Dizzy à la Mimi: Jazz, Text, and Translation

Transcription

Forthcoming in the Journal of the Society for American Music
Dizzy à la Mimi: Jazz, Text, and Translation
BENJAMIN GIVAN
W
hen jazz circulates across cultural, national, and geographic boundaries,
interesting things often happen. From its beginnings as an American
Afrodiasporic art form, the music has grown to encompass a vast
worldwide array of subidioms, and while some of its original sociopolitical functions
and stylistic elements endure in new contexts, others are decidedly altered or
reinterpreted.1 Inevitably, a great deal is lost—and much is gained—in translation.
Indeed, the metaphor of translation, along with various concepts and methodological
strategies drawn from the field of translation studies, has lately offered a small
number of jazz scholars, such as historian Celeste Day Moore and musicologist
Brigid Cohen, enlightening ways of understanding the music’s international diffusion
and transformation.2 This recent research exemplifies a broader interdisciplinary
convergence of musicology, literary criticism, and translation studies.3
Yet much more remains to be said about jazz’s globalization from a translational
perspective. In this regard, it is hard to imagine a more inviting place to begin than
the collaborative relationship between the French singer, lyricist, and translator Mimi
For their advice and support, I thank Luciane Beduschi, Wolfram Knauer, Ellie Martin, Celeste
Day Moore, and Isabelle Perrin.
1 Among the many publications dealing with jazz from a global perspective are E. Taylor Atkins,
“Toward a Global History of Jazz,” in Jazz Planet, ed. E. Taylor Atkins (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2003), xi–xxvii; Luca Cerchiari, “Introduction,” in Eurojazzland: Jazz and European Sources,
Dynamics, and Contexts, ed. Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, and Franz Kerschbaumer (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 2012), vii–xviii; and Stuart Nicholson, Jazz and Culture in a Global Age
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2014).
2 Celeste Day Moore, “Race in Translation: Producing, Performing, and Selling African-American
Music in Greater France, 1944–74,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 2014; idem, “Une Passerelle:
Sim Copans et la Traduction de la Musique Afro-Américaine,” trans. Vincent Cotro, in La Catastrophe
Apprivoisée: Regards sur le Jazz en France, ed. Vincent Cotro, Laurent Cugny, and Philippe Gumplowicz
(Paris: Outre Mesure, 2013), 151–55; Brigid Cohen, “Diasporic Dialogues in Mid-Century New York:
Stefan Wolpe, George Russell, Hannah Arendt, and the Historiography of Displacement,” Journal of
the Society for American Music 6/2 (2012): 143–73. Also see Brigid Cohen, “Boundary Situations:
Translation and Agency in Wolpe’s Modernism,” Contemporary Music Review 27/2–3 (2008): 323–41;
idem, “Introduction: Toward a Historiography of Modernism in Migration,” in Stefan Wolpe and the
Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–37; and idem, “Working on
the Boundaries: Translation Studies, National Narratives, and Robert Lachmann in Jerusalem,” Journal
of the American Musicological Society 65/3 (2012): 830–34. On translation studies as an academic field, see
Susan Bennett, Translation Studies, 4th edition (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Lawrence Venuti,
“Introduction,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd edition, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York:
Routledge, 2012), 1–9.
3 See, for example, the recent essay collection Music, Text, and Translation, ed. Helen Julia Minors
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013); and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation,
and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
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GIVAN
Perrin (1926–2010) and the African American jazz trumpeter and composer Dizzy
Gillespie (1917–93). These two creative artists crossed paths in two different fields:
they recorded a jazz album together in the early 1960s and Perrin translated
Gillespie’s memoir into French almost twenty years later. Their partnership
therefore not only raises translational questions of language, meaning, and cultural
exchange within each field independently, but also involves direct intersections
between music and literature. Needless to say, Gillespie, a seminal influence on
bebop and Latin jazz, is by far the better known of the pair. The trumpeter’s musical
worldview tended to be broadly internationalist, with an especially robust strain of
pan-Africanism evinced by his lifelong involvement with Afro-Cuban music and
musicians.4 Still, several of his important career landmarks took place in France. On
his first tour abroad, at the age of nineteen in 1937, he spent six weeks in Paris with
Teddy Hill’s Orchestra, and over the years he returned to the city many times,
including a 1989 visit for a duo concert with drummer Max Roach, released on a
commercial album, that was an artistic high point of his late career.5 His most
consequential appearances in the French capital were undoubtedly three big band
concerts that he gave at the Salle Pleyel in 1948, today regarded as pivotal events
marking modern jazz’s arrival in Western Europe.6
However, Mimi Perrin’s legacy, rather than Gillespie’s, is at the heart of the
present study. A graduate of the Sorbonne with a degree in English literature, Perrin
first emerged on Paris’s jazz scene during the 1950s, as both a pianist and a singer.7
In 1959, she experienced an epiphany upon hearing Lambert, Hendricks and Ross’s
Sing a Song of Basie, an album whose overdubbed, lyricized vocal recreations of Count
Basie’s big-band charts typified the art of “vocalese.”8 Setting out to emulate the
4 On Gillespie and internationalism, see Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, To Be, or Not... To Bop
(New York: Doubleday, 1979), 413–27; Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz
Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 31–43 and 235–40;
Lisa E. Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2009), 46–54; Alyn Shipton, Groovin’ High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 357–62; and Donald L. Maggin, Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie
(New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 366–76. On Gillespie and Afro-Cuban Music, see Gillespie and
Fraser, To Be, or Not... To Bop, 317–25; Jairo Moreno, “Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz: Difference,
Modernity, and the Black Caribbean,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103/1 (2004): 81–99; and Leonardo
Acosta, Cubano Be Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba, trans. Daniel S. Whitesell
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 110–15.
5 Gillespie and Fraser, To Be, or Not... To Bop, 73–77; Shipton, Groovin’ High, 38–41, 359–60; Max
Roach and Dizzy Gillespie, Paris 1989 (A & M 396 404-2), rec. March 23, 1989.
6 Gillespie and Fraser, To Be, or Not... To Bop, 326–36; Mike Hennessey, Klook: The Story of Kenny
Clarke (London: Quartet Books, 1990), 69–73; Shipton, Groovin’ High, 202–7.
7 Perrin discusses her early career in Mimi Perrin, “Traducteurs au Travail,” Translittérature 18–19
(2000): 9–15; http://www.translitterature.fr/media/article_272.pdf (accessed March 17, 2015).
8 Dave Lambert, John Hendricks, and Annie Ross, Sing a Song of Basie (ABC-Paramount ABC
223), rec. August–November, 1957. The term “vocalese” was invented by the critic Leonard Feather,
in 1953, to describe the practice of “tak[ing] a jazz solo already established through an improvisation
Dizzy à la Mimi
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American group, she organized an ensemble of six singers, Les Double Six, for
whom she composed a repertoire of original French vocalese texts based on
American jazz recordings.9 Their first album was devoted to music by the American
Quincy Jones, then based in France, who attended some of their initial rehearsals.10
Les Double Six toured internationally for seven years and recorded three more
albums—all with multiple vocal overdubs—including Dizzy Gillespie and the Double
Six of Paris, featuring the trumpeter himself.11 But in 1966 Perrin fell ill and was
compelled to disband the group and abandon her professional musical career
(though she remained involved with music as a teacher, occasional writer, and
collaborator on sporadic creative projects).12 She thereafter pursued a new vocation
as a literary translator. Over the next forty years, she produced French editions of
several dozen English-language books, including many science fiction and spy novels
as well as several memoirs and biographies of jazz musicians.13
Translation was a constant, core aesthetic principle for Perrin, not merely in her
literary occupation, but even in her musical work, where it functioned as a
conceptual heuristic, as idiosyncratic as it was productive. Her translational
philosophy was at all times highly creative: whether dealing with Anglophone
literature or inventing vocalese lyrics, she keenly explored the imaginative
possibilities that arose from sweeping art works into a new cultural orbit defined by
the use of the French language. Her decisions about which elements of Gillespie’s
musical compositions, and of his memoir’s text, to transmit as faithfully as possible,
which to transform, and which to eliminate, naturally reflect her own individual
convictions and dispositions. They also speak to larger issues concerning how texts
on records ... and recreat[ing] this solo, adding lyrics to it” (“Feather’s Nest,” Down Beat, January 28,
1953, 17).
9 For a discussion of Les Double Six’s working methods, see Daniel Humair, “Les Double Six,”
Jazz Hot 155 (June 1960): 16–18.
10 Quincy Jones, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 125; Les
Double Six, Les Double Six Rencontrent Quincy Jones (Columbia SGXF 105), rec. 1959–60.
11 A discography appears in Claude Carrière and Maurice Cullaz, “2 X 6 = Mimi,” Jazz Hot 345–
46 (February 1978): 57–58.
12 After retiring from performing, Perrin occasionally taught masterclasses at the Centre
d’Informations Musicales in Paris. Her published writings on jazz include “Billie,” Jazz Hot 272 (May
1971): 5–8, 17; reprinted in Les Grandes Signatures, ed. Philippe Adler (Paris: Éditions de l’Instant/Jazz
Hot, 1987), 79–87; and liner notes for Billie Holiday: Volume 1, 1933–1936 (Masters of Jazz MJCD 10).
13 They include Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17, trans. Mimi Perrin (Paris: Éditions J’ai Lu, 1973);
Dean R. Koontz, La Semence du Demon, trans. Mimi Perrin (Paris: Éditions Opta, 1974); John Le Carré,
Le Constance du Jardinier, trans. Mimi Perrin and Isabelle Perrin (Paris: Seuil, 2001); Nina Simone and
Simon Cleary, Ne Me Quittez Pas: Mémoires, trans. Mimi Perrin (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1992);
Ross Russell, Bird: La Vie de Charlie Parker, trans. Mimi Perrin (Paris: Filipacchi, 1980); Eric Nisenson,
Round About Midnight: Un Portrait de Miles Davis, trans. Mimi Perrin (Paris: Denoël, 1983); Dizzy
Gillespie and Al Fraser, Dizzy Gillespie: To Be Or Not To Bop, trans. Mimi Perrin (Paris: Presses de la
Renaissance, 1981); and Quincy Jones, Quincy, trans. Mimi Perrin and Isabelle Perrin (Paris: Laffont,
2003). For an extensive list of Perrin’s published translations, see “Perrin, Mimi (1926–2010)”
(http://www.idref.fr/027066916; accessed April 2, 2015).
