BENJAMIN GIVAN
How Mimi Perrin Translated
Jazz Instrumentals into
French Song
“Just like the th at the beginning of they and at the beginning of theater.”
“What’s different about the sound of theater and they?”
“Say them again and listen. One’s voiced and the other’s unvoiced, they’re as
distinct as V and F; only they’re allophones—at least in British English; so Britishers are used to hearing them as though they were the same phoneme.”
—Samuel R. Delany, Babel-171
—Prenez par exemple, en français, le C de cure et de constitution.
—Quelle est la différence?
—Répétez chaque mot en vous écoutant bien. Le premier est palatal, articulé sur le
sommet du palais, et le second vélaire, sur le voile du palais. Il s’agit simplement
de variantes combinatoires dues à l’environnement.
—Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17, translated by Mimi Perrin2
Translating prose from one language to another can often be a thorny
task, especially with a text, such as the above extract from Samuel R.
Delany’s Babel-17, whose meaning or literary effect is inseparable from
its voiced sound. For the French edition of this 1966 science fiction novel,
its translator, Mimi Perrin (1926–2010), had little choice but to completely
recompose Delany’s paragraph. Where the English original contrasts
“they” with “theater” to illustrate voiced and unvoiced phonemes, she
instead cites the French words cure and constitution to demonstrate palatal
and velar pronunciations of the consonant c, meanwhile omitting Delany’s comparison of American and British English. To convey the author’s
argument about interlingual phonetic perception, she had to forgo his
text’s literal word-for-word meaning and transpose its fictional setting
Benjamin Givan is associate professor of music at Skidmore College. Another
article on Mimi Perrin is forthcoming in the Journal of the Society for American
Music in 2016.
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American Music
Spring 2016
© 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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to a French cultural context.3 These sorts of logistical challenges and
creative possibilities—questions of what to retain, change, add, or omit
that inevitably arise when translating such concatenations of meaning,
speech, and sound—were lifelong preoccupations of Perrin’s, not only
in her prolific work as a professional translator but also in her equally
fruitful musical career as leader of one of the postwar era’s most successful jazz vocal groups: Les Double Six.4
Perrin’s accomplishments with Les Double Six, which she founded in
1959 and disbanded when illness curtailed her performing career in 1966,
have to date received little attention from Anglophone jazz researchers.5 (The only academic scholarship on her musical oeuvre has been
by French authors, Eric Fardet and Isabelle Perrin, her daughter, both of
whose work provides an essential grounding for the present study.)6 This
may be in part because, from a US-centered perspective, Perrin appears to
lie somewhat on the fringes of the jazz world. A white, European, female
practitioner of a male-dominated black American musical idiom, she specialized in the distinctive performance practice known as “vocalese,”7 in
which jazz singers take recorded instrumental improvisations (usually
well-known commercial discs by famous soloists), set them to words,
and reperform them, note for note. (Vocalese, whose name was coined
by the British critic Leonard Feather, first became popular during the
early 1950s and ever since has typically taken the form of an accessible,
engaging entertainment more than an unambiguously earnest art form.)8
Furthermore, Les Double Six were renowned for meticulously rehearsed
arrangements and elaborate postproduction recording techniques rather
than the sorts of live, spontaneous improvisation or compositional innovation that jazz critics and scholars have tended to esteem most highly;
the group’s name itself signaled their use of six singers, overdubbed to
create the illusion of twelve voices, on each of their four albums.9 Yet the
main reason for Perrin’s marginalization by Anglophone jazz scholarship
is that her principal enduring musical contributions were as a lyricist,
and she wrote in French.10
Nevertheless, Mimi Perrin’s strikingly original and sophisticated artistic legacy offers us a uniquely illuminating, transnational perspective on
the interrelationships between music, language, and culture. Working
alongside major American artists such as Quincy Jones and Dizzy Gillespie, not to mention many leading French singers and instrumentalists, she composed vocalese lyrics with acute sensitivity to the sorts of
phonetic subtleties noted in Delany’s novel. Seeking to vocally mimic
instrumental sonorities and articulation, she even conceived of her sung
texts as, in a metaphorical sense, translations of the recorded jazz solos
upon which they were based. The result was a distinctive vocal aesthetic
that, by adapting standard French grammar and pronunciation through
creative lexical choices and syllabic elisions, at times imparted an effect
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very close to that of wordless, instrumentally oriented scat singing. Perrin’s methods and motivations can best be appreciated and understood
by closely scrutinizing her texts’ poetic meanings and linguistic attributes
and contrasting them with vocalese lyrics by other authors, particularly
those of the American Jon Hendricks (b. 1921). To this end, her work first
needs to be situated in the context of jazz’s global history.
Vocalese’s Transatlantic Origins
From its very beginning, vocalese singing exemplified jazz’s intercontinental diffusion, whereby musicians, recordings, and creative practices
have continually circulated geographically and across cultural and linguistic boundaries. The first widely recognized vocalese recording, King
Pleasure’s 1952 rendition of “Moody’s Mood for Love” (with lyrics by
Eddie Jefferson), was based on a record made in Sweden by the American saxophonist James Moody.11 King Pleasure’s disc also featured a
few lines sung by Blossom Dearie, who, several weeks later, recorded
as a pianist behind Annie Ross, the Paris-based British singer who had
recently made her first record with Moody in France.12 Shortly thereafter
the two women presented a nightclub act together in London and Paris,
and Dearie ended up spending the next five years in France, where she
founded the Blue Stars, a bilingual vocal octet whose membership was
otherwise mainly French.13 In 1957, soon after Dearie returned to the
United States, Mimi Perrin joined a new, six-person incarnation of the
Blue Stars for an English-language album called Pardon My English.14 A
year later, the disc’s title echoed transatlantically when Neal Hefti, an
arranger for the Count Basie Orchestra, released Pardon My Doo-Wah, a
jazz vocal choir album that sought to capitalize on the popularity of the
landmark Sing a Song of Basie, which had been recorded in New York
in mid-1957. The latter album, featuring Basie’s big-band charts set to
words and arranged for overdubbed vocals, debuted the trio of Ross,
Dave Lambert, and Jon Hendricks, who remain history’s most famous
vocalese group by far, still remembered for their commercially successful recordings and marquee concert and festival appearances during
that era.15
It was Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross’s Sing a Song of Basie that inspired
Perrin to found Les Double Six in 1959. She already had embarked on
an unusual dual career path. After taking classical piano lessons in her
youth, she received a degree in English from the Sorbonne and taught
the subject for a short time during the early 1950s, also publishing translations of two English-language books.16 But she increasingly gravitated
toward music and before long had established a solid reputation as a
jazz pianist, as well as often singing at jam sessions around Paris.17 By
the decade’s end she was playing regularly at the Blue Note club, on
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the Right Bank, and had released her first album.18 That ten-inch disc,
Dancing-party à Saint-Germain-des-Prés, shows her to have been an adept,
bebop-inflected keyboard improviser and, on four songs with English
lyrics, a stately jazz vocalist, clearly influenced by Billie Holiday.19 Perrin heard Holiday perform in Paris in late 1958, several months before
the latter’s death, and many years later she recalled the experience as
“captivating, bewitching. When the curtain came down and you left the
club, all you wanted to hear was silence.”20
Most of Les Double Six’s founding members, including Perrin and
other singers from the Blue Stars, recorded regularly as background
vocalists on jazz and pop studio sessions during the late 1950s. Many
were formally trained: Christiane Legrand had studied classical singing,
Jean-Claude Briodin was a conservatory-educated saxophonist, Jacques
Denjean and Claude Germain were classical pianists, and so was the
American Ward Swingle, who had arrived in Paris in 1956 to study with
Walter Gieseking.21 Indeed, the majority of Les Double Six’s rotating
personnel, especially during its first two years of existence, were accomplished instrumentalists as well as vocalists. Those with extensive jazzplaying experience included the bassist Jean-Louis Conrozier and two
of France’s leading postwar jazz artists, trumpeter Roger Guérin and
organist Eddy Louiss.22 Seeking repertoire, Perrin turned to the American
trumpeter and composer Quincy Jones (b. 1933), who had been living in
France since 1957 while employed as a studio conductor and arranger
for Barclay Records.23 Jones gave her the charts for some of his big band
compositions and arrangements, and he participated in rehearsals for the
group’s first album, Les Double Six Meet Quincy Jones.24 Having gathered
singers and musical scores, Perrin had only one task left to complete.
