Jean-Jacques Perrey (1929–2016) was a French pioneer of electronic music whose works spanned the rarest avant-garde gems to the most mass-market earworms.

For decades, a piece he co-wrote, “Baroque Hoedown,” led the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland and other Disney parks. The preeminent virtuoso performer on the Ondioline, a rare French electronic keyboard, Perrey co-produced albums like The In Sound From Way Out! that are now cult classics. He was a master of the musique concrète tape techniques proffered by establishment heavyweight Pierre Schaeffer, though he worked from commercial recording studios in the USA rather than European high-art digs. With collaborator Gershon Kingsley, he launched some of the first Moog records into space-age orbit.

His aesthetic range was huge: from an early version of ambient music for sleep and relaxation, to silly sound effects that were adopted by cartoons, game shows, and children’s television, Perrey’s sounds circulated widely. By the 1990s, he was beset with the double binds of obscurity and ubiquity, when his music was surprisingly re-discovered and prolifically sampled by hip hop artists. His music is so audible—millions if not billions must have heard it—and yet, he’s not a household name. Who was this creative mind that collaborators described as joyful, warm, whimsical, and sincere?

Perrey was born Jean Marcel Leroy on January 20, 1929 in Rosières-en-Santerre in the north of France, to a music-listening and music-loving family. His rural childhood was a mix of abundant outdoor play, radio broadcasts, and accordion playing. He detested his violin and piano lessons but embraced his schoolwork. Like many people of his generation, Perrey was shaped by World War II. He and his parents smuggled farm-fresh food to prisoners in Amiens and shuttled Allied paratroopers to safety in a Red Cross van under the cover of night, housing them in their own secret attic.

One alarming day in 1943, four Nazi soldiers descended on Jean-Jacques’s school. His teacher practically pushed Jean-Jacques out the side door with David, the only Jewish student in his class, throwing a key into his hands. The boys scurried toward the equipment shed on the athletic field, where they hid David under a blanket. As Jean-Jacques locked up and walked back toward the school, the Nazi soldiers met him halfway, interrogating him angrily. Jean-Jacques lied that he didn’t have a key, reassuring them that the shed only contained football supplies. Peering inside the cracks and rattling the door, the Nazis overlooked David. They finally moved on. David’s life was narrowly spared.

To be only fourteen and balanced on the precipice of life must have been unforgettable. Jean-Jacques seemed to bear it with grace. Music helped navigate the tragedies that were not hypothetical, but real. Music was a coping strategy, but it was more than that. Music was about community. As his daughter Patricia reflected, Jean-Jacques discovered as a child that playing the accordion for people made them happy. It was an accidental discovery, a lark. And yet, once he could see that his musical talent brought joy, he sought it repeatedly. “I care about making people happy,” he said in his biography.

Boing. Glurp. Whee! Jean-Jacques discovered the musical slapstick of Spike Jones near the end of the war. He’d dial in the BBC shortwave to laugh at the silly sound effects. It was like cartoons and music in one. Music was Jean-Jacques’s calling, but how to follow it? He was an avid performer, but not a success at the classical music conservatory he attended in Amiens in 1946, where he was dismissed for organizing a jazz quartet that performed outside of the school. Next was medical school and obligatory military service, where he added saxophone and typing to his skill set. Medical school was an awkward fit. He strove to help others but couldn’t get beyond his squeamishness about dissection. Perrey drifted. It was around 1950 that he heard it on the radio: What was this electronic instrument that sounded like a violin? The Ondioline! Perrey was hooked.

The young French inventor George Jenny’s enigmatic new instrument, the Ondioline, was a marvel. It was a monophonic electronic instrument—petite, with a three-octave keyboard and a wooden art-deco case—built around a vacuum tube oscillator and amplifier, with switches to produce convincing facsimiles of bagpipes, flutes, violins, and bongo drum sounds. The touch-sensitive keyboard allowed horizontal movement for a manual vibrato, while the knee lever allowed the player to vary the volume in real time. The instrument was malleable, expressive, and warm—surprisingly human for an electronic instrument. Jean-Jacques set out to develop its potential.

He convinced Jenny to hire him as an Ondioline salesman and set to work becoming a virtuoso performer. Perrey’s strong ear helped—he could put almost anything he heard on to the keyboard. He developed a dual technique, positioning the Ondioline next to the piano so he could play both at the same time. He sat at the piano bench, playing piano with his left hand and left foot, while using his right hand and right knee for the Ondioline. It was like driving two cars in parallel.

