Happy Music with Jean-Jacques Perrey and Dana Countryman

Jan 8, 2007 2:51 PM, By Gino Robair

Does it cross any editorial or aesthetic lines to collaborate with your biographic subject?
Yeah, that's kind of strange. You know I hadn't anticipated that we were going to be doing anything together musically, when I originally started interviewing him. We did "Chicken on the Rocks" during the time that I was doing the interviews. I came home with something like 15 hours of interviews, which I hired a guy to transcribe and text for me when I got back. Then I started my solo CD project, and that led into us into doing this duo project.

Yeah, it is a little odd that I would be not only doing a CD with him but also writing his biography. But I feel like I'm probably the best qualified because I've been gathering facts on his life for years, and I did publish the magazine for seven years. So I'm excited about doing the book and I wanted to do it for a long time. And I don't want this information to get lost. He won't be with us forever, and I really want his life to be documented for future fans.

Can you tell me about your instrument? You say it's mostly Synthesizers.com modules: what other modules are in there?
Other than Synthesizers.com, I do have roughly about 25 percent [Synthesis Technologies] MOTM modules. I do have a few renegade modules: a couple from Doepfer, a couple from Analogue Systems in England, and I think I have one Blacet module as well.

Are they in the Frac Rack format, or did you have them put behind Synthesizers.com-style panels?
I'm currently putting some panels together myself—I actually did it with silkscreening. I'm holding a Doepfer joystick controller done onto a Synthesizers.com panel. I have nothing against doing a Frankensynth. The bottom line for me is really the sound. But at the same time, I've gone to this much trouble to put this huge synth together, and I'm getting into making it look uniform at the same time. It's a bit of a hodge-podge, but it's about 75 percent Synthesizers.com at this stage. I'm trying not to make it any taller than it is. I don't want it to take over the entire room.

What did you use for MIDI-to-CV conversion?
I used the Synthesizers.com MIDI module and the DX7 as a controller.

Did you sequence parts in Digital Performer and have them control the analog synth?
A fair amount. I would actually record in real time not only audio but also the MIDi signal simultaneously. And there were times when I would say "I don't really like that voice." But I had saved the MIDI data. Then Jean-Jacques and I would re-route the MIDI to the Synthesizers.com and then record a new voice back into Digital Performer.

Another thing that we did was make minute corrections in the MIDI data, sometimes to make it sound less perfect. We really wanted to retain the human quality even though we were using computer technology. One of the things I really don't care for is MIDI stuff that sounds robotic. So, sometimes we would go in and shift the beats around to make them less than perfect.

What does Perrey think about the sound of the latest analog synths?
Well it's second nature to him. He's got an amazing ability to know the exact kind of sound that's needed for a specific song. It's kind of like a little light bulb goes on over his head, and he would say "That's it!" Or he'd say "I want something that sounds like a blue color," or something that "sounds like a hippopotamus." And we would go in search of that kind of a sound. He has a lot of imagination.

And there would be times I would play something for him and go "What about this?" and he'd say "No, it's too harsh. It needs to be a little softer." So then he would experiment with the filtering. He's got an amazing ability for finding the perfect sound. We worked together well that way. There were times we would listen back to a track, and I would say "You know, there's just one note..." and he'd say "I heard that same note."

He doesn't have his own analog synths anymore?
Unfortunately, no he doesn't. He sold his big Moog that he carted back to France when he left the U.S. He's done a lot of recording work in France. A lot of the library music. I think there are seven or eight albums of background music, which are still being used currently—mostly in Europe. His royalty statements show all of the things he's done over the years, and most people weren't aware that it was him behind it. He has done a lot of commercials, and in fact a lot his music is still used for commercials.

Recently, one was used for the medicine Zelnorm, which is for female irritable bowel syndrome. They used this tune of his called "E.V.A." which has been used for so many commercials. And it's been sampled by all these hip-hop guys, like Ice-T and Dr. Dre. I can't tell you the products right now, but there are a couple of mainstream corporations that are negotiating for their commercials as well. Hopefully we'll get a couple of commercial offers from our crazy project.

Why did you choose to do a retro project?
We took this happy approach to the whole project because we both felt that electronic music has veered off into a little bit of a dark area, and it lost a little bit of its innocence. We talked about the way this project would be angled before we started the preproduction work of composing the tunes.

We both really wanted to do a lot of happy tunes, a lot of ragtime, putting humor back into the music. So that's something we both concentrated on. Not only when composing the tunes, but with the crazy sound effects. It's designed to make kids smile, and to ask people not to take themselves quite so seriously.