She needed to write the words.
Jazz and the French Language
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Vocalese lyrics raise some key issues of musical reception, meaning, and
national identity. In France during the 1950s, jazz was a well-established
cultural presence, with a long-standing tradition of native French players, institutions, and critical discourse.25 But while instrumental jazz may
seem relatively compatible with cosmopolitan or universalist conceptions of the idiom, sung texts are inherently anchored within a particular
language community, with inevitable cultural and national associations.
Much as the advent of the “talkies” (sound films with spoken dialogue)
linguistically fractured the global cinema audience during the late 1920s,
jazz sung in English around the same time made French listeners feel
more excluded than did instrumental music of the same genre.26 On his
first European tour, in 1934, Louis Armstrong was told by the manager of
Paris’s Salle Pleyel that, for the audience’s benefit, he must sing in French;
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Armstrong demurred on the grounds that “it would have been a flop.
. . . It would be like wanting Miss Lucienne Boyer to sing in English.”27
The notion of the chanteuse Boyer singing in English may well have
seemed outlandish to Armstrong, yet her compatriot Maurice Chevalier did just that, to great acclaim, during the same era. Still, when most
French vocalists of the 1930s sang American songs, it was far more common for them to perform versions translated into their native tongue. In
the hands of cabaret singer Jean Sablon, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad
Wolf” became “Prenez garde au grand méchant loup” (Beware of the
big nasty wolf); Ray Ventura’s band turned “Whistle While You Work”
into “Sifflez en travaillant” (Whistle while working).28 During the early
1940s, with Paris occupied by a German regime that was at war with the
United States and its allies, the city’s radio announcers sometimes even
thinly disguised American jazz numbers by retitling them in French—
Armstrong’s “Basin Street Blues” became “Le blues de la rue du Bassin,”
and his “Tight Like This” became “Tiens-le ainsi.”29 Even after World
War II, with American popular music showing no sign of losing its transatlantic appeal, French audiences continued to hear translated lyrics
quite frequently. There were obscure curiosities such as the American
trumpeter Roy Eldridge’s 1950 blues vocal, “Tu disais qu’tu m’aimais”
(You said that you loved me).30 But there were also covers of popular
English-language hits, such as singer Richard Anthony’s Francophone
renditions of “Hit the Road, Jack” (“Fiche le camp, Jack”) and “Blowin’
in the Wind” (“Écoute dans le vent”).31 Anthony’s 1960 version of Brian
Hyland’s novelty disc “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini,”
retitled “Itsy bitsy petit bikini,” featured a sophisticated-sounding female
speaker reciting a short line at the end of each verse: “Un, deux, trois,
elle tremblait de montrer quoi?” (One, two, three, she trembled to show
what?).32 The voice was Mimi Perrin’s.
Under Dearie’s leadership, the Blue Stars had been singing mainly in
French; their version of “Lullaby of Birdland,” arranged by Christiane
Legrand’s brother Michel, even appeared on the US pop charts in early
1956, retitled “La légende du pays aux oiseaux” (The legend of the land
of birds), with French lyrics by Jean Constantin.33 But by 1957, when
Perrin joined the group, they were often recording in English.34 Two
years later, as she set about planning Les Double Six’s renditions of
Jones’s jazz charts, Perrin at first considered writing English lyrics. She
soon changed her mind. “If you don’t try too hard to respect academically correct French, and if you allow yourself some slang phrases and
elisions,” she decided, “French is almost better.”35 It was a daunting
undertaking all the same. Ward Swingle recalled that, while composing
lyrics, Perrin “often spent an entire night looking for the one word that
would do the job.”36 The singers would arrive at her home each morning at nine o’clock to learn their parts, often returning in the evening
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to practice late into the night—Monique Aldebert, another participant,
remembered “hours, days, weeks, months, spent . . . rehearsing again
and again in order to achieve the sacrosanct ‘blend,’ the amalgam of six
voices sounding as one.”37
The recording process was just as arduous. Perrin first called only
the rhythm section (piano, bass, and drums) to the studio, where she
asked them to listen to the original instrumental discs and rehearse using
notated charts. When taping the instrumental tracks, drummer Daniel
Humair faced one of the greatest musical challenges he had ever confronted. “It is really very tricky,” he found, “to record the accompaniment for an imaginary big band while observing the theme, chorus, and
orchestral re-entrance, with the only point of reference being provided
by Mimi Perrin, who went from one [musician] to the other, murmuring the theme and solos softly enough that the microphone didn’t pick
up her voice.”38 Once the rhythm section tracks had been satisfactorily
completed, the Double Six singers rehearsed with them. When it came
time to record in the studio, the vocalists added three tracks: first the
voices representing the lead trumpet and saxophone section, then the
remaining brass parts, and finally the solos based on the original instrumental improvisations.39
Words from Music
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Musically, Les Double Six differed in several respects from their American counterparts, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. Perrin’s group was
larger, placed more emphasis on exact part-by-part replication of big
band orchestrations, and did not feature scat improvisation. Yet their
most original and distinctive artistic contribution of all was unquestionably their leader’s unique approach to crafting French lyrics. “When you
listen very closely to a jazz band,” Perrin explained in 1966, “it seems
to me that the instruments don’t do what we generally call onomatopoeias—that is, ‘taba-da’ or ‘tooboo-doo.’ Rather, there’s a phrasing, a
particular sound, that differs with each instrument, and I try—in some
ways you could say it’s like a translation of a foreign language. It’s a
translation of the music—of the sounds that the instruments make. So,
for example, when it’s a trumpet section, I’ll try to render the trumpet
attacks by t’s or d’s.”40 This, in essence, was her modus operandi: she
conceived of vocalese lyricization as a form of translation, and she tried
to write texts that would, to some extent, preserve the phonology of the
original instrumental renditions. Of course, Perrin was hardly the first to
note that jazz instrumentalists’ phrasing and articulation often resemble
the human voice.41 She was exceptional, though, in that she conceptualized this phenomenon almost literally and explored it at an exhaustive
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level of detail in her creative work.42 The resulting vibrant, imaginative fusion of speech, song, and instrumentally conceived melody was
unprecedented in jazz. “The first time I rehearsed these fabulous singers,”
Quincy Jones recalled, “I declared that they reproduced the instrumental
phrasing, inflections, and nuances marvelously, and I told Mimi, ‘When
I hear your group, I hear my band.’”43
To illustrate, Perrin drew attention to the opening line of her vocalese
setting of the Count Basie Orchestra’s “Blues in Hoss’ Flat.”44 “The beginning of this piece’s introduction . . . consists of successive attacks,” she
pointed out. “And the corresponding phrase for us is ‘Pour tout vous
dire, nous partons tenter le bon d’antan’ [Frankly, we’ll go and try the
good old things]. If you listen, that makes the ‘rebounds’ of the t’s, the
b’s, and the d’s, which reproduce this sound. So if you’d done ‘doogoodoogoo-doo,’ that wouldn’t have had any relationship.”45 One of her
aims, in this instance, was to deploy words that start with a plosive
consonant, principally bilabials (i.e., p’s and b’s) or alveolars (i.e., t’s and
d’s).46 In the Basie band’s instrumental arrangement, Frank Foster had
scored the phrase for trombones and saxophones; Perrin uses plosive
onsets, including five t’s, to enunciate eleven of its fourteen syllables.
