Essentials & Rarities

Essentials & Rarities (previously announced as Memories & Rarities) is a compilation album by Jean Michel Jarre, released in 2011. The double CD set consists of two distinctive CDs: Essentials, which is a compilation of Jean Michel Jarre's most famous work, and Rarities, which has tracks made before his ground-breaking album Oxygène. Most of the tracks on Rarities were never officially released on CD before (apart from tracks from Les Granges Brûlées). The Rarities CD includes a selection of tracks from Deserted Palace, his first single "La Cage" and its B-side "Erosmachine", and the track "Happiness Is a Sad Song", which he composed in 1968 for "Les Fêtes de la Jeunesse" in Reims and is Jean Michel Jarre's first musical release. Both "Happiness Is a Sad Song" and "La Cage / Erosmachine" were composed during Jarre's time at the Groupe Recherche Musicale. The album was released in memory of Francis Dreyfus, who was the founder of Jarre's first record label Disques Dreyfus and who died in the previous year.