In the '60s, hearing these kinds of rhythm tracks, which required intensive splicing, was pretty mind blowing. But now it's somewhat trivial to do with a sampler. I'm wondering what effect that has on younger listeners who are already used to hearing sound effects side by side like that.
When he gives his lectures, he gives a demonstration on how he would splice tape, with the whole technique involved of using a razor blade. Then it's definitely mind blowing when you hear a song like "Gosssipo Perpetuo" or "Flight of the Bumble Bee," which was done with hundreds and hundreds of minute splices.

On the computer it's easier to do that, but at the same time it's also very time consuming in its own way. The way he did it, back in the day, was infinitely harder but he didn't have any choice. He just had to think of a way to pull it off with the limited equipment and facilities that he had.

The thing about Jean-Jacques is that he has an incredible amount of patience, and that's why you didn't hear other people of the day using this kind of technique, because it took so much patience that I don't think the average musician could tolerate it. And that's something that Jean-Jacques has is infinite patience for—spending hours and hours on one small section of music.

So in the duo he had with Gershon Kingsley, was tape splicing mostly Jean-Jacques's job? Or did they share that duty?
I think Jean-Jacques did all the splicing work himself. He had access to a studio, which he basically lived in. Gershon, from my understanding, was more of the arranger and would contract the musicians that they brought in, and he took care of the background stuff. Jean-Jacques was always the splicing man, using the samples and the crazy sound effects.

Not to put Gershon down because I think he had an important part. It was a very successful collaboration. They did a lot of commercials for a lot of products, and even now, their theme "Baroque Hoedown" is still being used in all the Disneylands. That is one of Perrey's most successful tunes, but it was a true collaboration that they actually co-composed in the studio. And there are no loops on the tune whatsoever, so that's kind of a different approach to electronic music than just the crazy sound-effects loops.

It's incredibly catchy and you have to give the Disneyland people credit for latching on to it, because I think it worked perfectly for the Main Street Electrical Parade. As a matter of fact, I just met Don Dorsey down in Hollywood. He's the guy that played the synthesizer in his home studio for the Electrical Parade. There is something like 30 or 40 variations on that theme. When they had Pete's Dragon, they did a Pete's Dragon version of it. But the glue that held it all together was the original "Baroque Hoedown" tune.

Jean-Jacques was the guest of honor at Disneyland in August, 2006, after we did the Hollywood show. He's done signings there where the fans come to meet him.

Are any of them outtakes from this project?
No, we actually used everything we worked on for this project. We had one tune that we were going to try and finish up—a piece with Angelo Badalamenti—but unfortunately we didn't have time. Maybe that will be on the next CD. But we didn't actually get to the recording stage on that.

We're basically doing stuff from scratch for this project. And it will be a little less happy. I think the next CD will be a little bit more on the mysterious side, with even a couple of spy themes. Just going in a slightly different direction. I feel we did the ragtime thing enough. Not that I don't like ragtime, but the next project will have a whole different approach to it. We've got about six tunes in the can right now.

How did you get Vinnie Bell and Dick Hyman on the CD?
I went to New Jersey and recorded Vinnie doing banjo parts in Tony Bennett's son's studio, which is called Bennett Studios, in Englewood, New Jersey.

Dick Hyman was a fan of my magazine—Cool and Strange Music—and he'd been a subscriber. We had actually done a piece on him. So I knew him through the magazine and felt comfortable to phone him up and ask him to play on this project. At that time, that was on a tune that Jean-Jacques and I had co-composed, but we didn't know it was going to be on our duo project. And Dick was nice enough to go into his home studio and lay down the synth part that he contributed to "Harry's Rag."

We also had Robert Drasnin, who is famous in the exotica music genre, play saxophone on a couple of tracks. In that case, I contracted a studio in LA and had Bob go in. Unfortunately, I couldn't be there, so the engineer recorded three different takes of each song, and then I went through the takes and edited the best pieces together.

Usually I was in the studio with the live musicians, whether they be guitarists, or drummers, or background singers. Jean-Jacques was there, too, when the background singers came in and he directed them himself in the studio.

He's truly a pioneer in electronic music, because as far as I know, he was the first one to make it popular—not just for the avant garde, which can be kind of unlistenable for the average person. A lot of the tunes from The In Sounds from Way Out were used as TV themes for children's shows and a lot of commercials. And it paved the way for a lot of other musicians who, on the coat tails of him and Wendy Carlos, produced the massive amount of Moog albums that came out in the late '60s.

But when Jean-Jacques did The In Sounds from Way Out, it was just the Ondioline, the Ondes Martenot, and a couple of other instruments. They were pretty esoteric: it was pre-Moog synthesizer. When you consider what he had to work with, it is pretty darned amazing.