Perrin’s innovative use of language to mimic instrumental sonorities
and articulation caused Les Double Six’s performances to sound strikingly different from those of other vocalese singers. The clearest bases
for comparison are a number of pieces that both Perrin and other lyricists independently set to words. One such instance is Horace Silver’s
early hard-bop composition “Doodlin’”; Jon Hendricks, who wrote all
of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross’s lyrics, began his setting of this theme
with these lines:
Usin’ the phone booth—makin’ a few calls,
Doodlin’ weird things—usin’ the booth walls,
Got me a big date—waitin’ for my chick,
Puttin’ her face on, so she can look slick,
I enjoy procrastinatin’, ’cause I’m busy while I’m waitin’,
Doodlin’ away—doodlin’ away.47
Hendricks has said that he never attempts to re-create instrumental
attacks or sonorities, he simply derives his lyrics’ subject matter from
each composition’s original name.48 Silver may well have thought of the
word “doodlin’” as an onomatopoeia resembling the theme’s incipit,
insistently repeated melodic motive; Hendricks, in any case, took the title
literally and invented English lyrics evoking idle scribbling. In contrast,
when Perrin set this same melody to French lyrics, she capitalized on the
phonetic resonance between its title, its reiterative melody, and the French
approximate homonym dodelinant (nodding).49 Insistently reiterating this
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word in tandem with the theme’s motivic repetitions, she heightened the
French text’s sonic resemblance to the instrumental original:50
Dis, toi, t’as peur de travailler, dis, toi, t’as peur de t’réveiller,
dis, tois, tu n’peux pas t’lever!
Dodelinant, dodelinant, dodelinant, dodelinant,
Dodelinant, dodelinant, dodelinant, dodelinant,
Tu n’peux pas, dis donc patate, non tu n’peux pas passer
tout ton temps tout en dodelinant, tout en dodelinant!
[Hey you, you’re afraid to go to work, hey you, you’re afraid
to wake up, hey you, you can’t get up!
Nodding, nodding, nodding, nodding,
Nodding, nodding, nodding, nodding,
You can’t, hey couch potato, no you can’t spend
all your time always nodding, always nodding!]
The inherent musicality of such linguistic repetition has been empirically
demonstrated; in a recent study of music cognition, Elizabeth Hellmuth
Margulis observes that “when language is being repetitive . . . language
is being musical.”51
What is more, Perrin associated certain types of consonants with
particular musical instruments. She spoke of “translating” saxophone
attacks with labiodental fricatives (f and v) and voiced bilabial plosives
(b); to replicate brass parts, she generally preferred alveolar plosives (t
and d) or the voiceless bilabial, p.52 The most often cited illustration of
how she conveyed the effect of specific instrumental note onsets is her
setting of Bobby Timmons’s classic hard bop theme “Moanin’.”53 “On
Quincy Jones’s arrangement,” she explained, “I hummed ‘ta pada pada
pada pa.’ The first word would need to be ‘ta pa,’ hence ‘t’as pas peur de
t’évader d’là’ [you’re not afraid of escaping from there]. I wouldn’t have
been able to put ‘viens chez moi’ [come to my place], since we wouldn’t
have attacked.”54 She eventually completed a vocalese text entitled “La
complainte du bagnard” (The convict’s lament):
T’as pas peur de t’évader d’là? (Moi, pas.)
Tu n’crois pas qu’tu n’y arriveras pas? (Moi, pas.)
Tu n’crois pas qu’tu n’y arriveras pas? (Moi, pas.)
[You’re not afraid of escaping from there? (Not me.)
You don’t think you won’t make it? (Not me.)
You don’t think you won’t make it? (Not me.)]
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In this case, the theme’s title is a basic starting point, but textual semantics
are a subsidiary consideration because Perrin’s foremost creative goal
is to recreate the instrumental phonology: almost all of the words start
with consonants, and she begins each line with the letter t, replicating the
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crisp, tongued saxophone articulation heard on Quincy Jones’s big band
recording.55 And, characteristically of jazz aesthetics, her own creative
vision largely supersedes whatever meanings or symbolism “Moanin’”
may have possessed in its original context.
Hendricks, whose father was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, has said, “‘Moanin’’ to me sounds like a church song.”56
Motivated by the theme’s gospel semiotics—its call-and-response
exchanges and plagal cadential progressions—he wrote very different
lyrics for Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross:
Every morning find me moaning. (Yes, Lord.)
’Cause of all the trouble I see. (Yes, Lord.)
Life’s a losing gamble to me. (Yes, Lord.)
The English phrase “Yes, Lord,” set to the responsorial IV–I (“amen”)
interjections at the end of each line, unmistakably resonates with the
music’s implicit liturgical connotations, yet these words’ initial consonants, y and l, bear little resemblance to the horn articulations of trumpeter Lee Morgan and saxophonist Benny Golson on Art Blakey’s original
quintet recording.57 Perrin’s corresponding “Moi, pas” not only uses
bilabial consonants to mimic the trombone attacks in Jones’s big band
arrangement but also deploys vowels whose relative lengths in spoken
French—a drawn-out oi (wah) followed by a clipped as (uh)—roughly
conform to the motive’s rhythmic profile: a dotted quarter note followed
by an eighth note. In short, Hendricks’s lyrics seek to convey linguistically what he believes the original music signifies; Perrin’s lyrics recreate the music’s sound while verbally expressing new meanings, often
limited only by her imagination.
Hearing Scat
But what of Perrin’s characterization of her vocalese texts as translations?
Although lyricizing instrumental performances is certainly quite unlike
literary translation in the everyday interlingual sense, it is quite close
to what Roman Jakobson calls “intersemiotic translation,” or “transmutation,” in which “verbal signs [are interpreted] by means of signs of
nonverbal sign systems,”58 except that the intersemiotic relationship is
reversed: nonverbal signs are interpreted verbally. Naturally, the instrumental music and corresponding vocalese lyrics may not necessarily
have any shared meaning; what they share is their sounding phonology.
Perrin’s texts can therefore also be considered a form of homophonic
translation. Homophonic translation, ordinarily construed interlingually,
involves reinterpreting the sounds of one language in another language,
typically with a change in meaning; for instance, the English phrase “Baa
baa black sheep, have you any wool?” can be homophonically translated
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into French as “Papa blague chipe, à vieux inouï houle” (Stealing, even in
fun, my father, can disturb a mature man to unheard-of depths).59 Perrin’s
mode of inventing vocalese lyrics was, in sum, a process of homophonic
intersemiotic translation: phonetically, her verbal texts approximated the
sounds of instrumental performance, but semantically, they did not necessarily bear any relationship to any meanings that could reasonably be
ascribed to the original renditions.
Because they reproduce jazz instrumental phonology, Perrin’s lyrics
have an unusual transnational bivalence: more than most other vocalese texts, they are capable of being perceived by linguistic outsiders as
semantically open, scatlike vocal performances. Consider, by way of
comparison, the perspective of non-Anglophones hearing one of Hendricks’s English settings of a jazz instrumental recording. Lacking any
decipherable linguistic content, the performance would not be semantically comprehensible, nor could it be easily apprehended as if it were
semantically open, in the manner of most scat singing, since, unlike scat,
its vocal phonemes do not tend to mirror jazz instrumental articulation and inflections.60 Non-Anglophone listeners are therefore prone to
experience the music with a marked sense of foreignness and cultural
exclusion—as simply a language that they do not understand. Perrin’s
French texts are different. More instrumentally oriented and thus more
scatlike, they do not linguistically alienate non-Francophones quite so
resolutely.
A good example is her setting of the Woody Herman Orchestra’s “Four
Brothers,” which she gave a science fiction text, a common theme of her
lyrics after the early 1960s.61 Retitled “Les quatre extra-terrestres” (The
four extraterrestrials), it begins:
Pour vous nous voilà venus,
Partis de tous les coins de l’univers,
Pour tenter tant qu’on pourra,
D’prouver qu’en n’étant pas du tout d’une même planète,
On peut pourtant vous tendre la main.62
[Here we are—we’ve come for you
From all corners of the universe
To try as best we can
To show that though we’re not at all from the same planet
We can still give you a helping hand.]