Perrey’s Ondioline playing—a magical tapestry of many sounds—was quickly a sensation. He recorded “L’âme des poètes” with Charles Trenet, an extraordinarily prolific, visible, and popular French singer and songwriter, and began touring a variety show act called “Around the World in 80 Ways.” He fell in love with the ballet dancer Klara Erb, they married, and their daughter Patricia was born in 1955. He further collaborated with psychiatrists and sleep researchers to make Prélude au Sommeil, a record meant to help the listener to sleep. Listen with me: overtone-rich major chords float up from the bass. Drones anchor the soothing, slow, languid melodies. Ambient music, years before the birth of the genre.

Perrey’s sense of humor pervades another early record, Mr. Ondioline (1960), with its boom-chick accompaniments, silly sound effects, and tuneful melodies. The cover art—Perrey wearing a strange hood, hovering over an Ondioline and a rare prototype instrument of Jenny’s with countless wires and vacuum tubes exposed—conjures the man behind the curtain. “What could possibly be going on here?” the cover seems to ask. These playful touches contrasted the high-minded electronic music proffered by Pierre Schaeffer, the leader of the official electronic studio at the French radio in the 1950s. Schaeffer’s musique concrète denatured recorded sounds by splicing them into loops, playing them backwards, slower, and faster. Musique concrète was about abstraction, an elemental attitude toward sound that moved from music toward raw materials. As related in his biography, Perrey interned at Schaeffer’s studio in 1959, learning valuable tape splicing techniques. But it was socially awkward. Schaeffer and his right-hand man Pierre Henry opposed Perrey’s humorous music. “This technique must only be used for serious, experimental creations,” Schaeffer insisted. “We’ll see,” was Perrey’s bemused response.

Despite the seriousness of the Cold War–shadowed 1950s, Perrey turned again and again to projects that could be fun and enlivening. He realized that music could create an escape into pleasure for himself and for others. “We can’t afford to be pessimistic,” he said.

Perrey arrived in New York City in 1960, cruising on an introduction from Edith Piaf and the encouragement of Jean Cocteau. He landed at Carroll Musical Instrument Service, an instrument rental company on 48th Street in midtown Manhattan, which was a hub for the entertainment, theatre, and recording industry. Carroll Bratman, the owner, became his friend and sponsor. Perrey was the Ondioline salesman and demonstrator in the center of a swirling parade of powerful, famous people. At Carroll’s, he met Raymond Scott, who was making advertising jingles with his custom electronic instruments. Perrey also met or collaborated with the percussionist Harry Breuer, the jazz pianist Errol Garner, the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, the session guitarist Vinnie Bell, the recording maverick Les Paul, the film composer Angelo Badalamenti, and the conductor Leonard Bernstein.

The connections proliferated. Soon Jean-Jacques was playing the Ondioline on television, appearing on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, playing for children on Captain Kangaroo, and for adults on The Tonight Show. On stage at Radio City Music Hall in 1962, Perrey ping-ponged between two Ondiolines, performing four times per day, every day, to six thousand people at a time. Think about that: he was playing the Ondioline for over 20,000 people per day. Meanwhile over summers, Jean-Jacques took an ocean liner back to France and travelled the circus circuit with his daughter Patricia. He was part of a music hall revue under a big tent, performing aside clowns, magicians, acrobats, and dancers. Jean-Jacques accompanied a ventriloquist with Ondioline sound effects, while Patricia passed puppets backstage. Then it was back across the Atlantic, rubbing elbows with Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney along the way.

Encouraged by the constant churn, Perrey’s recorded music blossomed. Perrey was the Ondioline guy, and his unusual sounds were increasingly valuable. Record execs and arrangers sought him out for new projects, ranging from advertising jingles to novelty albums. Musique electronique du cosmos (1962) was recorded in Sam Fiedel’s New York apartment, despite the misdirection on the cover—“recorded in Paris”—a ploy to steer clear of the Musicians’ Union. The album’s slithers, whorls, and sighs welcomed in the space age, inviting us to imbibe unusual and unknown sounds. The playful “Chicken on the Rocks,” with its oboe- and bassoon-like honks, pecked its way into an Ideal Toy commercial and on to Sesame Street, the famous long-running American children’s television program.

