Perrey-Kingsley - Biography
BY J Poet
Perrey & Kingsley – French born Jean-Jacques Perrey and Berliner Gershon Kingsley – created the music today known as electronica. Before they collaborated on their two groundbreaking albums The In Sound from Way Out! (1966 Vanguard) and Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Spotlight on the Moog (1967 Vanguard) electronic music had been considered avant-garde and was mostly shunned by the public as “unlistenable”. By combining the sounds of Moog, Ondioline, and Perrey’s tape loops - laboriously put together by hand by cutting and splicing recording tape together – with a whimsical pop sensibility, they created the first electronic pop music. They only made two albums together, but their influence on pop, techno and hip-hop is incalculable.
Gershon Kingsley, born Goetz Gustav Ksinski, grew up in Berlin, but moved to Palestine in 1938 to escape from the Nazis. He lived on a kibbutz, taught himself piano, and performed in jazz bands around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He studied music at the Jerusalem Conservatory and came to the US to attend Julliard, but they would not accept him. He moved to LA, and attended the LA Conservatory of Music (now Cal Arts) supporting himself by playing organ at synagogues. He moved to New York in 1955 and became a well-known conductor, musical director and arranger. He was nominated for a Tony for Best Musical Direction for the hit La Plume de ma Tante and arranged for many musicals including Porgy & Bess and The Cradle Will Rock. He was also musical director for the Joffrey Ballet and TV special The World of Kurt Weill with Lotte Lenya. In 1966, he was the arranger for Vanguard Records and met the French composer Jean-Jacques Perrey.
Jean-Jacques Perrey was born in northern France and by 1933, at the age four, he was playing accordion. He studied music in high school and at Conservatory at Amiens, but was expelled for playing pop music. He was an avid reader of science fiction, which obviously influenced his musical direction. After WWII, he studied medicine in Paris, but while he was in medical school he met Georges Jenny, inventor of the Ondioline, one of the first synthesizers. He dropped out of school, taught himself piano and convinced Jenny to hire him as a salesman to demonstrate the features of the Ondioline. At nights, using the Ondioline as his main instrument, he performed a self-written review, Around the World in 80 Ways. The piece was a hit and he toured Europe performing it.
In 1956 he met singer/composer Charles Trenet, who asked Perrey to play Ondioline on some of his records, including the international hit, “The Soul of the Poets - L'ame Des Poetes”. He also accompanied Yves Montand and Jacques Brel and made what may be the first new age recoding, Prelude to Sleep, a piece of mood music to help insomniacs fall asleep. It was tremendously successful in Europe. In 1959, the immortal Edith Piaf hired Perrey to accompany her on the Ondioline and gave him money to make a demo tape of his own Ondioline compositions. In 1969, with a note from Piaf in hand, he moved to New York to met her friend Carroll Bratman of the Carroll Music Service, a company that rented instruments to recording studios, theaters, music halls and TV studios. With Bratman’s help Perrey played the Ondioline and did a comedy routine on Captain Kangaroo, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and other American TV shows. He found work playing Ondioline on commercial jingles and started making tape loops, laboriously put together by hand by cutting and splicing recording tape. He recorded some 3,000 sounds - street noise, birdcalls, instrumental snippets - and mixed and matched them to produce a library of odd sounds.
In 1964 he met Gershon Kingsley and they hit it off. Together they created The In Sound from Way Out! (1966 Vanguard) with many of the pieces put together by hand, cutting and pasting recording tape in the studio. “Unidentified Flying Object” and “Electronic Can-Can” later became theme music for the children’s program Wonderama. “Visa To The Stars”, one of the album’s more classical sounding tracks was co-written with Angelo Badalamenti, who went on to fame as the composer for many David Lynch movies.
Their second album Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Spotlight on the Moog (1967 Vanguard) was the first recording made using the recently invented Moog synthesizer. Walt Disney heard “Baroque Hoedown” from Kaleidoscopic Vibrations and made it the theme song for Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade. It is still played everyday at every Disney theme park. Both albums plus additional tracks from Perrey’s Moog Indigo (1970 Vanguard, 1996 Vanguard) are available on The Out Sound from Way In! The Complete Vanguard Recordings (2001 Vanguard).
The two never collaborated again, but each went on to a long an varied musical career. Perrey made two more Vanguard albums The Amazing New Electronic Pop Sound of Jean Jacques Perrey (1968 Vanguard) and Moog Indigo (1970 Vanguard) before moving back to France. He’s an active composer of movie soundtrack and commercial jingles as well as a recording artist. His albums include Eclektronics (1998 Basenotic), Circus of Life (1999 PHMP), Moog Sensations (2001 Pulp Flavor), The Happy Electropop Music Machine (2006 Oglio) and Destination Space (2008 Oglio). “E.V.A.” from Moog Indigo is one of the most sampled tunes hip-hop and rap
Kingsley became known as the Master of the Moog. He founded the First Moog Quartet and played the first live show of synthesizer music at Carnegie Hall. His “Concerto Moogo” premiered in 1971 at the Boston Symphony Hall. “Popcorn” (1972) a song Kingsley premiered on his album Music to Moog By (1969 Audio Fidelity, 2003 Dagored) was an international hit for Hot Butter. It’s the lead off track on their best of compilation Popcorn (2000 Musicor). In the 80s Kingsley made Much Silence (1985 Relativity) reissued on his own label as Anima (1990 Kingsley Sound). Voices from the Shadows, a piece based on the poetry of the holocaust, had its premiere in 1998 at Lincoln Center. It’s paired with some of Kingsley’s earlier work on Voices from the Shadows/Jazz Psalms (2001 Naxos). Kingsley and lyricist Michael Kunze produced the opera Raoul, a retelling of the exploits of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from Nazi concentration camps. It premiered at the Goethe Institute New York on April 30, 2004. His most recent album is God Is a Moog (2005 Reboot Stereophonic).
Kingsley won an Emmy Award for the music to the TV special A New Voice in the Wilderness and two Clios for music he composed for TV commercials. He received a lifetime Achievement award at Moogfest 2007, an annual celebration of Dr. Robert Moog and the synthesizer that bears his name.