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The opening line, “Pour vous nous voilà venus,” contains a triple assonance of the ou (ooh) vowel pairing, closely echoed by the final syllable’s
u (see ex. 1). The consonant v is repeated three times, n twice, and the
only other consonants at syllabic onsets are the plosive p on the downbeat and the l on beat 3. The latter syllable, là, is the most distinctive of
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Example 1. “Les quatre extra-terrestres” (Deux voix par tête [Central Variétés, ORTF
television broadcast, dir. Claude Fayard, March 25, 1966]).
B 7
Pour
vous
nous
voi
là
ve
nus
all, giving additional salience to an eighth note that initiates a decisive
change in melodic direction from the incipit semitonal undulation toward
an arpeggiated descent.
Herman’s “Four Brothers” also happens to have been the first recording
for which Hendricks wrote and recorded a vocalese lyric.63 His English
text is semantically grounded in the first-person-plural perspective of
four horn players, but, except for its straightforward rhymes, it has neither the phonetic consistency nor the instrumental phonology of Perrin’s:
Take a seat and cool it,
’Cause unless you overrule it,
We are ready to show you some blowin’.
A-rompin’ and a-stompin’ is a lot of fun.
Four brothers who are blowin’ our horns.
Hendricks’s first seven vocalese syllables—“Take a seat and cool it,
’cause”—contain two s consonants, a voiceless alveolar fricative that
tends not to be much used in scat singing, perhaps because it does not
resemble any conventional instrumental articulation. Consequently, to
a linguistic outsider, this English phrase is not nearly so conducive to a
“scat hearing” as is Perrin’s corresponding “Pour vous nous voilà venus”
(in standard French pronunciation the terminal s consonants are silent).
Though Perrin’s primary intended listenership was French, she also
was well aware of, and appreciated, Les Double Six’s English-speaking
North American audiences (the group toured the United States and
Canada in 1964, and their albums were released transatlantically).64 By
presenting non-French speakers with a genuine foreign language masquerading as scat, she inverted a long-standing tradition among jazz
singers of using scat to convey the impression of a “mock-foreign language.”65 Since Perrin’s lyrics always certainly remain, at some level,
recognizably French texts, listeners who do not understand French will
continue to experience them with some degree of alienation from their
verbal meaning, even if less so than non-Anglophones hearing Hendricks’s lyrics. From a non-Francophone standpoint, her texts also affirm
the long-standing notion of jazz as, in Louis Armstrong’s words, “a secret
order,”66 an exclusive community that uses opaque musical and verbal
codes, such as “jive” argot, to segregate itself from mainstream society, including even some of the idiom’s devotees. And meanwhile, by
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infusing a real, non-English language with qualities of instrumentally oriented scat, Perrin evoked another, related jazz practice: the intermingling
of scat and hipster jive (epitomized, as Brent Hayes Edwards observes,
by Armstrong’s English “translation” of Budd Johnson’s scatted “viper
language” on a 1933 recording of “Sweet Sue”).67 Even so, her lyrics
remain exceptional in the extent to which they convey the effect of textless, “abstract” instrumental sound without ever abandoning concrete
linguistic signification. They are, in a sense, simultaneously both globally
cosmopolitan and distinctly French.
After d’Alembert: Transfiguring French
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Understood as a process of translation, albeit an intersemiotic rather
than interlingual one, Perrin’s vocalese aesthetic embodied certain longstanding principles of the literary translation process that was her once
and future vocation. Even her invention of entirely new texts whose
meaning was sometimes completely untethered to that of their musical foundation is reconcilable with a literary aesthetic: Walter Benjamin
famously claimed that a literary text’s “essential quality is not statement
or the imparting of information.” Translation is, in his view, a “mode”
that “ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal
relationship between languages,” and one way it does so is by “finding
that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which [one] is
translating which produces in it the echo of the original.”68 Although
Benjamin’s theory is by no means always reflected in practice, his notion
that literary translations should imbue their target language with an
aroma of the foreign original is a very old one, traceable to such sources
as the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean d’Alembert, who wrote
in 1763 that interlingual translation ought to borrow “features of one
language in order to embellish another” and thus produce a text with
“a foreign coloring.”69 Perrin, in a similar vein, felt it was necessary to
modify her native tongue when composing vocalese texts.
One of her reasons for defamiliarizing the French language was to
engender the ineffable quality called “swing,” a goal she shared with a
number of other prominent French popular vocalists and lyricists both
before and since her time.70 “French . . . doesn’t swing like the English
language,” she explained in a rare English interview. “I have to transform
it a little . . . to put the . . . word stress on another syllable. . . . The French
language is more fluid. Our stress is not accentuated like in English. So
that obliged me to put the stress on the French word where it’s not there
really when we talk normally. . . . I had to . . . twist it a little so that the
words would bounce like in English.”71 This process of linguistic transfiguration has been further explicated by Perrin’s daughter, Isabelle, a
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translation scholar who worked closely with her mother (they published
many literary translations together as equal collaborators). Isabelle Perrin
notes that English contains a comparatively large number of monosyllabic words; lyricists can use these to accent musical syncopations with
a single complete word. French, with proportionally more polysyllables,
is more conducive to legato, rather than strongly accented, phrasing.72 To
compensate, Mimi Perrin adopted a French vocalese lexicon comprised
of a disproportionately large number of single-syllable words; Isabelle
calls attention to her mother’s text for J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding’s
version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” which foregrounds
words such as peut (can), voir (see), là (there), and donc (thus):73
Paraît qu’on peut voir en Arabie,
paraît qu’on peut voir là, parlez donc,
paraît qu’on peut voir en Arabie,
des milliers d’tapis volants. (T’en es tout baba.)
[It seems we can see in Arabia,
it seems we can see there, say then,
it seems we can see in Arabia,
thousands of flying carpets. (You’re all flabbergasted.)]
Isabelle Perrin additionally observes that the slang term baba at the end
of this stanza—a word that itself resembles scat syllables—is echoed by
a reference to Ali Baba later in the same text.74
Mimi Perrin also deviated from French linguistic norms by saturating her texts with syllabic elisions. In a nonexhaustive list, musicologist
Eric Fardet has identified twenty-eight different fused consonant pairs
that arise from elisions throughout her oeuvre: d and q merge when “de
quoi” is contracted into “d’quoi,” j adheres to v when “je vais” is elided
into “j’vais,” and so forth.75 These elisions not only contribute to her
lyrics’ colloquial flavor to French speakers but also facilitate their bivalent function, accentuating the impression of scat to non-Francophone
listeners.76 In the second line of her text for the tune “Walkin’” (retitled
“Un tour au bois” [A walk in the woods]), Les Double Six sing the
reiterated phrase “là où il y a” with extreme elisions that condense its
five syllables within just two distinct pitches (see ex. 2). Their diction
creates an effect very close to the scat syllable “ool-ya,”77 in this case
Example 2. “Walkin’” (“Un tour au bois”) (Les Double Six, BMG France).
C’est
là
bas
là/où il y a
là
bas
là/où il y a
là/où/il y/a
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là/où/il y/a l’bois.
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mimicking the saxophone grace-note inflections of Quincy Jones’s original arrangement:78
C’est là-bas, là dans le bois, là, qu’on ira là. (Tout là-bas.)
C’est là-bas, là où il y a, là-bas, là où il y a, là où il y a, là où
il y a l’bois.
Venez donc avec moi,
allons faire un tour au bois.
Venez donc avec moi,
chérie allons là-bas,
faire un petit tour au bois,
tous les deux, tous les deux là-bas, là.
[It’s down there, there in the woods, there, we’re going there.
(Right down there.)
It’s down there, that’s where, down there, that’s where, that’s
where there’s the woods.
So come with me,
let’s take a walk in the woods.
So come with me,
darling, let’s go down there,
for a little walk in the woods,
both of us, both of us down there, there.]