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GIVAN
and music may be variously understood and transformed by different linguistic
communities, raising questions about which aspects of expressive culture are—or, at
least, can potentially be made—accessible to socially remote audiences, and which
elements unavoidably remain elusive.14 Perrin’s goals and strategies in translating
Gillespie’s memoir and in lyricizing his compositions can, in both instances, only be
fully comprehended by first taking stock of her habitual working methods in general
and then considering, in that light, how she dealt with the trumpeter’s works in
particular. Her oeuvre as a whole, encompassing both jazz and literature, presents
many original, creative solutions to complex, intertwined, crosscultural problems of
sound, music, and meaning. It has much to teach us.
Mimi Perrin as Literary Translator: Text, Dialect, and
Improvisation
Perrin’s musical sensibility shaped her work as a literary translator. Three years
before completing her translation of Gillespie’s memoir, she described to an
interviewer how she had recently set about transforming an English poem into
French, comparing her process to the way she wrote jazz vocal lyrics. “Just like with
the Double Six, I tried to find an equivalence of sound, of sonorities,” she explained.
“I felt the balance, the rhythm, the equilibrium of the phrases. I identified the ‘key
points,’ the main consonants, emphases, and intonations that I needed to find for my
French translation—sonorities, emphases, and syllables that sounded similar to the
corresponding English text.”15 Analogies between poetry and music are, of course, a
longstanding theme in Western aesthetics,16 yet Perrin’s literary musicality involved
more than just a close attunement to sonority and rhythm and a desire to reproduce
the sounds of consonants, emphasis, and intonation. In a 1986 essay entitled
“Improviser Comme Les Jazzmen” [“Improvising Like Jazzmen”], she compared her
14 A recent monograph addressing the inevitability of mistranslation in a global literary context is
Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013). Also see
Barbara Cassin, “Introduction,” trans. Michael Wood, in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical
Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2014), xvii–xx; and Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 22.
15 “Ces phrases écrites, je les entendais dans ma tête, et dans ce cas, comme dans celui des
Double-Six, je cherchais à trouver une équivalence de sons, de sonorités. Dans les deux cas, il me
fallait reproduire des sonorités correspondant à d’autres sonorités, à des paroles et à des phrases. Je
me récitais inlassablement cette strophe du poème en anglais. Je sentais le balancement, le rhythme,
l’équilibre des phrases. Je repérais les ‘points,’ les consonnes principales, les accentuations, les
intonations pour retrouver dans ma traduction en français, des sonorités correspondantes, des
accentuations, des syllabes sonnant semblablement et correspondant au text anglais” (Carrière and
Cullaz, “2 X 6 = Mimi,” 56).
16 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1953), 88–94.
Dizzy à la Mimi
5
prose translation method to jazz improvisation in the sense that she exercised
considerable interpretive latitude, treating English texts as simply a point of
departure, loosely analogous to a jazz musician’s chord changes.17
One literary phenomenon that not only permits but requires translators to use a
great deal of discretion is written dialogue featuring oral dialect. Dialect, as Perrin
was very much aware, poses especially thorny problems because it is both literally
impossible to preserve linguistically in a new language and inherently embedded in a
specific cultural context. A typical case in point is the African American sociolect
commonly known as “black American English”—which pervades Gillespie’s
memoir. Corpus-based studies have shown that translated texts typically observe
standard grammatical rules more consistently than does literature originally written in
the target language, perhaps because translators tend to be more intent than other
writers on avoiding oral locutions. 18 Thus, more often than not, any dialect
occurring in an original text becomes normalized in translation.19 A characteristic
example from classic literature is Charles Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century edition of
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Gold-Bug, which translates the English text’s
stereotypical antebellum African American dialect into crisp, standard French. 20
Dialogue by Poe such as “And dis all cum ob de goole-bug! de putty goole-bug!”21
becomes, in the hands of Baudelaire, “Et tout cela vient du scarabée d’or? Le joli
scarabée d’or!”22 [“And all this comes from the golden beetle? The pretty golden
beetle!”].
Perrin treated black American dialect rather differently. Showing a sensitivity to
the texture and tone of African American speech as well as its literal meanings, she
sometimes intentionally deviated from French linguistic norms in order to imbue her
translated texts with a sense of otherness. Her transformative approach is illustrated
especially clearly by her translation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, an epistolary
novel written in the rural southern African American speech patterns of a bygone
Mimi Perrin, “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), 123.
18 David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York:
Faber and Faber, 2011), 191–94.
19 Isabelle Perrin notes that indelicate attempts to preserve features of dialect in translation can
risk lapsing into absurdity (L’Anglais: Comment Traduire? [Paris: Hachette Supérieur, 2000], 64).
20 Ineke Wallaert, “The Translation of Sociolects: A Paradigm of Ideological Issues in
Translation?,” in Language across Boundaries, ed. Janet Cotterill and Anne Ife (London: Continuum,
2001), 171–84. Also see Apter, Against World Literature, 306–9; and Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?,
194. For a more nuanced perspective on Baudelaire’s translation see Ineke Wallaert, “Writing
Foreign: The Paradoxes of Baudelaire’s Neologizing Strategies in His Translations of Poe,” Palimpsestes
25 (2012): 69–92; http://palimpsestes.revues.org/1049 (accessed March 13, 2015).
21 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug,” in The Gold-Bug and Other Tales (New York: Dover, 1991),
94.
22 Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes de Charles Baudelaire: Traductions: Histoires Extraordinaires par
Edgar Poe (Paris: Conard, 1932), 105–6.
17
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GIVAN
era. The book’s French version, La Couleur Pourpre, which was published in 1984,
hews closely to the original’s overall trajectory and narrative content; at the same
time, Perrin chose to inflect its prose dialogue with oral locutions characteristic of
provincial French dialect.23 In her 1986 essay, she elucidated how she dealt with
Walker’s text, demonstrating that, for instance, she conveyed the literary tone of the
character Celie’s line “I ast him to take me instead of Nettie while our new mammy
sick”24 with the French wording “J’ai dit au père qu’il avait qu’à me prendre au lieu
de Nettie, tant que notre nouvelle maman elle est malade”25 [‘I said to father that he
just had to take me instead of Nettie while our new mom, she is sick’]. According to
Perrin:
My word-for-word was “je lui ai demandé de me prendre” [“I asked him to take
me”], but my French Celie can’t speak this way. In English, the tone is given by
“ast” and the absence of “is” at the end of the phrase. So I compensated by a
heavier turn of phrase—“qu’il avait qu’à” [“that he just had to”], by Gresset’s
favorite anaphora,26 and by “au père” [i.e “I said to father that” rather than “I asked
him”] to regionalize it.27
Perrin also infused the French text with linguistic elisions and contractions—if less
plentifully than did Walker in the original—that approximated the American novel’s
vernacular tone: where the English-language version contains words with dropped
syllables and consonants such as “cause” and “somethin,” the corresponding
translation uses contractions such as “p’têt” and “j’crois” (from “peut-être” [maybe]
and “je crois” [I believe]).28 In these instances, written literary conventions yield to
the aural logic of humanly performed sound.
23 Perrin writes, “Here are my black Americans transplanted right in the middle of Charentes (or
Poitou, why not?)!” [“Voilà mes Noirs américains transplantés en plein milieu des Charentes (ou du
Poitou, pourquoi pas?)!”] (“Improviser Comme les Jazzmen,” 123).
24 Alice Walker, The Color Purple, Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1992 [1982]), 7.
25 Alice Walker, La Couleur Pourpre, trans. Mimi Perrin (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1984), 15.
The French edition of Walker’s novel was originally issued under the title Cher Bon Dieu [Dear God].
26 The references are to the translator Michel Gresset, whom Perrin discusses earlier in her essay,
and to the linguistic device of anaphora, here deployed by means of the pronoun “il” [he] referring to
the preceding “père” [father].
27 “J’ai traduit ‘I ast him to take me instead of Nettie while our new mammy sick’ par ‘J’ai dit au
père qu’il avait qu’à me prendre au lieu de Nettie, tant que notre nouvelle maman elle est malade.’
Mon mot à mot était ‘je lui ai demandé de me prendre,’ mais ma Celie française ne peut pas parler
ainsi. En anglais, grâce au ‘ast’ et à l’absence de ‘is’ en fin de phrase, le ton est donné. Donc j’ai
compensé par une tournure plus lourde ‘qu’il avait qu’à,’ par l’anaphore chère au sieur Gresset, et par
‘au père’ pour faire ‘terroir’” (Perrin, “Improviser Comme Les Jazzmen,” 123).
28 Rosemarie Fournier-Guillemette, “Traduction et Interprétation: De la Traduction du
Vernaculaire Noir Américain Chez Hurston, Walker et Sapphire,” M.A. thesis, University of Quebec,
2011, 76 (http://www.archipel.uqam.ca/3961/1/M11917.pdf; accessed August 16, 2014).
Dizzy à la Mimi
7
Yet the French translation of The Color Purple still inevitably lacks the original’s
full depth of African American cultural resonance. Some translation scholars have
gone so far as to accuse Perrin of ethnocentrism for taking liberties with aspects of
the novel that they consider intrinsic to its expressive power in confronting the
brutal legacy of black Americans’ social oppression.29 Though such criticisms are
objectively valid to the extent that, by employing French dialect, her translation
culturally reorients the text, they tend to gloss over, rather than forthrightly
acknowledge, literary translation’s inherent logistical complexities and philosophical
tensions. The French version retains the book’s American setting, conveyed through
direct references to American place names, as well as occasional descriptions of racial
physiognomy and black cultural practices; it unequivocally remains a novel rooted in
African American history.30 Yet Perrin still faced the reality that some of the original
English version’s vernacularisms are simply untranslatable—they cannot be
transmitted or paralleled in French, and no amount of literary creativity or ingenuity
on her part could ever truly compensate for their loss.31 Dizzy Gillespie’s memoir
presented her with the same dilemma.
