the city's 150th anniversary and NASA's 25th, with an audience of around 1.3 million that entered the Guinness Book of Records. Lyon followed on 5 October 1986, staged for the visit of Pope John Paul II.

What makes these albums unusual is that they don't try to be clean concert documents. They're collages — live performance cut with reportage from the events themselves: excerpts from the memorial service at which Ronald Reagan eulogised astronaut Ron McNair, who was to have played saxophone from orbit before the Challenger disaster; passages from Kennedy's moon speech at Rice University; the blessing of the city of Lyon. "Ron's Piece" — "Last Rendez-Vous" — sits at the centre of it.

Released in 1987 on Disques Dreyfus, recorded and mixed on a digital Otari 32-track.