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This particular text also makes ample use of single-syllable words such
as là, bas, and bois that sound almost identical to common scat syllables
(“la,” “bah,” and “bwah”). Perceptually, these sorts of French/scat homophones may even facilitate a “scat hearing” for non-Francophones, much
as cognate homophones are known to trigger codeswitching in conversations between bilingual speakers.79
Truth be told, even French speakers sometimes tend to hear these
sung texts as if they are scat vocables rather than semantic syllables.
Perrin was of the opinion that those who found her texts difficult to
apprehend were mainly “superficial, distracted, or musically unskilled
listeners.”80 “To them I reply, ‘Of course,’” she explained. “‘Because if
you were understanding each word very distinctly, it would just mean
that we weren’t swinging, since we wouldn’t be vocally reproducing the
attack, intonation, phrasing, nor even the sonority of the instruments!’”81
That is, her lyrics’ occasional incomprehensibility was not a shortcoming but a measure of their success. Perrin’s accomplishment was to have
devised a mode of linguistic deformation that was singularly capable of
imparting a sense of swing, incorporating vernacular argot, and echoing
the original instrumental phonology, all at the same time.
During her seven years at the helm of Les Double Six, in a leadership
role that was in the 1960s—and still is—rare for a woman in the jazz
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world, Perrin realized a creative vision that straddled some basic social
and artistic binarisms: speech and song, music and text, instrumental
and vocal production, live performance and technologically manipulated
recordings, and of course European and African American culture.82
Such marked originality always risks marginalization;83 for all that she
enjoyed some short-lived commercial success, her work would probably be more widely recognized today had she pursued musical goals
that were less idiosyncratic or within more conventionally prestigious
fields. Nonetheless, her lyrics and recordings—aside from their immediate aesthetic, expressive, and intellectual rewards—offer an instructive,
compelling illustration of postwar mainstream jazz’s global reach, traversing national, geographic, and linguistic boundaries and, conversely,
providing a dynamic site for crosscultural interaction.
In highly distinctive ways, Perrin’s vocalese aesthetic exemplifies the
practice of translation in both its intersemiotic sense and the larger metaphorical sense of cultural transmission and adaptation. Her composition
of French lyrics based on Afrodiasporic musical sources was far from
a matter of transparent mediation; it was always an inventive process
effected not merely via an implicit dialogue with American cultural traditions but also through literal, face-to-face collaboration with these traditions’ human proponents (in addition to Jones and Gillespie, Les Double
Six also recorded with the American jazz musicians Kenny Clarke and
Bud Powell).84 As a variety of recent musicological and literary scholarship has shown, the concept of translation, deployed as an interpretative
trope, can shed light on the power relations and ideological motivations
that suffuse networks of cultural diffusion; it additionally encourages,
historian Celeste Day Moore has argued, a salutary shift in “focus away
from the ‘thing’ itself (be it the word, the idea, or even commodity) and
toward the processes of creation and animation.”85 Perrin’s musical project certainly can be understood in cultural nationalist terms insofar as
it used language as a means of decisively sweeping jazz into a French
social orbit. But translational processes, at the same time, inherently
serve to establish and fortify social bonds between separate linguistic
communities; to invoke Brent Hayes Edwards’s metaphor, translation
“lubricates the turbine” of internationalism by helping ideas, thoughts,
and feelings to circulate.86 On balance, Perrin’s vocalese lyrics for Les
Double Six certainly facilitated social exchange and cohesion far more
than they hindered them. By interweaving two culturally distinct expressive systems—an African American music and a European language—
they left an imprint on both. On the one hand, her texts enriched the jazz
idiom by forging a novel, transnational synthesis between sung lyrics and
instrumental music, and on the other, jazz’s aesthetic imperatives yielded
comparably substantial transfigurations of the French language. Neither
jazz nor French was simply an object of her translational process. Each
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was furthermore a medium within which that process unfolded, and
together they provided the inspirational spark and creative method for
an artistic undertaking whose electrifying energy, whimsical humor, vital
creativity within clear parameters, and sheer communicative immediacy
embodied the transformative power of the language of music—and the
music of language.87
NOTES
I thank Luciane Beduschi, Ellie Martin, Celeste Day Moore, and Isabelle Perrin. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise.
1. Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17 (1966; New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 13.
2. “Take, for example, in French, the C of cure and of constitution.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Repeat each word and listen closely. The first is palatal, articulated on the roof of
the palate, and the second is velar, on the soft part of the palate. It’s simply a matter
of combinatorial variants due to the environment.”
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Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17, trans. Mimi Perrin (Paris: Éditions J’ai Lu, 1973), 21.
3. The classic crosscultural study of phonetic perception is Edward Sapir, “The Psychological Reality of Phonemes,” in Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and
Personality, ed. David G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
46–60; first published as “La realité psychologique des phonèmes,” Journal de psychologie
normale et pathologique 30 (1933): 247–65. For a succinct summary of this issue, see Greg
Urban, Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 33–35.
4. Perrin published French translations of several dozen books, including the memoirs
of Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones (Dizzy Gillespie and Al Fraser, To Be or Not to Bop,
trans. Mimi Perrin [Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1981]; Quincy Jones, Quincy, trans.
Mimi and Isabelle Perrin [Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 2001]). I discuss Perrin’s work as
a literary translator in “Dizzy à la Mimi: Jazz, Text, and Translation,” forthcoming in the
Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 4 (2016).
5. For instance, Perrin’s name does not appear in the index of Will Friedwald’s generally
thorough Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (1990;
New York: Da Capo Press, 1996).
6. Eric Fardet, “Le jazz et les groupes vocaux [groupes, écritures et enseignements],”
Ph.D. diss., Université Marc Bloch de Strasbourg, 2006; Fardet, “Pour une nouvelle définition du terme vocalese,” Acta Musicologica 87 (2015): 75–98; Isabelle Perrin, “L’écriture
du vocalese à la française: Traduction ou (re)création?,” unpublished paper, 2013. Fardet’s
doctoral dissertation comprehensively surveys the history and musical styles of postwar
French jazz vocal ensembles; Isabelle Perrin’s essay analyzes Mimi Perrin’s vocalese texts
and Les Double Six’s performance practices.
7. Although spelled similarly, “vocalese” is completely unrelated to the wordless vocal
compositional idiom known as “vocalise.”
8. Leonard Feather, “Feather’s Nest,” Down Beat, January 28, 1953, 17; Bilal Salaam,
“Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross: American Ventriloquism,” M.A. thesis, Rutgers University, 2013, 85. Various reasons for critical bias against vocalese singing are discussed in
Barry Keith Grant, “Purple Passages or Fiestas in Blue? Notes Toward an Aesthetic of
Vocalese,” in Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1995), 286–91.
9. Les Double Six, Les Double Six Meet Quincy Jones (Columbia SGFX 105), recorded
1959–60; Les Double Six, Swingin’ Singin’ (Phillips 600.026), recorded 1960–61; Les Double
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Six, Dizzy Gillespie et Les Double Six (Phillips 652.038 BL), recorded 1963; Les Double Six,
Les Double Six de Paris chantent Ray Charles (Phillips 652.054), recorded 1964. For two very
different perspectives on jazz that privilege improvisation and spontaneity, see Daniel
Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights,
and the Ethics of Cocreation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), xxiii and passim;
and the discussion of Hugues Panassié’s writings of the 1930s and 1940s in Jeremy F. Lane,
Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, “Race,” and Intellectuals in France, 1918–45 (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 94–105. For a critique of certain jazz critics’
emphasis on improvisation rather than musical composition and arrangement, see Alex
Stewart, Making the Scene: Contemporary New York City Big Band Jazz (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2007), 4–12. The ensemble’s name, Les Double Six, may also have been
an allusion to the early 1920s circle of French composers known collectively as Les Six.