To Be or Not... to Bop: Translating Jive
Gillespie’s To Be, Or Not... To Bop is one of the longest autobiographies by a major
jazz musician.32 Completed in 1979 in collaboration with the trumpeter’s longtime
friend, historian Al Fraser, the five-hundred–page book interweaves its primary firstperson narrative with transcribed interviews quoting dozens of the trumpeter’s social
Bernard Vidal, “Le Vernaculaire Noir Américain: Ses Enjeux pour la Traduction Envisagés à
Travers Deux Oeuvres d’Écrivains Noires, Zora Neale Hurston et Alice Walker,” Érudit 7/2 (1994):
171 (http://www.erudit.org/revue/ttr/1994/v7/n2/037185ar.pdf; accessed August 16, 2014);
Chantal Gagnon, “La Traduction des Textes Womanist: Le Cas de La Couleur Pourpre D’Alice
Walker,” in Actes des XVes Journées de Linguistique, ed. Marie-Josée Goulet (Quebec: Centre International
de
Recherche
sur
Les
Activités
Langagières,
2001),
13–22
(http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED473043.pdf; accessed August 16, 2014). See also FournierGuillemette, “Traduction et Interprétation,” 72–73; and Tessa Ashlin Nunn, “Hearing the Ancestors’
Voices in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Mimi Perrin’s Translation La Couleur Pourpre,” M.A.
thesis, Université de Toulouse II—Le Mirail, 2013.
30 These include references to Macon, Georgia, and Monticello, Georgia (Walker, The Color Purple,
1–3; Walker, La Couleur Pourpre, trans. Perrin, 9–11); and descriptions of characters’ appearances, such
as “Under all that powder her face black as Harpo” (Walker, The Color Purple, 44), which is translated
as “Sous sa couche de poudre son visage est aussi noir qu’Harpo” (Walker, La Couleur Pourpre, trans.
Perrin, 58).
31 For example “Lord, I wants to go so bad” (Walker, The Color Purple, 25) is translated by Perrin
as “Seigneur, j’ai si envie d’y aller” [“Lord, I have such a desire to go there”] (Walker, La Couleur
Pourpre, trans. Perrin, 36); “How us gon do this? I ast Shug” (Walker, The Color Purple, 121) is
translated as “Comment on va faire? je demande à Shug” [“How are we going to do it? I ask Shug”]
(Walker, La Couleur Pourpre, trans. Perrin, 143).
32 Gillespie and Fraser, To Be, Or Not... To Bop.
29
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GIVAN
intimates and professional colleagues, as well as occasional conversational dialogues
between Gillespie and other musicians.33 “While it is a personal story (Dizzy’s), it is
also a piece of history which has been approached scientifically,” Fraser explained at
the time of the book’s publication. “What I tried to do in terms of a literary angle
was to give Diz a Big Band of all his major relatives, friends, and associates, who
each come in and speak a solo regarding him, while Dizzy plays the narrative.”34 As
an overtly communal text, the book is somewhat redolent of the sort of “eclectic
narrative form” that Robert Stepto has identified in nineteenth-century African
American slave narratives;35 it also calls to mind late-twentieth-century modes of
ethnography that interweave many speakers’ words without imposing a single unified
interpretive perspective.36 Its finished state inevitably reflects the editorial decisions
of its transcriber and compiler, Fraser, not to mention its publisher’s input.37 Still,
Gillespie’s own authorial presence, however heavily mediated, dominates the entire
memoir. The story is his.
In a preface to the book’s French edition, Gillespie (who was not fluent in
French) acknowledges the considerable challenges his multivoiced work posed to its
translator.38 Recalling that he personally invited Perrin to undertake the translation,
on account of their long friendship and his high regard for her musicianship, the
trumpeter drolly muses that “as she is equally versed in two languages,
Shakespeare’s... and my own, I thought that this project would give us the pleasure
of ‘being and bopping’ together, one more time.”39 Invoking the book’s titular play 33 Ibid., xviii. For more on the composition and reception of Gillespie’s memoir, see Maggin,
Dizzy, 353.
34 “Cheyney Prof. Writes Dizzy Gillespie Biography,” New Pittsburgh Courier, October 13, 1979, 5.
35 Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, 2nd edition (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), 3–4; discussed in William H. Kenney, III, “Negotiating the Color
Line: Louis Armstrong’s Autobiographies,” in Jazz in Mind: Essays on the History and Meanings of Jazz,
ed. Reginald T. Buckner and Steven Weiland (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 40. See
also Daniel Stein, Music is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2012), 76–77.
36 Discussed in James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986), 12. See also Tom Perchard, “Writing Jazz Biography: Race, Research, and Narrative
Representation,” Popular Music History 2/2 (2007): 137.
37 On questions of collaborative authorship of jazz musicians’ autobiographies, see Christopher
Harlos, “Jazz Autobiography: Theory, Practice, Politics,” in Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 131–66; Ajay Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz,
Dissonance, and Critical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2000), 89–116; and Ken Prouty, “Plagiarizing
Your Own Autobiography, and Other Strange Tales: Miles Davis, Jazz Discourse, and the Aesthetic
of Silence,” Jazz Research Journal 4/1 (2010): 21–23.
38 Perrin states that Gillespie did not speak French with any functional fluency. See Claude
Carrière, “Son Amie Raconte: To Dizzy with Love, par Mimi Perrin,” Jazzman 163 (February 1993):
11.
39 “Comme elle est également versée dans deux langues, celle de Shakespeare... et la mienne, j’ai
pensé que ce travail nous donnerait le plaisir d’« être et de bopper » ensemble, une fois de plus”
Dizzy à la Mimi
9
on-words, which Perrin opted to retain untranslated, he wryly counterposes his own
language against the Bard’s Elizabethan English. The distinctions between different
English linguistic idioms—oral and written, “orthodox” and vernacular—indeed
constitute one of the book’s chief translational challenges because its prevailing
authorial narrative, with a relatively “standard” grammar and lexicon, continually
alternates with the African American spoken parlance, jive vocabulary, and
occasional lighthearted profanity of its quoted dialogue and interview transcripts.40
These contrasting linguistic registers also roughly correlate with two different ways
that Gillespie’s book signifies as a markedly African American text: its “standard”
English narrative voice mainly tends to do so denotatively, via its relatively
straightforward semantic content, while its quoted speech—in transcribed interviews
and recounted dialogue—also conveys such meanings connotatively, through the
language’s associative sociocultural implications.41
Factually speaking, Perrin’s translation is extremely faithful to Gillespie’s story,
mirroring the English version chapter by chapter as it traces the trumpeter’s life from
his South Carolina upbringing through his globetrotting career as an internationally
renowned artist. Like the original, the French text is irreducibly a memoir of the
African American experience, candidly discussing matters such as the misgivings that
Gillespie’s generation of jazz musicians felt about Louis Armstrong’s “plantation
image”42 (“bon Noir de plantations”43). But on the infrequent occasions where the
translation condenses or eliminates short portions of the text, the excised passages
tend to contain direct American cultural references or unmistakable African
(Gillespie and Fraser, Dizzy Gillespie: To Be Or Not To Bop, trans. Perrin, 13). According to Perrin,
Gillespie asked his American editor to require that Perrin be designated his book’s translator. See
Carrière, “Son Amie Raconte,” 11.
40 In an early review, the writer Claude Brown deemed the trumpeter’s vernacularisms an
“especially precious” element of the memoir (“In Love with the Trumpet,” The New York Times Book
Review, February 3, 1980, 4).
41 On the connotative function of African American oral language, see Jean-Paul Levet, Talkin’
That Talk: Le Langage du Blues, du Jazz, et du Rap: Dictionnaire Anthologique et Encyclopédique (Paris: Outre
Mesure, 2010), 16–17. I use the terms “denotative” and “connotative” according to everyday usage,
rather than in the more restrictive semiotic sense of primary codes and subcodes proposed in
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 54–57. For
instance, André Martinet writes that the term “denotation” is generally taken to mean either a word’s
dictionary definition or the object to which it refers, whereas “connotations” are “all that the term can
evoke, suggest, excite, [and] imply clearly or vaguely” [“tout ce que ce terme peut évoquer, suggérer,
exciter, impliquer de façon nette ou vague”] (“Connotations, Poésie et Culture,” in To Honor Roman
Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth
Birthday, Vol. 2 [The Hague: Mouton, 1967], 1290). Also see Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and
Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990), 22–24.
42 Gillespie and Fraser, To Be, Or Not... To Bop, 295.
43 Gillespie and Fraser, Dizzy Gillespie: To Be Or Not To Bop, trans. Perrin, 276.
10
GIVAN
American vernacular language.44 For instance, Perrin deletes two paragraphs where
Gillespie describes the salutary influence of his wife, Lorraine, as a check on his
ego.45 The trumpeter writes that he:
came home one day and told Lorraine, “Hey I just came through Harlem, and, boy,
those people up there really dig me. One thing about me, Lorraine, you have a
husband who has that ‘common touch.’”
“You’re right,” Lorraine said. “You’re one of the commonest muthafuckas I ever
saw in my life.”46
This omitted exchange would not have been easy to translate for French readers.
Cultural references, such as the mention of Harlem, carry implications—in this case,
uptown Manhattan’s largely African American population (“those people up
there”)—that are essential to the text’s meaning and that American audiences are
more likely than non-Americans to infer tacitly, by virtue of everyday familiarity.
Equally difficult to translate are the text’s oral colloquialisms—quoted words such as
“boy” and “dig”—as well as its phonetically-spelled jovial profanity
(“muthafuckas”47), associated with mid-century American jazz musicians’ jive argot.48
The entire anecdote hinges on the multivalent adjective “common,” employed as
both a term of praise and, with a vernacularized superlative suffix (“-est”), a
pejorative epithet. Perrin’s French text judiciously bypasses this passage rather than
attempting to convey it through an inevitably inadequate translation.
In places, though, Perrin’s translation imparts a vernacular tone, somewhat like
her edition of La Couleur Pourpre, by reproducing the trumpeter’s jocular scabrous
language with approximate French slang equivalents. Gillespie’s pithy summary of
44 Mimi Perrin’s French publisher asked her to slightly reduce the volume’s length (Isabelle
Perrin, Email communication, October 17, 2015).
45 Gillespie and Fraser, To Be, Or Not... To Bop, 122; Gillespie and Fraser, Dizzy Gillespie: To Be Or
Not To Bop, trans. Perrin, 110.
47 A comprehensive French lexicon of music-related African American vernacular speech
describes “Muthafucka” (“Motherfucker”) as “one of the most ambiguous words of black American
speech, which, depending on the tone and context, can be a serious insult, a term of respect or
affection, or simply a neutral term designating someone” [“L’un des mots les plus ambigues du parler
négro-americain qui, selon le ton et le contexte, peut être une insulte grave, un terme de respect et
d’affection ou un terme neutre désignant simplement quelqu’un”] (Levet, Talkin’ That Talk, 274–75).