On The In Sound from Way Out! (1966) Perrey and collaborator Gershon Kingsley augmented the Ondioline with harpsichord, organ, Ondes Martenot, and live-played drums, guitar, and bass. Perrey began by assembling his unique sampled sounds in the private electronic music studio that Carroll Bratman had set up for him. Then, with Kingsley’s arrangements, they recorded tracks in the professional studios of Vanguard Records, with Perrey on the Ondioline. Record execs got on board with a “well, why not?” penchant for the new and eccentric. “Barnyard in Orbit” is a jaunty bop with a different sonic punch line every time ‘round. Its melody wiggles, swerves, and spins through two bars before pausing for a new sound effect at the end of each phrase: meow, cuckoo, oink-oink, glur-eee. Then, back on the merry-go-round.

Perrey’s musique concrète tape loops reappear, too. Consider “Unidentified Flying Object,” the opening track on The In Sound. Small sound effect snippets are collaged together in quick succession. Their rhythmic sequence becomes a groove as the loop repeats, repeats, repeats. Once you know it, you can hear Jean-Jacques’ tape loops in many of his compositions, where they make rhythmic foundations from bright, colorful pops of sound. His most thrilling tape loop composition has to be “Gossipo Perpetuo” on Moog Indigo (1970), a cover of Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo Op. 11 (1831). It opens with a rhythmic vocal groove—blah, blah, bl-blah—that channels “Blue Moon,” the 1961 #1 hit from The Marcels. Perrey’s vocal percussion continues, but one begins to suspect we’re hearing both synthesized and human voices. It is almost impossible to distinguish, as the imaginary singers zip through their scales like wind-up toys. Perrey made the piece from extensive tape edits of sampled human singers, by fragmenting and re-sequencing their vowel sounds, then layering them together with instruments. The gossiping voices are a mechanical choir, with echoes that cast back to doo-wop and forward to the beat-boxing of hip hop. It’s a mesh of human voices, tape edits, and synthesized sound.

Perrey’s collaboration with Kingsley eventually broke down, but not before the pair explored the Moog synthesizer in its earliest days. Like everyone else, they were taken with Switched-On Bach when they heard it in a demo version in 1967. Jean-Jacques begged Carroll, who laid out immediately for the second or third Moog to be sold commercially. The analog synthesizer was compelling, but difficult to handle. Sounds had to be created from scratch, using a combination of knobs and patch cords. It was often impossible to recreate a previously used sound and tricky to keep the instrument in tune. Recording was often done quickly, to capture lightning in a bottle. The two peppered Kaleidoscopic Vibrations (1967) with covers of other people’s music (“Strangers in the Night,” “Lover’s Concerto,” and “Moon River”) as well as new, joint-authored compositions like “The Savers” and “Baroque Hoedown,” the tune that would be adapted for Disney.

In the late 1960s, the public was bombarded with electronic sound on multiple channels: the classical arrangements of Switched-On Bach and its copycat classical music siblings; pop music cover albums like The Plastic Cow Goes Moooog; sci-fi film soundtracks; cartoon sound effects; and advertising jingles. Perrey’s music was particularly useful to advertisers, who wanted to capture the attention of consumers with novelty, surprise sounds. In some cases, Jean-Jacques’ music was used without permission, like when the game show The Joker’s Wild used “The Savers” without credit in 1972, and when a Latin American television network used “The Elephant Never Forgets” for a hugely popular daily sitcom without credit for twenty years. In other cases, Perrey took on advertising work himself, composing music and sound effects meant for radio, television, and film producers. Perrey remained in demand as an expressive, skilled session musician too. He recorded the Ondioline sounds on Decca’s Switched-On Bacharach for a flat fee, standing with arranger Dave Mullaney behind the pseudonym Christopher Scott. His uncredited Ondioline playing was a crucial part of Kai Winding’s instrumental “More!,” the theme from the 1963 film Mondo Cane and a #8 Billboard hit.

Moog Indigo (1970) would be Jean-Jacques’ last album made in the United States, with some of the most lasting effects. Consider “E.V.A.,” which incorporates Jean-Jacques’ signature whirls and blurps into a laid-back psychedelic groove. The track opens with an electronic zip, followed by a tumble of glurpy bubbles. The bass drops five seconds in with a simple, funky groove, noodling around a minor scale. You’d be forgiven if the next sound you expected to hear is an emcee rapping, “Stick up kids is out to tax,” instead of the guitar chinks that populate Perrey’s original. You see, “E.V.A.” was sampled prominently in 1991 by the rap outfit Gang Starr in “Just to Get a Rep,” bringing new audibility to Jean-Jacques’ music. By January 2025, WhoSampled.com counted “E.V.A.” as sampled 106 times by artists including Busta Rhymes with Coolio and LL Cool J, A Tribe Called Quest, Pusha T, and DJ Spooky.