10. Many, though not all, Anglo-American jazz scholars have tended to ignore texts written in any language other than English; even some landmark critical or historiographical
surveys, including Scott DeVeaux’s “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,”
Black American Literature Forum 25 (1991): 525–60 and John Gennari’s Blowin’ Hot and Cool:
Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) have overlooked major
untranslated non-Anglophone books such as Robert Goffin’s Aux frontières du jazz (Paris:
Éditions du Sagittaire, 1932).
11. James Moody, “I’m in the Mood for Love” (Metronome [Sweden] 15219; mx. mr29a), recorded October 12, 1949; King Pleasure, “Moody’s Mood for Love” (Prestige 924),
recorded February 19, 1952. There are earlier recorded precedents for the setting of lyrics
to recorded jazz improvisations, such as Bee Palmer’s recording of “Singin’ the Blues,”
which sets words to Frank Trumbauer’s 1927 recorded saxophone solo (Columbia; mx.
W147771), recorded January 10, 1929; and The Delta Rhythm Boys’ “Take the A Train”
(Decca 8578), recorded 1941. Several other early instances are noted in the overview of
vocalese found in Friedwald, Jazz Singing, 233–50.
12. Jacques Dieval, “Le vent vert” (Prestige 157; mx. RE058), recorded February 22, 1950;
Annie Ross, “Everytime,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “I’m Beginning to Think You Care
for Me,” and “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” The Voice of Annie Ross (Dee Gee
XP 4010), recorded April 1, 1952.
13. Annie Ross, “NEA Jazz Master Interview with Anthony Brown,” January 13–14,
2011, p. 15, http://www.smithsonianjazz.org/documents/oral_histories/Ross_Annie_
Transcript.pdf, accessed July 19, 2014; Whitney Balliett, “Absolutely Pure,” in American
Singers: Twenty-Seven Portraits in Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 221. The
original Blue Stars consisted of Christian Chevallier, Blossom Dearie, Jeanine DeWaleyne,
Roger Guérin, Christiane Legrand, Jean Mercadier, Fats Sadi, and Nadine Young (see
Leonard Feather, liner notes to the Blue Stars of France, Lullaby of Birdland and Other Hits
[Emarcy EJD 1010], recorded November 1954).
14. Les Blue Stars, Pardon My English (Mercury 7182), recorded 1957. By the time they
recorded Pardon My English, the Blue Stars’ personnel consisted of Claudine Barge, Jean
Liesse, Jean Mercardier, Mimi Perrin, Henri Tallourd, and Nadine Young; see Fardet, “Le
jazz et les groupes vocaux,” 357. For a table indicating the membership shared by the Blue
Stars, Les Double Six, and the Swingle Singers, see ibid., 258.
15. For more on Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, see Will Friedwald, A Biographical Guide to
the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 277–80. Lambert, Hendricks, and
Ross’s early reception is discussed in Lee Martin, “Changing Attitudes: The Reception of
Race and Gender in Professional Reviews of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross,” unpublished
paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for American Music, Lancaster,
PA, 2014. Separately, Hendricks and Ross are both still performing as of 2015 (Lambert
died in 1966).
16. Perrin discusses her early career in “Traducteurs au travail: Mimi Perrin,” Translitterature 18–19 (2000): 9, http://www.translitterature.fr/media/article_272.pdf, accessed
January 14, 2014.
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17. According to composer David Amram, then based in Paris, “Mimi was singing in
Paris in ’55, but she was better known at the time as a fine jazz pianist. Like Roger Guérin,
the outstanding trumpet player, Mimi could sing and loved to scat at various jam sessions”
(quoted in Marc Myers, “David Amram on Mimi Perrin,” November 28, 2010, http://
www.jazzwax.com/2010/11/sunday-wax-bits-3.html, accessed July 13, 2014).
18. Jean Tronchot, “Ce chant que jouent, cette musique que chantent Les Double Six . . .
cette bande de copains terribles,” Jazz Hot 171 (December 1961): 18. On the Blue Note club,
see Peter Pullman, Wail: The Life of Bud Powell (New York: Peter Pullman, 2012), 281–82.
19. Mimi Perrin et al., Dancing-party à Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Club National du Disque
CV 208), recorded 1956. On the album, Perrin sings “Fine and Dandy,” “Just One of Those
Things,” “We’ll Be Together Again,” and “How About You.” For full personnel and discographical details, see Claude Carrière and Maurice Cullaz, “2 x 6 = Mimi: Mimi Perrin,”
Jazz Hot 345–46 (February 1978): 57. Perrin also dubbed vocals, in English, for the song
“Sophisticated Lady” in the 1961 film Paris Blues.
20. Mimi Perrin, liner notes to Billie Holiday: Volume 1, 1933–1936 (Masters of Jazz MJCD
10), n.p. On Holiday’s performances at the Mars club in Paris, see Donald Clarke, Wishing
on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 420; and
Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York:
Free Press, 2001), 107. In the early 1970s, Perrin published an article thoroughly surveying
Holiday’s career, including a detailed analysis of Holiday’s 1952 recording of “Lover Come
Back to Me” (Mimi Perrin, “Billie,” Jazz Hot [May 1971]: 5–8, 17; reprinted in Les grandes
signatures, ed. Philippe Adler [Paris: Éditions de l’Instant / Jazz Hot, 1987], 79–87). She also
discussed Holiday at some length for an interview published in Alex Dutilh, “Derrière la
voix: Mimi Perrin / David Linx,” Jazzman 153 (January 2009): 38–39.
21. Leonard Feather, “. . . with a French Twist,” Down Beat, September 24, 1964, 20. Also
see Fardet, “Le jazz et les groupes vocaux,” 201.
22. Also singing with the group in 1959 and 1960 were Monique Guérin (Roger’s wife)
and her future husband, Louis Aldebert.
23. Quincy Jones, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (New York: Doubleday, 2001),
125.
24. Carrière and Cullaz, “2 x 6 = Mimi,” 53; I Love Quincy, Channel Four (UK) television
broadcast, dir. Eric Lipmann, 1984; Les Double Six Meet Quincy Jones (Columbia SGFX 105),
recorded 1959–60.
25. The literature on jazz in France includes Ludovic Tournès, New Orleans sur Seine:
Histoire du jazz en France (Paris: Fayard, 1999); Denis-Constant Martin and Olivier Roueff,
La France du jazz: Musique, modernité, et identité dans la première moitié du XXe siècle (Marseille:
Éditions Parenthèses, 2002); Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in
Interwar Paris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Colin Nettelbeck, Dancing with
De Beauvoir: Jazz and the French (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2004); Matthew F.
Jordan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010);
Vincent Cotro, Laurent Cugny, and Philippe Gumplowicz, eds., La catastrophe apprivoisée:
Regards sur le jazz en France (Paris: Outre Mesure, 2013); Olivier Roueff, Jazz: Les échelles du
plaisir (Paris: La Dispute, 2013); Andy Fry, Paris Blues: African American Music and French
Popular Culture, 1920–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Laurent Cugny,
Une histoire du jazz en France, tome 1: Du milieu du XIXe siècle à 1929 (Paris: Outre Mesure,
2014); Deborah Mawer, French Music and Jazz in Conversation: From Debussy to Brubeck
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Tom Perchard, After Django: Making Jazz
in Postwar France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); and Rashida K. Braggs,
Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post–World War II Paris (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2016).
26. The Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold wrote that “from the moment the
film began to talk the international power of the screen began to diminish” (Meyerhold on
Theatre, trans. Edward Braun [New York: Hill and Wang, 1969], 255; discussed in Philip
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Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. [New York: Routledge,
2008], 25).
27. Louis Armstrong, Swing That Music (1936; New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 114.
28. Jean Sablon, “Prenez garde au grand méchant loup” (Columbia DF1406; mx. CL
4663-1), recorded January 16, 1934; Ray Ventura et Ses Collégiens, “Sifflez en travaillant”
(Pathé PA1476; mx. CPT 3837-1), recorded March 4, 1938.