48 On jive language, see Robert S. Gold, Jazz Talk (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975); Neil
Leonard, “The Jazzman’s Verbal Usage,” Black American Literature Forum 20/1–2 (1986): 151–60;
Clarence Major, Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (New York: Penguin Books, 1994);
and Dan Burley, Dan Burley’s Jive, ed. Thomas Aiello (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
2009). Also see John Russell Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (New York: Wiley, 2000);
Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1986); and Marcyliena Morgan, Language, Discourse, and Power in African American
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Dizzy à la Mimi
11
his music’s message, “get the fuck outta the way,”49 becomes “magnez-vous le cul,
sortez-vous de ce merdier”50 [“move your ass, get out of this crap”]; Miles Davis’s
exclamatory “Aw, shit” 51 becomes “Bof” 52 [“pshaw”]. Elsewhere, when Perrin
eliminates informal reported speech from a given passage, she compensates by
introducing nearby oral locutions where the original has none. Gillespie’s
exclamation encapsulating African American musicians’ reaction to the World War II
military draft—“Ahhh, they got me!”53—receives no French equivalent, but two
sentences later Perrin converts the sentence “I already had in mind what I would do
if they called me”54 into “Moi, je n’avais pas du tout envie de me faire piéger”55 [“Me,
I had no desire at all to let them get me”]. The latter phrase employs the selfreferential grammatical construction, typical of spoken French, known as left
dislocation—“Moi, je” [“Me, I”]—even though the corresponding English text lacks
any analogous speech-like usage.56
Still, the French translation very often pares away or moderates the original’s
plentiful colloquialisms. Many quotations are rewritten in the form of reported
speech, such as when Gillespie, in a transcribed dual interview with drummer Kenny
“Klook” Clarke, describes the two musicians’ collaborative working methods during
the 1940s:
I’d think of something and bring it, and say, “Hey, look, Klook, look at this here,
man,” and show him on the piano.
He’d say, “Yeah, lemme try that.” And in trying it, he’d do something else,
something to aid this; and by him doing that, I’ll think of ten other things to do.57
In French, Perrin writes this passage as: “Par exemple, si j’avais une idée, je l’exposais
à Klook au piano, et lui à la batterie cherchait à l’encadrer ou à la mettre en valeur
par des figures rythmiques; et ce faisant, il me suggérait dix autres idées! C’était un
échange très fructueux”58 [“For example, if I had an idea, I’d show it to Klook on the
piano, and he would try to frame it or highlight it on the drums with rhythmic
figures; and by doing this, he would suggest ten more ideas to me! It was a very
fruitful exchange”]. Her translated sentences impart less of a sense of informal
affability than does Gillespie’s transcribed dialogue—“Hey, look,” and “Yeah, lemme
try that”—and they meanwhile explain Clarke’s musical contributions in slightly
Gillespie and Fraser, To Be, Or Not... To Bop, 142.
Gillespie and Fraser, Dizzy Gillespie: To Be Or Not To Bop, trans. Perrin, 124.
54 Ibid.
56 Discussed in Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, 192–93.
49
50
12
GIVAN
more detail than does the original. Whereas Gillespie’s anecdote evokes a
conversation in which jazz musicians discuss their music with a lot of phatic
sociability and implicit inference, French readers instead receive a retrospective
account featuring more concretely articulated explanation. Throughout the memoir,
quoted speech is especially liable to be eliminated in translation when it contains
dialect or profanity. 59 At one point, where Gillespie recounts Don Redman’s
sardonic, jive-laden alternate lyrics to the song “Jingle Bells”60—containing lines such
as “Don’t cha know that Santa Claus is hip,” and “Say, daddy, you’re gonna have a
ball”—Perrin simply skips the entire passage.61
All things considered, Gillespie’s memoir in translation stays true to the English
original’s biographical facts and chronological organization, but the trumpeter’s
personality comes across as slightly more orthodox and conventional—more
introspective and less playfully voluble—and displaying relatively few, if any,
demonstratively African American speech patterns. In short, denotative meanings
are largely preserved while connotative cultural associations are significantly reduced.
This outcome should not, first and foremost, be attributed to Perrin’s free literary
decisions; it is essentially unavoidable, given the untranslatability of vernacular
sociolects with their attendant subtextual cultural meanings. Connotatively, what
remains, in her French version of To Be or Not... To Bop, is a smattering of informal
argot, giving it a colloquial, sociable tone, much like the verbal contractions
permeating La Couleur Pourpre. It may be no coincidence that the same sorts of
linguistic devices—slang words and truncated or elided syllables—also permeated,
and more prominently so, Perrin’s vocalese lyrics for Les Double Six. And though
the dynamics of intercultural exchange and transmission unfolded rather differently
in a musical setting, there was another, more unexpected, common thread linking
Perrin’s musical oeuvre to her literary career: the process of translation itself. In jazz,
the principal object of her translational labor—the essential content that she sought
to convey in the French language—was not semantic meaning but musical sound.
Perrin’s Translational Aesthetics of Vocalese
Mimi Perrin’s chief musical innovation, distinguishing her from all other vocalese
lyricists, was that she strove to invent texts that, when sung, recreated the
phonology—the audible sonority and articulation—of the instrumental recordings
upon which they were based. In 1978 she recalled how, when composing lyrics:
See, for example, “muthafucka” (Gillespie and Fraser, To Be, Or Not... To Bop, 233; c.f. Gillespie
and Fraser, Dizzy Gillespie: To Be Or Not To Bop, trans. Perrin, 209); and “damn, what is this shit?”
(Gillespie and Fraser, To Be, Or Not... To Bop, 101; c.f. Gillespie and Fraser, Dizzy Gillespie: To Be Or
Not To Bop, trans. Perrin, 93).
59
Dizzy à la Mimi
13
I started with what I called the “points” in a given instrumental phrase, which I
carefully analyzed by listening and relistening for a long time. The “points” that I
singled out corresponded, for me, to vocal sonorities—to consonants and syllables,
such as the letter I or A, or to “shhh” or “fa”—depending on the instruments and
players. So these “points” provided the key to basic, essential sonorities; from them
I derived syllables, the syllables suggested words, I made these words into phrases,
and the phrases eventually comprised a “story.” The “points” also provided the
secret of the “attacks,” which varied a lot depending on the instruments and the
players.62
Perrin conceived of her method of choosing words that echoed jazz instrumental
sounds as a sort of translation process:
I had to transpose these different [instrumental] “attacks”—to “translate” them
vocally, so to speak. To “translate” the saxophone attacks and sonorities, I had
recourse to what we call, in linguistics, spirant palatals and plosives: “fff” and
“bhhh”; for the brass instruments, there are the consonants that explode—“pah”—
and sometimes dentals—“tah” and “dah.”63
She consistently invoked this translational metaphor, in various interviews, when
describing her modus operandi.64 Naturally, replicating instrumental sonorities and
articulation by means of sung texts is quite different from translating in the everyday
literary sense of converting one language to another while preserving semantic
meaning. If Perrin’s creative process involved translation in any conventional, nonmetaphorical sense of the term, it was as a form of “homophonic” translation—
preserving sound rather than meaning—and it was not interlingual but intersemiotic,
involving a shift between semiotic systems—from instrumental music to French
62 “Je partais de ce que j’appelerais des « pointes » dans une phrase instrumentale donnée, que
j’écoutais et réécoutais longuement et que je décortiquais soigneusement. Ces « pointes » que je
repérais, correspondaient, pour moi, à des sonorités vocales, à des consonnes, à des syllabes, des « I »,
des « A », des « CHE », des « FE », suivant les instruments et les instrumentistes. Ces « pointes » me
livraient donc la clef des sonorités essentielles, des sonorités de base; de là j’obtenais des syllabes, les
syllabes me suggéraient des mots, de ces mots je faisais des phrases et les phrases finissaient par
constituer une « histoire ». Les « pointes » me livraient aussi le secret des « attaques », bien différentes
suivant les instruments et les instrumentistes.” Quoted in Carrière and Cullaz, “2 x 6 = Mimi,” 53.
63 “Ces différentes « attaques », il me fallait les transposer, les « traduire », pourrait-on dire,
vocalement. Pour « traduire » l’attaque et la sonorité des saxophones, j’avais recours à ce qu’on
appelle, en linguistique, des chuintantes et des plosives: des « PHHE », des « BHHE »; pour les
cuivres, ce sont des consonnes qui explosent: « PAH », quelquefois des dentales: « TAH », « DAH ».”
Quoted in Carrière and Cullaz, “2 x 6 = Mimi,” 53.
64 See, for instance, her comments in the television documentary episode Deux Voix par Tête
(Central Variétés, ORTF television broadcast, dir. Claude Fayard, March 25, 1966).
14
GIVAN
text—rather than a change of language. 65 Her lyrics could at times give the
impression of being wordless scat vocables (perhaps especially when heard by nonFrancophone listeners), an effect magnified by her tendency to pair reiterated words
with melodic motivic repetitions, to intensify rhythmic accents with monosyllabic
words, and to use a wide variety of syllabic elisions and argot that additionally
imbued her texts with a sense of colloquial informality.66
Perrin often allowed her imagination free rein, devising lyrics whose meaning
bore little, if any, relationship to anything that the original jazz instrumentalists might
conceivably have had in mind. (In this respect she markedly differed from her
original American inspiration, Jon Hendricks, whose lyrics for Lambert, Hendricks,
and Ross typically involved subject matter that was at least plausibly congruent with
the actual jazz performers’ American cultural milieu.67) Among her most inspired
and technically dazzling texts is a 1960 setting of Quincy Jones’s uptempo big-band
composition “Rat Race,” which the Count Basie Orchestra had first recorded just
over a year earlier.68 While Jones’s title evokes an American colloquial metaphor—
the frantic modern-day struggle for urban professional success—Perrin took the
term “rat race” literally, describing a madcap chase after a scurrying rodent, renamed
“La Course au Rat.” Les Double Six’s crackling recreation of the original horn chart
features a tour-de-force solo by Perrin herself, showcasing her authoritative vocal
virtuosity.
The Basie Orchestra’s “Rat Race” recording consists of an introductory twentyfour–bar piano solo plus a dozen blues choruses by the horns—two four-chorus fullband statements framing a four-chorus interlude featuring tenor saxophone solos by
Billy Mitchell and Frank Foster.69 Perrin’s lyrics for the opening ensemble section
call attention to the rat—“R’gardez donc par là, c’est là qu’il est le rat” [“Say look
65 On homophonic translation, see Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, 35; and Jeff Hilson,
“Homophonic Translation: Sense and Sound,” in Music, Text, and Translation, ed. Helen Julia Minors
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 95–105. On intersemiotic translation, see 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.