Perrey’s daughter Patricia reported that he loved his improbable collision with hip hop. He admired beat makers’ ethics of crate digging, and he thought that sampling was incredibly creative. Ultimately, Jean-Jacques loved community. Hip hop artists’ rediscovery of his music provided a whole new way to share his sense of musical humor. As he said in his biography, “These records will be my legacy. It is my gift to humanity […] because I think humor will save the world.”

In 1970, Jean-Jacques faced a crossroads. His ten-year work visa was expiring, he missed his growing daughter, and his parents were aging. He was reluctant to leave the stimulating, renewable energy of New York City, but he needed to tend to family in France. He moved home, living between Paris and his birthplace of Rosières-en-Santerre. He was even more disappointed than he expected with the French music scene, which he found difficult to navigate. There wasn’t the same emphasis on commercial music. French record labels didn’t cultivate new talent or show much interest in novel electronic sounds. He was no longer in the center of a swirling creative market. Perrey felt that his musical achievements weren’t seen, but really couldn’t be seen, because he was suddenly in a system that didn’t have a space for him. He was like a plug in search of an outlet.

Once again, Perrey drifted. Between 1970 and ‘77, he produced seven albums of “library music” under the name Pat Prilly, meant to be used as jingles and call signs, background music, or sound effects in radio, television, and cartoon productions. One of these tunes, for example, was the intro music for France’s Channel Two until 1986.

He occasionally played piano in nightclubs or bars. He was the musical director for a ballet company. He kept in touch with friends and colleagues from New York. There were some bright spots. In 1972, Perrey and Kingsley’s “Baroque Hoedown” was adapted for the Disney Main Street Electrical Parade, a long-running exhibit that moved between parks, which he found gratifying. In ‘74 and ‘83, he struggled through the death of his parents. In these years, Jean-Jacques’ community was thin—or thinner than it had been. He had friends and family, but he didn’t have constant creative outlets. Without the surge he got from audiences—from performing on stage, making people laugh, and bringing people together with music—he languished in the pessimism that his daughter says was present beneath the ebullient surface. Without music in community, the shadows got big.

A late-career renaissance reconnected Jean-Jacques to joy. The renaissance began with hip hop sampling in 1991 and continued with the publication of Incredibly Strange Music (1993), an independent book celebrating outsider music by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. A cult following developed around his unusual experiments, with younger musicians re-discovering the novelty of his sounds. The Beastie Boys released their own album titled The In Sound from Way Out! (1996), an homage that celebrated the spirit of Perrey and Kingsley’s original. Vanguard re-released a compilation called The Out Sound from Way In! (2001). Perrey produced several later albums with collaborators: the Circus of Life (2000) with Gilbert Sigrist; Eclektronics (1998) and ELA (2014) with the French multi-instrumentalist David Chazam; and The Happy Electropop Music Machine (2006) and Destination Space (2008) with the American musician and biographer Dana Countryman.

Several concerts celebrated Jean-Jacques’ music in the late ‘90s and ‘00s, including Perrey and Countryman’s tours of the West Coast, New York, Montreal, and Europe. These collaborations—albums, tours, biography—were a thrill for Perrey, but also for Countryman, who said it was “monumental” to experience Perrey’s musical presence. For Countryman, it was the culmination of childhood inspiration that began in 1972 and lasted for decades.

In 2014, Perrey met Wally De Backer, aka Gotye. The two formed a fast friendship: “He was my musical hero,” De Backer said. De Backer subsequently curated and released Perrey’s Ondioline music, much of it previously lost or hard to find, and performed tribute concerts to Perrey with an ensemble called the Ondioline Orchestra. He then took up with buying and chronicling Ondiolines, having them extensively restored, and developed the non-profit Forgotten Futures around this preservation project. When Jean-Jacques Perrey passed in 2016, many other fans and admirers were already nurturing his legacy, too.

But what about the musical establishment—the journalists, the critics, and the musicologists? Why isn’t Jean-Jacques Perrey mentioned in the same breath as Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen? He cultivated many of the same techniques at the same time. In truth, commercial music is rarely taken as seriously as art music. Critics have long avoided the taint of the market, staking their musical claims by indexing intelligence rather than pleasure. We should drop the fiction: music can be both smart and silly; it can be both commercial and artful. Perrey was a true pioneer. His embrace of humor—joyfulness above all—separates him from serious electronic music in the most exciting of ways. Jean-Jacques wasn’t naïve to the tragedy of life. But he refused to dwell in that which is difficult. He brought us new sounds and laughter. He believed humor could save the world. Shall we give that a try?

Essay by Jennifer Iverson.