29. Gérard Régnier, Jazz et société sous l’occupation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 75. Also see
Jacques Chesnel, Le jazz en quarantine: 1940–1946 (Cherbourg: Éditions Isoète, 1994), 12; and
Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 142–43. Under German occupation, language even
became a political medium for concealing American jazz musicians’ national identity with
fictive French pseudonyms: Parisian radio broadcasters were known to attribute Benny
Goodman’s discs to “Robert Bonhomme” (Régnier, Jazz et société, 75).
30. Roy Eldridge, “Tu disais qu’tu m’aimais,” Roy Eldridge and His Little Jazz (Vogue LD
004), recorded October 28, 1950.
31. Richard Anthony, “Fiche le camp, Jack” (Columbia ESRF 1334), recorded 1961;
Anthony, “Écoute dans le vent” (Columbia SCRF 830), recorded 1964.
32. Brian Hyland, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” (Kapp K342x),
recorded 1960; Richard Anthony, “Itsy bitsy petit bikini,” Roly Poly (Columbia ESRF
1292), recorded 1960. See Francis Marmande, “Mimi Perrin, chanteuse, traductrice,” Le
monde, November 19, 2010, http://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2010/11/19/
mimi-perrin-chanteuse-traductrice_1442332_3382.html, accessed July 14, 2014. Perrin also
appeared in Anthony’s accompanying Scopitone film. See http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=cvKn13wxuYA, accessed July 14, 2014.
33. The Blue Stars, “La légende du pays aux oiseaux [Lullaby of Birdland]” (Barclay
EP70004), recorded November 1954.
34. An exception is their scat recording of “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” Les Blue Stars
(Barclay EP 70 027), recorded 1956.
35. “J’ai constaté que, si l’on ne prend pas la peine de respecter un français académique,
et si l’on se permet des phrases d’argot et des élisions, le français est presque mieux”
(Tronchot, “Ce chant que jouent,” 18, quoted in Fardet, “Le jazz et les groupes vocaux,”
227, and in Perrin, “L’écriture du vocalese”).
36. Ward Swingle, Swingle Singing (Delaware Water Gap, PA: Shawnee Press, 1997), 13.
In 1963 Swingle founded the Swingle Singers, whose original personnel included several
other former Double Six vocalists. See Mike Hennessey, “Double Six: Resurrection of the
Dead Poll Winners,” Melody Maker, February 19, 1966, 11; Swingle, Swingle Singing, 100;
and Fardet, “Le jazz et les groupes vocaux,” 258.
37. “Chers amateurs, avez-vous jamais pensé aux heures, journées, semaines, mois
passés dans ce fameux salon de Mimi Perrin, à répéter encore et encore afin d’obtenir le
sacro-saint Blend, cet amalgame de six voix sonnant comme une” (Monique Aldebert, De
la musique avant toute chose . . . et d’autres choses . . . [Aubais: Mémoire d’Oc Éditions, 2005],
57). See also Eddy Louiss, “Interview with François Busnel,” Le grand entretien, France
Inter Radio Broadcast, August 28, 2012, http://www.franceinter.fr/emission- le-grand
-entretien-eddy-louiss, accessed July 18, 2014.
38. “Il est vraiment très délicat pour une section rhythmique d’enregistrer
l’accompagnement d’un grand orchestre imaginaire en respectant thème, chorus et rentrée
d’orchestre, le seul point de repère étant fourni par Mimi Perrin qui allait de l’un à l’autre,
murmurant le thème et les solos suffisamment doucement pour que le micro n’intercepte
pas sa voix” (Daniel Humair, “Les Double Six,” Jazz Hot 155 [June 1960]: 16). Perrin and
recording engineer Jean-Michel Pou-Dubois offer some additional description of the recording process in the television broadcast Deux voix par tête (Central Variétés, ORTF television
broadcast, dir. Claude Fayard, March 25, 1966).
39. Humair, “Les Double Six,” 16. Members of the rhythm section also took part in the
vocalists’ studio sessions and may have rerecorded the instrumental tracks. Humair recalls
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recording with the singers, and Christiane Legrand remembers the drums being placed
in the basement while the singers were on the first floor (Fardet, “Le jazz et les groupes
vocaux,” 338). In the 1970s Perrin also described a recording process that used four vocal
tracks in addition to the rhythm section track (Carrière and Cullaz, “2 x 6 = Mimi,” 55).
40. “Lorsque vous écoutez de très près un orchestre de jazz, puisque il s’agit d’un
orchestre de jazz, il me semble que les instruments ne font pas ce qu’on appelle généralement des onomatopées, c’est à dire des ‘tabadas’ ou des ‘touboudous’ mais ils ont un phrasé,
un son particulier—qui diffère d’ailleurs avec les instruments—et j’essaie, en quelque
sorte, c’est comme une traduction d’un langage étranger, si vous voulez, et là c’est une
traduction de la musique, du son que produisent ces instruments. C’est pour ça que, par
exemple, lorsqu’il s’agit d’une section de trompette, j’essaierai de rendre les attaques de
trompette par des Ts ou des Ds” (Fayard, Deux voix par tête).
41. See, for example, Rudi Blesh, Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz, 2nd ed. (New York:
Knopf, 1958), 43; Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of the Hipster,” Partisan Review 15, no. 6
(June 1948): 724, reprinted in The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground, ed.
Glenn O’Brien (New York: Library of America, 2013), 72; LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Blues
People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Morrow, 1963), 28; and John Szwed, “The
Antiquity of the Avant-Garde: A Meditation on a Comment by Duke Ellington,” in People
Get Ready: The Future of Jazz Is Now!, ed. Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2013), 53. Vocalese lyricist and singer Jon Hendricks, asked whether
vocalese emerges out of scatting, responds, “I think yes, everything emerges out of scatting, like scatting emerges out of the solos of the jazz musicians. I think everything starts
and ends with the voice. The voice being the original instrument, the horns try to sing like
the voice” (Jon Hendricks, “NEA Jazz Master Interview with James Zimmerman,” August
17–18, 1995, p. 75, http://www.smithsonianjazz.org/oral_histories/pdf/Hendricks.pdf,
accessed July 19, 2014).
42. In a 1968 interview, Hendricks, too, described his vocalese lyricizations as a mode of
translation, but he explicitly characterized the translational process as more metaphorical
than literal, geared toward capturing the “feeling” of the music: “I call it translating, really.
. . . Not just a literal translation. I try to translate the feeling of the music lyrically” (Jon
Hendricks, interview with Les Tomkins, 1968, http://www.nationaljazzarchive.co.uk/
stories?id=199, accessed July 19, 2014).
43. “La première fois que j’ai fait répéter ces fabuleux chanteurs, j’ai constaté qu’ils
reproduisaient à merveille le phrasé, les inflexions et les nuances des instruments et j’ai dit
à Mimi: ‘Quand j’entends ton groupe, j’entends mon orchestre’” (Quincy Jones, “Préface
à l’édition française,” in Quincy, 9–10).
44. Count Basie, “Blues in Hoss’ Flat,” Chairman of the Board (Roulette 81664), recorded
March 4, 1958. Another, very different, reinterpretation of this instrumental recording as
if it were expressed through human speech can be seen in the 1961 film The Errand Boy,
starring Jerry Lewis. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS21T_p0pNA, accessed
July 24, 2014.
45. “Le début, l’introduction de ce morceau, que nous avons d’ailleurs reposé devant
vous, est fait d’attaques successives, et la phrase pour nous qui correspond est ‘Pour tout
vous dire, nous partons tenter le bon d’antan.’ Si vous écoutez ça fait des rebonds de Ts,
de Bs, de Ds, qui reproduisent ce son. Alors si vous avez fait ‘tou-goudou-goudou,’ ça n’a
aucun rapport” (Fayard, Deux voix par tête).
46. For a multimedia chart of consonants classified according to the International Phonetic Alphabet, see Eric Armstrong, “IPA Consonants,” http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/
ipa/consonants.html, accessed October 20, 2014. See also Salaam, “Lambert, Hendricks,
and Ross,” 65–70.
47. Leonard Feather, “An Explanation of Vocalese,” Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music
3 (1959): 266–67.