66 Perrin’s linguistic techniques are discussed extensively in Isabelle Perrin, “L’Écriture du Vocalese
à la Française: Traduction ou (Re)création?,” unpublished paper, 2013; and Eric Fardet, “Le Jazz et
Les Groupes Vocaux [Groupes, Écritures et Enseignements],” Ph.D. Diss., Université Marc Bloch de
Strasbourg, 2006, 223–49. See also Benjamin Givan, “How Mimi Perrin Translated Jazz
Instrumentals into French Song,” American Music (2016), forthcoming.
67 On Hendricks’s use of song titles as a creative point of reference, see Lee Ellen Martin, “Jon
Hendricks, Father of Vocalese: A Toledo Story” (M.M. Thesis, University of Toledo, 2010), 11–12.
According to Martin, “Hendricks would often call up composers and ask them the meaning behind
their specific works” (ibid.).
68 Les Double Six, “Rat Race (La Course au Rat),” Les Double Six Rencontrent Quincy Jones
(Columbia SGXF 105), rec. early 1960; Count Basie, “Rat Race,” Basie: One More Time: Music from the
Pen of Quincy Jones (Roulette 52024), rec. December 18–20, 1958.
69 Basie experts Loren Schoenberg and Philippe Milanta concur that the saxophone soloists are
Mitchell, first, followed by Foster (email communications, April 15 and 16, 2015).
15
Dizzy à la Mimi
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now
œ
Tiens
dis
Hey
now
-
17
Dizzy à la Mimi
39
&
Eb
œ œ œ
bbb œ
œ
œ
œ
il n’y/a pas long - temps,
tu
the rat, it was just right there,
42
&
œ
bbb
nœ
œ
er,
oui
mon
ting,
yes
my
!œ
bon - homme,
friend,
par - tout, t’es pas ma - lin,
there,
all ov - er, you ain’t so
b
& b b œJ
F min7
47
‰
œ !œ
trou,
if
49
&
bbb
Eb
œ
œ
œ
You’d be
A b7
œ
car
moi
j’te
vois
par
là - bas,
’cause
I
just
saw
you
right there,
œ œ
Œ
dé - file–toi
smart,
là
œ
œ
œ
G min7
bœ
œ
œ
œ
œ nœ
œ
si
tu
veux,
dis
mon
rat
T’as ou - bli - è
like,
hey
there
lil’
rat
you
œ
donc,
t’as
beau
now
you
done
well
œ
œ
t’en
all
to
go
-
for - got
œ
œ
er,
là,
down
there,
F min7
œ
J
I
nœ
par
là -
right down
G b dim7
toi
là
œ
œ
dans
ton
bolt right down your
hole,
bœ
œ
œ
dis,/le
rat,
mais
oui
dis
said
the
rat
oh
yeah
3
you
œ
œ
œ nœ bœ
dé - file–
just
off quit -
œ
œ
œ
bien oui
well now just bolt, yeah now
B b7
œ #œ
bet - ter
œ
œ œ
œ
Tu f’rais mieux d’ab - an - donn -
ar - ound.
œ
œ
bas,
œ
bœ
Eb
œ œ
b
œ
œ
& b b œJ ‰ J ‰ n œ
44
œ bœ
Œ
f’sais des bonds.
you’re jum - pin’
bœ
E b7
œ n œA dim7
Ó
œ
œ
Œ
3
rat
A b7
œ
‰
œ
B b7
œ
œ
œ
t’es
per - du
you
got away my
œ
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J
mon rat!
‰
rat!
Example 1. “Rat Race” (“La Course au Rat”). Continued.
over there, there’s where the rat is”]—and exhort a tomcat to catch it—“Parti par làbas, dis matou, va là-bas” [“Get away down there, say tomcat, go down there”]. Her
culminating full-ensemble choruses proclaim the rat’s successful evasion of its feline
pursuer, with the final soli break declaring “Il est perdu le rat... Perdu!” [“It is lost,
the rat... Lost!”]. But the center of attention is inevitably Perrin’s breathtaking,
acrobatic rendition of the saxophone solos; one contemporary journalist calculated
that she sings approximately 250 words in forty-two seconds.70 At a patter-song
tempo of approximately quarter-note = 285 (nearly ten eighth-note syllables per
second), she delivers an imaginary play-by-play commentary on a frenetic, careering,
70
Philippe Adler, “La Voix Humaine, cet Instrument...,” Jazz Magazine 60 (June 1960): 41.
18
GIVAN
and ultimately fruitless pursuit (Example 1 displays her lyrics along with a musical
transcription and broad-brush English translation).
Perrin’s chosen array of both consonants and vowels in “Rat Race” is quite
varied—evidently her stated ideal of recreating instrumental phonology was not an
inviolable principle—but the vocal solo nonetheless illustrates a number of her
homophonic translational techniques, echoing saxophone sonorities and articulation.
Occasional passages are dominated by Ps, Bs, or Ds at syllabic onsets, such as “pas la
peine de vous donner” (mm. 1–2) and “pas besoin d’balai pour prendre le rat non
pas d’balai vaut mieux s’aider des dents” (mm. 10–12), which ends emphatically with
a triple consecutive assonance: “–der des dents” [day day dah]. Elsewhere, she
highlights multiple assonances, such as the reiterated “ou” [“ooh”] vowel pair in
“courant partout tout comme un fou oui comme un fou” (mm. 29–30) and the
extravagantly attenuated “–traî” [“tray”] and “–très” [“treh”] pairs, echoed by “vais”
[“vay”] and “–ner” [“nay”], that span the top of her second chorus: “J’vais l’entraî...
l’entraî... ner, très loin, très loin” (mm. 13–16). These two passages also exemplify
Perrin’s propensity to yoke word reiterations to motivic duplications, a device she
employs still more demonstratively in mm. 3–6 (“oui, j’l’aurai” four times, “ce maudit
rat” twice, and then “oui je l’aurai” again).
At various points, concurrent textual and motivic reiterations also decisively
accentuate scat-like syllabic effects. According to Perrin, when composing lyrics she
would start out by “listen[ing] to the first phrase and ... try[ing] to affix
onomatopoeias to it. For example, ‘abada’ is transformed into ‘par là-bas’”71 [“right
down there”]. The latter three words appear twice in “Rat Race,” at mm. 43–44.
Other scat-like vocalizations occur at m. 48, with “T’as oublié dis” (phonetically
“tah-oo-blee-ay-dee”72) set to eighth-note triplets; and throughout mm. 40–42, where
B and D consonants are liberally employed in conjunction with the nasal phoneme
“–on” (“bonds ... d’abandonner ... mon bon-homme”). Immediately before “T’as
oublié dis,” a string of ten single-syllable words unfolds: “là dans ton trou, si tu veux,
dis mon rat,” with “trou” metrically accented on the down beat and “veux” initiating
an effusive melodic ascent (mm. 46–47). Perrin often uses single-syllable words to
stress phrase endings, such as “toits” in m. 9, “dents” and “loin” in mm. 15–16
(discussed above), and “bonds” at m. 40.73
“She actually made the French language swing, for perhaps the first and last time,
by particularly using jazz musician’s slang,” remembered Ward Swingle, a member of
Les Double Six who sang on the “Rat Race” recording.74 “Mimi knew that language
“J’écoute la première phrase et j’essaie d’y coller des onomatopées, par example abada se
transformera en par là-bas” (quoted in Jean Tronchot, “Ce Chant Que Jouent, Cette Musique Que
Chantent Les Double Six ... Cette Bande de Copains Terribles,” Jazz Hot 171 [December 1961]: 17).
72 Compare, for instance, the 1945 Mary Lou Williams/Milt Orent composition “In the Land of
Oo-Bla-Dee,” recorded by Dizzy Gillespie (Victor 20-3538; mx. D9-VB-1791-1), rec. July 6, 1949.
73 Discussed in Isabelle Perrin, “L’Écriture du Vocalese à la Française.”
74 Swingle went on to found the Swingle Singers.
71
Dizzy à la Mimi
19
very well.”75 Adopting a thoroughly vernacular linguistic idiom from start to finish,
Perrin makes abundant use of near-untranslatable oral slang expressions, such as
“pas du bidon” [“no kidding”/“ain’t no jive”] (mm. 6–7) and “pas d’boniment” [“no
claptrap”] (m. 32), and she heightens the text’s informal, speech-like quality with
plentiful elisions as the music hurtles headlong through more syllables than its
melodic pitches can fully absorb. Barreling into her third chorus, she unleashes a
sweeping ascending glissando (mm. 26–27) that encompasses four syllables (“ça il n’y
a”), and midway through the same chorus (m. 33) she begins a phrase by cramming
six syllables (“Vous m’avez l’air de ne”) into four eighth notes. Four bars later,
Perrin flies through five syllables (“ce que je vous ai”) in the space of just two eighth
notes (m. 37). At such moments, with demotic parlance overflowing beyond the
limits of comprehensibility, semantic meaning dissolves into pure musical sound.
Bebop in Sci Fi: Gillespie and Les Double Six
Les Double Six recorded their album with Gillespie in mid-1963, three years after
“Rat Race.” The twelve-track LP turned out to be their leader’s pièce de résistance;
in a published review, critic Leonard Feather quipped that “Miss [recte Mrs.] Perrin
deserves, at the very least, the Légion d’Honneur.”76 Her imagination flowering
more fancifully than ever, Perrin wrote lyrics that spun extravagantly fantastical
fictional stories, often incorporating self-reflexive themes that spotlighted the
album’s real human participants. Several of her texts even dealt directly with the
topic of linguistic translation, touching upon some of the literary and aesthetic issues
that she routinely faced as a musician and lyricist. If her translation of Gillespie’s
memoir had preserved most of the book’s denotative references to African American
culture while somewhat reducing its connotative blackness, Perrin’s vocalese
renderings of the trumpeter’s compositions had the opposite effect: they maintained
much of the music’s connotative expressive content—its jazz idiom and in particular
its distinctive instrumental phonology, re-performed by an ensemble that included a
number of American singers and instrumentalists—but their semantic, denotative
meanings had relatively little to do with anything that the original versions may
conceivably have signified.
The Gillespie album reunited various intersecting circles of longtime friends and
musical associates of different nationalities. It was initially the brainchild of Quincy
Jones, an ex-member of Gillespie’s orchestra, who requested new vocal charts from
the band’s pianist and arranger, Lalo Schifrin, whom he had first met several years
“Global Hit for August 8, 2003,” The World, Public Radio International broadcast.
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kwgs/.artsmain/article/4/70/532740/Pop/Global.Hit.for.Augu
st.8..2003/ (accessed October 22, 2014).
76 Dizzy Gillespie and Les Double Six, Dizzy Gillespie and the Double Six of Paris (Philips PG 223);
Leonard G. Feather, “Dizzy Gillespie and the Double Six of Paris,” Down Beat, March 12, 1964, 26.
75
20
GIVAN
earlier in Schifrin’s native Argentina.77 The rhythm section consisted of the former
house trio at Paris’s Blue Note club: French bassist Pierre Michelot and two
American expatriates, Kenny Clarke—who, like Michelot, had played on Les Double
Six’s debut album—and pianist Bud Powell.78 The trio initially planned to record
their instrumental tracks by themselves, expecting Gillespie to add horn parts in New
York that could be overdubbed along with the vocal arrangements.79 But in the end
the trumpeter decided to fly to Paris to join Schifrin and Perrin at the recording
session. He, Powell, and Clarke—three major bebop innovators who had not all
played together since 1946—listened, along with Michelot, to recordings that
Gillespie had made with either big bands or small groups during the 1940s and early
’50s, and treated them as schematic guideposts for their new versions.80 Powell, in
precarious health, required some encouragement from the trumpeter, but performed
more than creditably;81 Gillespie, according to Quincy Jones, had “rarely played so
well,”82 and Clarke later recalled the session as “fantastic.”83 The finished album’s
dominant creative presence, however, was Perrin. Once she had received Schifrin’s
vocal arrangements and heard the new pre-recorded instrumental tracks, she began
writing words modeled on the phonology of the trumpeter’s earlier discs.84
Having discovered that Schifrin and Gillespie both shared her love of science
fiction, Perrin decided to compose lyrics on sci-fi and fantasy themes. 85 She
transformed the trumpeter’s original 1945 recording of “Blue ’n’ Boogie”86 into “Le
Monde Vert” [“The Green World”], referencing imagery from the vegetationengulfed setting of Brian W. Aldiss’s 1962 novel, Hothouse. 87 Gillespie’s own
composition “Hot House”88 (which predates Aldiss’s novel) became “Le Manoir du
Loup Garou” [“The Werewolf’s Castle”]. And the original 1951 rendition of “Tin
Carrière, “Son Amie Raconte,” 11. It was at Schifrin’s suggestion that Jones had first moved to
France, to study composition with Nadia Boulanger. See Lalo Schifrin, Mission Impossible: My Life in
Music (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 82; and Jones, Q, 122.
78 Hennessey, Klook, 138–39.
79 Ibid., 149.
80 Peter Pullman, Wail: The Life of Bud Powell (New York: Peter Pullman, 2012), 340; Bernard
Maranza, “Les Double Six de Paris,” Jazz Hot 199 (June 1964): 30. Perrin later recalled that most of
Gillespie’s original charts had been lost. See Carrière, “Son Amie Raconte,” 11.
81 Pullman, Wail, 340.
82 “Dizzy a rarement aussi bien joué que dans cet album” (Maranza, “Les Double Six de Paris,”
30). Gillespie’s biographer Donald Maggin writes that on this recording the trumpeter was in “terrific
form” (liner notes for Dizzy Gillespie, The Verve/Philips Dizzy Gillespie Small Group Sessions [Mosaic
MD7-234], 14).
83 Michael Haggerty, “Conversation with Kenneth (‘Kenny’) Spearman Clarke: Under Paris
Skies,” The Black Perspective in Music 13/2 (1985): 207.
84 Maranza, “Les Double Six de Paris,” 30.
85 Ibid.; Leonard Feather, “...With a French Twist,” Down Beat, September 24, 1964, 20.
86 Dizzy Gillespie, “Blue ’n’ Boogie” (Guild 1001; mx. G555), rec. February 9, 1945.
87 Brian W. Aldiss, Hothouse (London: Faber and Faber, 1962); initially published in the United
States, in abridged form, as The Long Afternoon of Earth (New York: New American Library, 1962).
88 Dizzy Gillespie, “Hot House” (Guild 1003; mx. G568A), rec. May 11, 1945.
77
Dizzy à la Mimi
21
Tin Deo”89 was recast, in a spiritually-tinged, primitivist vein, as “Rites de Vaudou”
[“Voodoo Rites”]. On its bridge, Perrin placed a number of Ps and Ts at syllabic
onsets, mimicking the clarion phrases that Gillespie had played, along with
saxophonist John Coltrane and vibraphonist Milt Jackson, on the earlier disc:
Partout autour des piliers
Préparons, préparons le rite.
Partout autour des piliers
Préparons, préparons les rites du Vaudou.
[All around the pillars,
Let’s prepare, let’s prepare the rite.
All around the pillars,
Let’s prepare, let’s prepare the Voodoo rites.]
Les Double Six crisply articulate the final Ts on each “partout,” eliding them with
the initial As of the next word, “autour” (i.e. “par-too-toe-toor”). Their diphthongs
on the final syllable of “piliers” (“pee-leeyay”) imitate the delicate mordent
ornamentations of Gillespie’s trumpet.
“Mimi is a perfectionist,” Schifrin told Down Beat magazine for a cover story on
Les Double Six the following year. “She knows there are no miracles. Everyone
listened endlessly to the original Gillespie records to get the exact attack and
phrasing.”90 Perrin’s vocalese setting of “Two Bass Hit,”91 retitled “Tout à Coup
T’as Peur” [“Suddenly You’re Afraid”], reproduces brass instrumental articulation by
placing Ts at the beginning of eleven of its first fourteen lines. It also features a
variety of internal rhymes—four “ou” vowel pairs within the first two lines, as well
as “ien” and “oi” twice apiece in lines four and five respectively:
Tombé tout à coup
Tombé dis-nous d’où?
T’es v’nu, pourquoi?
Parions, tu m’as bien l’air d’un terrien.
Toi, pourquoi t’être envolé?
Toi t’as qu’une tête
Qu’attends-tu de nous?
Si tu nous le dis, tu n’t’en repentiras pas.
Toi, tu m’as bien l’air d’un terrien
Toi, pourquoi t’être envolé?
Tu pourras planter ton camp
Tout près, tout près d’notre tribu.
89
1951.
90
91
Dizzy Gillespie, “Tin Tin Deo” (Dizzy Gillespie, Vol. 1 [Dee Gee MG 1000]), rec. March 1,
Feather, “...With a French Twist,” 20.
Dizzy Gillespie “Two Bass Hit” (Victor 20-2603; mx. D7-VB-1544-1), rec. August 22, 1947.
22
GIVAN
Tout te plaira (x 4)
T’es beau pourtant, t’as pas quatre têtes.
[Fallen all of a sudden
Fallen—tell us, where from?
Why have you come?
Bet you’re an earthling.
Why have you flown here?
You’ve got only one head
What do you want from us?
If you tell us, you won’t regret it.
You seem like an earthling.
Why have you flown here?
You can set up camp
Near by, near by our tribe.
Make yourself comfortable (x 4)
You’re beautiful, even though you don’t have four heads.]
Here, Perrin whimsically places Les Double Six in the role of extraterrestrials
addressing an invading earthling whose humanoid features are depicted as oddly
aberrant.92 The expressive intentions of Gillespie and his co-composer, John Lewis,
when they first recorded the piece—with its title punning on a baseball term—in
1947, will never be known for certain.93 But it seems highly unlikely that they would
have had in mind anything remotely connected to this French text’s semantic
meanings. In an extreme case of homophonic translation, all that remains of the
original are its pitches, rhythms, and articulatory intricacies. And, of course, the
trumpeter himself.
The LP was a novel venture for Les Double Six in several respects. Rather than
simply basing their renditions on existing recordings, as they had done previously,
the group was now using custom-written arrangements and prominently featuring
new instrumental improvisations (as well as, in a couple of instances, Gillespie’s
singing). This was first and foremost an original vocal jazz project with star
instrumentalists—it contained just three brief vocalese settings of horn solos from
pre-existing recordings. Conceptually, the disc looked both forward and backward.
While its transatlantic instrumental-vocal combination was new to all participants,
the recording process was likely a nostalgic experience for Gillespie. Not only did he
92 Among the science fictional precedents for this sort of ironic reversal is Jean Renoir’s 1927
futuristic film Sur un Air de Charleston, in which a well-dressed African protagonist arrives by spacecraft
to explore the bewildering “unknown land” [“terres inconnues”] of France (Jean Renoir, 3-Disc
Collector’s Edition [Lions Gate, 2007]).
93 According to Kenny Clarke, “Two Bass Hit” was initially entitled “Bright Lights,” and its
original version was composed solely by Lewis, while he was serving in the U.S. Army in France
around the end of World War II (Ira Gitler, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the
1940s [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], 227).
Dizzy à la Mimi
23
enjoy a musical reunion with past associates, listening together to his records from
former times, but he even found himself sharing the limelight, on two tracks, with
vocalese renditions of saxophone improvisations by his late friend and fellow bebop
pioneer Charlie Parker (1920–55), who had died eight years earlier. Transcending, in
its way, both time and space (two of the rhythm-section tracks were recorded in
Chicago by Gillespie’s regular sidemen before being overdubbed in Paris by Les
Double Six), 94 and reuniting living musicians with one another as well as,
symbolically, with a departed confrère, the album provided an apt venue for Perrin’s
futuristic lyrics.95
Several of her texts concoct faux-mythological tales. A setting of Parker and
Gillespie’s 1945 disc “Groovin’ High”96 portrays real jazz musicians embarking on a
supernatural adventure. Retitled “La Vallée des Dieux” (“The Valley of the Gods”),
the lyrics tell of the trumpeter and Les Double Six arriving in a valley where they
discover Charlie Parker ensconced. 97 During the head melody, with soprano
Claudine Barge shadowing Gillespie in unison while Perrin and Eddy Louiss re-enact
Parker’s role an octave lower, the vocalists figuratively tell Parker, “Tu t’es perdu,
tout étonné de venir tomber là, Parmi un monde oublié que ne regarde que toi”
[“You—you’re lost, all surprised to have fallen down there among a forgotten world
that looks only at you”]. 98 In her vocalese recreation of Parker’s original solo
(transcribed in Example 2), Perrin, ventriloquizing the saxophonist, recounts an
oneiric vision:
Tandis que tout autour de moi la ville dormait, tout rayonnant là, parût un être voilé,
moi de lui jouer un air, riez donc, qui me permit de voler, puis tourbillonnant dans la
nuit, j’avalais les rayons de lune, quel bonheur pour moi de fuir loin de ma vie, car il
y a long temps qu’j’en rêvais tout en soufflant99 mes notes à tout vent. Près d’moi
parut, tout illuminée la Vallée des Dieux, tout comme dans mes rêves, plus rien ne
m’étonne!