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48. Carrière and Cullaz, “2 x 6 = Mimi,” 56; Ralph J. Gleason, “All of Them Sing to Me:
An Interview with Jon Hendricks,” Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music 5 (1960): 45; Hendricks, “NEA Jazz Master Interview,” 76.
49. Isabelle Perrin calls attention to Mimi Perrin’s consistent use of such textual repetitions in conjunction with motivic replications; see “L’écriture du vocalese.”
50. The first line of Perrin’s text corresponds to a short introductory phrase in Quincy
Jones’s arrangement (the melody and lyrics of this line are reproduced in Swingle, Swingle
Singing, 14). Hendricks’s version, which is not based on Jones’s arrangement, has no corresponding phrase, so the first line of Hendricks’s text corresponds to the second line of
Perrin’s.
51. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 162.
52. Carrière and Cullaz, “2 x 6 = Mimi,” 53–54.
53. Discussed in Fardet, “Pour une nouvelle définition,” 88, 93; and in Perrin, “L’écriture
du vocalese.”
54. “Sur l’arrangement de Quincy Jones, je fredonnais ‘ta pada pada pada pa.’ Il fallait
que le premier mot soit ‘ta pa,’ d’où ‘t’as pas peur de t’évader d’là.’ Je n’aurai pas pu mettre
‘viens chez moi,’ car on n’aurait pas attaqué” (Tronchot, “Ce chant que jouent,” 17, quoted
in Perrin, “L’écriture du vocalese”).
55. Quincy Jones, “Moanin’,” The Birth of a Band (Mercury SR60129), recorded June 16,
1959.
56. Hendricks, “NEA Jazz Master Interview,” 79. On Hendricks’s family background,
see Lee Ellen Martin, “Jon Hendricks, Father of Vocalese: A Toledo Story,” M.M. thesis,
University of Toledo, 2010, 22 and passim.
57. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, “Moanin’,” Moanin’ (Blue Note 4003), recorded
October 30, 1958.
58. Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in Theories of Translation: An
Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 145.
59. Luis d’Antin van Rooten, Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames: The d’Antin Manuscript (New
York: Grossman, 1967), n.p. (English translation in the original). Also see David Bellos,
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Faber and
Faber, 2011), 35.
60. Milton L. Stewart, “Stylistic Environment and the Scat Singing Styles of Ella Fitzgerald
and Sarah Vaughan,” Jazzforschung 19 (1987): 62; William R. Bauer, Open the Door: The Life
and Music of Betty Carter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 32–33; Thomas
Brothers, Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 213.
61. See, especially, Les Double Six, Dizzy Gillespie et Les Double Six (discussed in Givan,
“Dizzy à la Mimi”).
62. “Les quatre extra-terrestres,” Deux voix par tête.
63. Hendricks, “NEA Jazz Master Interview,” 51–53; Martin, “Jon Hendricks, Father of
Vocalese,” 68–69.
64. Mimi Perrin, “Mimi Thanks Readers,” Down Beat, January 14, 1965, 6; Leonard
Feather, “Double Six of Paris: Swingin’ Singin’,” Down Beat, September 27, 1962, 36–37; John
S. Wilson, “Town Hall Echoes with Exuberance of Woody Herman,” New York Times, May
11, 1964, 38; Tronchot, “Ce chant que jouent,” 18–19; Feather, “. . . with a French Twist,”
21.
65. Robert G. O’Meally, liner notes to The Jazz Singers (Smithsonian Recordings RD 113),
98. Another literature scholar, Brent Hayes Edwards, characterizes the faux-Chinese and
faux-Yiddish comic vocals of swing-era artists such as Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard
as a “mode of performing alterity” (“Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat,” Critical
Inquiry 28, no. 3 [2002]: 627).
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66. Louis Armstrong, “Letter to Chris Clufetos,” February 6, 1954. http://www.christies
.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=2353445, accessed July 24, 2014, quoted in
John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (1997; New York: Da Capo
Press, 1998), vii.
67. Edwards, “Louis Armstrong,” 626–27; Louis Armstrong, “Sweet Sue (Just You)”
(Victor 24321), recorded April 26, 1933.
68. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 69, 72, 76.
69. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, “Observations sur l’art de traduire,” in Mélanges de littérature, d’histoire, et de philosophie (Amsterdam: Chatelain, 1763), 3:18, quoted and translated in
Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, 45. Also see Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different
Methods of Translating,” trans. Waltraud Bartscht, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology
of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992), 44; and Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Introduction to Agamemnon,”
trans. Sharon Sloan, in Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, 56–57.
70. Olivier Bourderionnet, Swing Troubadours: Brassens, Vian, Gainsbourg: Les trente glorieuses en 33 tours (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 2011), 43–70.
71. Mimi Perrin, “Interview with Daniel Zwerdling,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, April 15, 1999, transcript, http://search.proquest.com.lib2.skidmore.edu:2048/
docview/190033085/fulltext/13D22D6F42D8F5FB97/10?accountid=13894, accessed May
30, 2013.
72. Isabelle Perrin, “L’écriture du vocalese.”
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Fardet, “Pour une nouvelle définition,” 96. Also discussed in Perrin, “L’écriture du
vocalese.”
76. Jon Hendricks made use of elisions as well, though not nearly to the same extent as
Perrin. See Hendricks, “NEA Jazz Master Interview,” 77–78.
77. Compare, for instance, Dizzy Gillespie and Gil Fuller’s scat composition “Ool-YaKoo” (Victor 20-2878), recorded December 30, 1947.
78. Quincy Jones, “Walkin’,” This Is How I Feel about Jazz (ABC Paramount 149), recorded
September 29, 1956.
79. See, for example, Mirjam Broersma and Kees de Bot, “Triggered Codeswitching: A
Corpus-Based Evaluation of the Original Triggering Hypothesis and a New Alternative,”
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 9, no. 1 (2006): 1–13; Mirjam Broersma, “Triggered
Codeswitching Between Cognate Languages,” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12,
no. 4 (2009): 447–62; Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second
Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 201–3; and Gerrit Jan Kootstra, Janet G.
Van Hell, and Ton Dijkstra, “Priming of Code-Switches in Sentences: The Role of Lexical
Repetition, Cognates, and Language Proficiency,” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15,
no. 4 (2012): 797–819.
80. “auditeurs superficiels, distraits ou peu musiciens” (Carrière and Cullaz, “2 x 6 =
Mimi,” 54).
81. “Je leur répondais: ‘Bien sûr, car si vous compreniez très distinctement chaque parole,
cela voudrait simplement dire que nous ne swinguons pas, car nous ne reproduirions
vocalement ni l’attaque, ni l’intonation, ni le phrase, ni même la sonorité de l’instrument
ou des instruments!’” (ibid.).
82. For a brief discussion of women’s marginalization in the postwar French jazz world,
see Perchard, After Django, 15–17.
83. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 25th anniversary ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008), 233–46.
84. Clarke played on Les Double Six’s debut disc, and both he and Powell appeared on
the group’s album with Dizzy Gillespie.
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85. Celeste Day Moore, “Race in Translation: Producing, Performing, and Selling AfricanAmerican Music in Greater France, 1944–74,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2014,
25. For a brief discussion of the potential for interdisciplinary synergy between the fields
of translation studies and musicology, see Brigid Cohen, “Working on the Boundaries:
Translation Studies, National Narratives, and Robert Lachmann in Jerusalem,” Journal of
the American Musicological Society 65, no. 2 (2012): 830–34.
86. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of
Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 9.
87. As Perrin herself wrote, “Don’t we often say that a language ‘sings’ or that a music
‘speaks’?” (Ne dit-on pas, souvent d’une langue qu’elle “chante,” et d’une musique qu’elle
“parle”?; “Improviser comme les jazzmen,” in Actes des deuxièmes assises de la traduction
littéraire [Arles 1985], ed. Jean Gattegno, Michel Pezet, and Jean-Pierre Camoin [Paris: Actes
Sud, 1986], 124).
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