94 The additional tracks were recorded by saxophonist James Moody, pianist Kenny Barron,
bassist Chris White, and drummer Rudy Collins. See Donald L. Maggin, Liner notes for Gillespie, The
Verve/Philips Dizzy Gillespie Small Group Sessions, 13.
95 In its partnering of living and deceased musicians, the recording prefigures the phenomenon of
“intermundane” overdubbing that became much more common some decades later. See Jason
Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane,” in The Sound Studies
Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York: Routledge, 2012), 304–24.
96 Dizzy Gillespie, “Groovin’ High” (Guild 1001; mx. G554A-1), rec. February 28, 1945.
97 Perrin supplied journalist Nat Hentoff with notes describing each of the lyrics’ stories in
English, which Hentoff summarized in his liner notes for the album’s U.S. release (Nat Hentoff, Liner
notes for Dizzy Gillespie and the Double Six of Paris).
98 The three singers are identified in Feather, “...With a French Twist,” 20.
99 Though the lyrics printed in the LP’s liner notes give the word “soufflant” [“blowing”] at this
point, on the recording Perrin appears to instead sing “chantant” [“singing”].
24
GIVAN
q = 204
bb
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Tan - dis
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11
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ne m’é - tonne!
Example 2. “Groovin’ High” (“La Vallée des Dieux”).
Example 2. “Groovin’ High” (“La Vallée des Dieux”) (0:47).
[While all around me the city slept, all shining, a veiled creature appeared. I played
an air on him—laugh then—which let me fly, swirling into the night. I swallowed
the moonbeams—how happy I was to flee far from my life, since I dreamed long
ago of blowing my notes to the winds. Before me the Valley of the Gods appeared
all illuminated, just as in my dreams. Nothing surprises me any more!]
It was hardly uncommon, by the 1960s, for jazz musicians to invoke space age
themes—they occur in the work of artists ranging from Duke Ellington and Clark
Dizzy à la Mimi
25
Terry to George Russell and Wayne Shorter.100 Yet Perrin’s science fictional tale,
with its surreal fantasy setting, is in some ways more akin to the sorts of
Afrofuturism associated with writers such as Samuel R. Delany or Octavia Butler,
and musicians such as Sun Ra.101 The lyrics weave a necromantic phantasmagoria,
transporting a real historical figure to a celestial spirit realm. Swept up amongst
intangible elements of the natural world, Parker is liberated from terrestrial life’s
social constraints and quotidian obligations.
Some of Perrin’s other lyrics for the album describe imaginary conversations
between the participating musicians, all within science fiction scenarios. The
opening track, “Ow!,” retitled “The Sword of Rhiannon” after the 1953 Leigh
Brackett novel of that name, concocts a dialogue with Schifrin, whose arrangement is
modeled on Gillespie’s 1947 big-band recording.102 In “Anthropology,” renamed
“Le Bonnet de Dizzy” [“Dizzy’s Hat”], the singers ask a fictionalized Gillespiecharacter where he got his hat, which they believe to be the magical source of his
musical talent and inspiration. Bassist Pierre Michelot is featured on “One Bass
Hit,” which adds an additional reflexive dimension by raising the theme of linguistic
translation, albeit still in an interplanetary context. Entitled “Pierre dans L’Espace”
[“Pierre in Space”], the chart is based on Gillespie’s 1946 big-band score, with
Michelot taking the solo double-bass role that Ray Brown had performed on the
original.103 In its opening chorus, call-and-response vocal interplay recreates the
instrumental version’s alternating reeds and muted trumpets:
Saxophones (i.e. low voices): Pierre nous parle
Trumpets (i.e. high voices): Traduis-nous
Saxophones: Allons n’le ratez pas, Pierre nous parle
Trumpets: Traduis-nous
Saxophones: Croyez la, croyez la parole d’or.
[Saxophones: Pierre, speak to us
Trumpets: Translate us
Saxophones: Come on, don’t fail—Pierre, speak to us
Trumpets: Translate us
Duke Ellington, Blues in Orbit (Columbia CK 87041); Duke Ellington’s Space Men, The Cosmic
Scene (Mosaic MCD-1001); Clark Terry with Thelonious Monk, In Orbit (Riverside RLP 12-271);
George Russell, Jazz in the Space Age (Decca 9219); Wayne Shorter, Super Nova (Blue Note BST 84322).
101 On Delany’s Afrofuturism, see Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R.
Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 179–222. On Butler, see Ytasha L. Womack,
Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013), 109–
13. On Sun Ra, see John F. Szwed, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York:
Pantheon, 1997).
102 Dizzy Gillespie, “Ow!” (Victor 20-2480; mx. D7VB1542-1), rec. August 22, 1947; Leigh
Brackett, The Sword of Rhiannon (New York: Ace Books, 1953).
103 Dizzy Gillespie, “One Bass Hit, Part 2,” (Musicraft 404; mx. 5609), rec. July 9, 1946.
100
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GIVAN
Saxophones: Believe, believe the speech of gold.]
With these words, the Francophone singers acknowledge their native language’s nonuniversality and recognize translators’ vital role in enabling communication across
linguistic—and, in this setting, attendant intergalactic—boundaries. In an apparent
reversal of Perrin’s own intersemiotic translation process, bassist Michelot finds
himself being exhorted to convert linguistic utterances into, presumably, his own
non-verbal instrumental idiom.
Another text dealing with the topic of translation is “The Champ,” a blues riff
first recorded in 1951.104 Gillespie himself opens the track with a sixteen-bar a
cappella scat improvisation whose non-pitched delivery heightens the illusion of
impenetrable speech. Entering along with the rhythm section, the vocalists sing the
first chorus soli and are joined by the trumpeter for the second:
Porteur d’la bonne parole, v’là Robie le Robot (x 3)
Ecoutez l’porte-parole des planètes, Robie le robot (x 3)
Pas de doute
Regardez-le filer loin à toute allure
Notre Robie le Robot (x 2)
Regardez-le filer loin à toute allure
Record battu.
[Bearer of the good word, here’s Robby the Robot (x 3)
Listen to the planets’ spokesman, Robby the Robot (x 3)
No doubt
Watch it zoom away at top speed
Our Robby the Robot (x 2)
Watch it zoom away at top speed
Record beaten.]
Saluting Robby the Robot, the stalwart science fiction automaton who debuted in the
1956 film Forbidden Planet, Perrin’s lyrics implicitly treat scat vocables as a mysterious
techno-futuristic extra-terrestrial language, one whose speakers may be elusive. The
narrating chorus’s insistent textual repetitions, which are characteristic of blues lyrics,
are given a mechanistic hue by their subject matter, suggesting machine-like
replication.
Perrin’s most linguistically sophisticated French text for the album happens also
to be her shortest. “Oo-Shoo-Be-Doo-Bee,” a song that Gillespie first recorded
alongside its composer, vocalist Joe Carroll, in 1952, receives a new arrangement
Discussed in Isabelle Perrin, “L’Écriture du Vocalese à la Française.” Dizzy Gillespie, “The
Champ” (The Champ, Savoy MG 12047), rec. April 16, 1951.
104
Dizzy à la Mimi
27
with the trumpeter himself singing the original lyrics.105 The notion of scat as a
translatable language is inherent in the original composition: its verse describes two
lovers strolling through a park and its chorus recounts their conversation, which
consists exclusively of “Oo-shoo-be-doo-be, ooh, ooh” repeated over and over,
rifflike, except for the bridge, where the lyrics explain, in English, that this scat
phrase “means that ‘I Love You.’”106 Les Double Six sing the “Oo-shoo-be-doo-be,
ooh, ooh” text, overdubbed, in unison with Gillespie—a rare instance of them
performing scat—and Perrin’s supplementary original French text consists of just
four lines: two interludes between Gillespie’s vocals and his instrumental solo (played
by trumpet and baritone saxophone in octaves on the original disc), and a short
coda. 107 The complete vocal arrangement is therefore macaronic, comprised of
English, French, and scat.
Monolingual Anglophones may conceivably perceive Les Double Six’s brief
French vocal interjections in much the same way that they hear the wordless scat
phrases; the interjections are in fact so fleeting and laden with assonances (“tu” and
“du”; “nous” and “tout”; “dis” and “n’y”) that such listeners might hardly have time
to even realize that, for a moment, they are no longer hearing non-linguistic
vocables. For French speakers, however, Perrin’s lyrics offer further reflexive
commentary on the multilingual setting. The interludes that follow Gillespie’s
opening vocal chorus ask:
Veux-tu nous traduir’ c’que tu nous dis là (x 2)
pour tout dire, on n’y comprend rien du tout (x 2)
[Do you wanna translate what you’re saying to us there? (x 2)
Frankly, we don’t understand it at all (x 2)]
Whereas the English lyrics treat only scat as incomprehensible and needing
interpretation, Les Double Six’s request for translation can be heard, especially from
the perspective of monolingual Francophones, as referring to Gillespie’s English text
as well as to his scat syllables. The vocal ensemble assert this more directly at the
coda, where they sing:
Tout’ tes bonn’ paroles
Dizzy Gillespie, “Ooh-Shoo-Be-Doo-Bee” (The Champ, Savoy MG 12047), rec. July 18, 1952.
There are various precedents for jazz lyrics that treat scat as a translatable language. These
include Milt Orent’s lyrics for Mary Lou Williams’s composition “In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee” (which
Gillespie and Carroll recorded in 1949), and Louis Armstrong’s recording, with Budd Johnson, of
“Sweet Sue (Just You)” (Victor 24321), rec. April 26, 1933. See Brent Hayes Edwards, “Louis
Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat,” Critical Inquiry 28/3 (2002): 626–27.
107 On the recording, the sung coda appears to include two or three extra words, difficult to
discern by ear, in addition to the lyrics as printed with the album’s French-issue liner notes, which is
my source of reference here.
105
106
28
GIVAN
ne veulent rien dir’du tout!
[All your good words108
mean absolutely nothing at all!]
The obvious humor rests on perspectival ambivalence: the French vocalists, though
fully active participants, comment on their shared musical undertaking from a
somewhat disassociated vantage point—they are collaborators, yet also observers.
With these parting words, Les Double Six concede that a Franco-American artistic
partnership, however successful, inevitably meets a communicative hurdle once
language enters the picture. This sense of confronting an obstacle was a motivating
impetus—perhaps the fundamental impetus—of Perrin’s career as both a lyricist and
literary translator; on behalf of Francophones, she dedicated herself either to
overcoming the language barrier, by translating English texts, or, in the case of
vocalese, to producing a parallel alternative in her own language.
Mimi Perrin’s dual legacy in both music and literature, grounded throughout in
translational aesthetics, is sui generis in the jazz world. Nevertheless, in the broader
scheme of things, much wisdom remains to be gained from considering various
other aspects of jazz from a translational perspective—translational, that is, in the
literal sense of an interlingual literary process as well as a metaphor applicable to
music or other cultural practices. Gillespie’s To Be or Not... to Bop is just one instance
among many, and interlingual translations of jazz-related texts can often shed
valuable new light on familiar issues, particularly in terms of the transformations they
effect and the misperceptions they cause. Consider the distortive consequences of
James F. Bezou’s 1947 English rendering of the Belgian author Robert Goffin’s
Louis Armstrong biography; Bezou presents some of the book’s fictionalized
dialogue in highly stereotypical—indeed, offensive—African American dialect that is
completely absent from the French original.109 Or the impact of David Noakes’s
decision to excise, from his English translation of André Hodeir’s classic postwar
French text, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, a seventy-plus–page chapter, entitled “The
Religion of Jazz,” excoriating the author’s fellow critic Hugues Panassié.110 And
how, we might wonder, did Panassié’s wife, Madeleine Gautier, along with her
The French word “paroles” also subsumes the English terms “speech” and “lyrics.”
For instance, Goffin depicts a fictionalized scene where Armstrong’s mother tells her
husband, “Dès que nous le pourrons, Willy, nous fuirons ce quartier de misère” [“As soon as we can,
Willy, we’re going to get away from this miserable neighborhood”] (Robert Goffin, Louis Armstrong: Le
Roi du Jazz [Paris: Éditions Pierre Seghers, 1947], 17). Bezou translates the sentence as “‘Willy,’ said
Mary suddenly, ‘’tain’t no two ways ’bout it—we’s gwine leave dis heah mizzable dump!’” (Robert
Goffin: Horn of Plenty: The Story of Louis Armstrong, trans. James F. Bezou [New York: Allen, Towne,
and Heath, 1947], 10).
110 André Hodeir, Hommes et Problèmes du Jazz; Suivi de la Religion du Jazz (Paris: Flammarion, 1954);
idem, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, trans. David Noakes (New York: Grove Press, 1956).
108
109
Dizzy à la Mimi
29
colleague, Marcel Duhamel, go about translating the affected jive language of Mezz
Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe’s Really the Blues?111 And what, more recently, became
of Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe’s unabashedly vernacular prose when translated
into French by Christian Gauffre?112 In the jazz community, as in the world at large,
the particular language that people speak and read, and in which they think, heavily
influences what they know and believe.113
Despite its pitfalls and inherent deficiencies, translation always remains a vital
means of facilitating intercultural communication and understanding, and in the
realm of music, where Perrin’s impact was most unique and lasting, metaphorical
translational processes have an even greater ability to function in creative,
transformative ways.114 As Les Double Six’s album with Gillespie demonstrates
beyond doubt, this capacity grows when the object of translation—such as
instrumental music—lacks words, making it more conducive to freely inventive
intersemiotic processes. In such cases, the elements that a translator adds, alters, or
eliminates may ultimately be just as significant, or more so, than what she or he
transmits unchanged. “Improvising like jazzmen,” Perrin’s simile describing her own
literary translation process, is equally descriptive of how she composed vocalese
lyrics—it invokes translation’s processual, performative dimension rather than the
static products with which the process begins and ends. If her career as a lyricist was
impelled by a desire to reorient jazz away from its cultural origins for the benefit of
Francophones, she nonetheless realized this vision by means of a guiding principle—
the privileging of individual improvisatory agency within self-defined constraints—
that she rightly credited to her chosen musical idiom’s African American aesthetic
roots.
What Perrin’s literary and musical collaborations with Gillespie exemplify, above
all, is the inherently participatory dimension of translation, as a mode of intercultural
communication that, with rare exceptions, involves two or more people. Translation
Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (New York: Random House, 1946); idem,
La Rage de Vivre, trans. Marcel Duhamel and Madeleine Gautier (Paris: Éditions Corrêa, 1950).
Discussed in Moore, “Race in Translation,” 135–59.
112 A sample: Troupe writes “But [Charlie Parker] was cool, with that hipness he could have
about him even when he was drunk or fucked up. Plus, he had that confidence that all people have
when they know their shit is bad” (Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography [New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1989], 57). Gauffre translates these sentences as “Mais [Charlie Parker]
était relax, avec cette élégance qu’il pouvait avoir même quand il était soûl ou raide. Mieux, il avait
cette confiance qu’ont tous ceux qui savent que ce qu’ils font fait vraiment mal” [“But [Charlie Parker]
was relaxed, with that elegance that he could have even when he was drunk or stiff. Plus, he had that
confidence that all those have who know that what they do is really bad.”] (Miles Davis with Quincy
Troupe, Miles: L’Autobiographie, trans. Christian Gauffre [Paris: Presses de le Renaissance, 1989], 49).
113 Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); Apter, Against World Literature. For a contrary perspective,
see John H. McWhorter, The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
114 On translation as a facilitator of intercultural exchange, see Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 9.
111
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GIVAN
often occurs without any literal human interaction: an author’s and translator’s roles
may be distinct, separated by any length of time, such that their social connection is
purely metaphorical—a joint endeavor to express a given set of thoughts, ideas, or
feelings. For Perrin and Gillespie, however, translation was, particularly in music, a
truly collective enterprise involving real, face-to-face contact. The French-language
memoir, to some degree, and the 1963 jazz album, without question, were the fruit
of a partnership based on mutual respect, understanding, and an enduring friendship
(the two of them saw each other for the last time during Gillespie’s final European
tour, in 1991, when they talked late into the night at Paris’s Méridien hotel). That
personal bond represented, in its way, a human legacy as profound as the book and
music they created together through many hours of labor and laughter. “He had a
great hope in humanity,” Perrin reflected after Gillespie died in 1993. “And if there
were more people in the world like him, things would surely be better.”115
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Shipton, Alyn. Groovin’ High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie. New York: Oxford
Simone, Nina, and Simon Cleary. Ne Me Quittez Pas: Mémoires. Trans. Mimi Perrin.
Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1992.
Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1986.
Stanyek, Jason, and Benjamin Piekut.
“Deadness: Technologies of the
Intermundane.” In The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne, 304–24. New
York: Routledge, 2012.
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1997.
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Six ... Cette Bande de Copains Terribles.” Jazz Hot 171 (December 1961): 16–19.
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Lawrence Venuti, 1–9. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Vidal, Bernard. “Le Vernaculaire Noir Américain: Ses Enjeux pour la Traduction
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165–207.
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16, 2014.
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Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1992 [1982].
__________. La Couleur Pourpre. Trans. Mimi Perrin. Paris: Éditions Robert
Laffont, 1984.
Wallaert, Ineke. “The Translation of Sociolects: A Paradigm of Ideological Issues in
Translation?” In Language across Boundaries, ed. Janet Cotterill and Anne Ife, 171–
84. London: Continuum, 2001.
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GIVAN
__________. “Writing Foreign: The Paradoxes of Baudelaire’s Neologizing
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Discography
Armstrong, Louis. “Sweet Sue (Just You).” Victor 24321. Rec. April 26, 1933.
Basie, Count. “Rat Race.” Basie: One More Time: Music from the Pen of Quincy Jones.
Roulette 52024. Rec. December 18–20, 1958.
Les Double Six. “Rat Race (La Course au Rat).” Les Double Six Rencontrent Quincy
Jones. Columbia SGXF 105. Rec. early 1960.
Duke Ellington’s Space Men. The Cosmic Scene. Mosaic MCD-1001. Rec. 1958.
Ellington, Duke. Blues in Orbit. Columbia CK 87041. Rec. 1958.
Gillespie, Dizzy. “Blue ’n’ Boogie.” Guild 1001. Mx. G555. Rec. February 9, 1945.
__________. “Groovin’ High.” Guild 1001. Mx. G554A-1. Rec. February 28,
1945.
__________. “Hot House.” Guild 1003. Mx. G568A. Rec. May 11, 1945.
__________. “One Bass Hit, Part 2.” Musicraft 404. Mx. 5609. Rec. July 9, 1946.
__________. “Ow!” Victor 20-2480. Mx. D7VB1542-1. Rec. August 22, 1947.
__________. “Two Bass Hit.” Victor 20-2603. Mx. D7-VB-1544-1. Rec. August
22, 1947.
__________. “In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee.” Victor 20-3538. Mx. D9-VB-1791-1.
Rec. July 6, 1949.
__________. “Tin Tin Deo.” Dizzy Gillespie, Vol. 1. Dee Gee MG 1000. Rec.
March 1, 1951.
__________. “The Champ.” The Champ. Savoy MG 12047. Rec. April 16, 1951.
__________. “Ooh-Shoo-Be-Doo-Bee.” The Champ. Savoy MG 12047. Rec. July
18, 1952.
Gillespie, Dizzy, and Les Double Six. Dizzy Gillespie and the Double Six of Paris.
Philips PG 223. Rec. mid-1963.
Lambert, Dave, John Hendricks, and Annie Ross. Sing a Song of Basie. ABCParamount ABC 223. Rec. August–November, 1957.
Roach, Max, and Dizzy Gillespie. Paris 1989. A & M 396 404-2. Rec. March 23,
1989.
Russell, George. Jazz in the Space Age. Decca 9219. Rec. 1960.
Shorter, Wayne. Super Nova. Blue Note BST 84322. Rec. 1969.
Terry, Clark, with Thelonious Monk. In Orbit. Riverside RLP 12-271. Rec. May 7
and May 12, 1958.
Dizzy à la Mimi
37
Filmography
Fayard, Claude, dir. Deux Voix par Tête. Central Variétés. ORTF television broadcast.
March 25, 1966.
Renoir, Jean, dir. Sur un Air de Charleston. 3-Disc Collector’s Edition. Lions Gate, 2007.

Dizzy à la Mimi: Jazz, Text, and Translation

Transcription

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