Les Double Six

Lore & Background

Les Double Six was founded in 1959 by Mimi Perrin, who had contracted tuberculosis in 1949. The group's name alluded to the sextet's use of double-tracking: six members would sing once to a recording track, then duplicate the performance on a second track, fattening the sound. Membership varied from recording to recording, drawing from a pool of singers including Ward Swingle, Christiane Legrand, and Eddy Louiss. The group recorded two studio albums (1961 and 1963) and one live album (1964), including collaborations with Quincy Jones. Perrin's health problems led to the group's dissolution in 1966. Many members later joined the Swingle Singers, known for reproducing Bach's works in jazz vocal style.

Reader's Guide

Les Double Six holds significance as a pioneering French vocal jazz ensemble that innovated studio techniques by doubling each vocal part to create a fuller sound, a method later associated with Brian Wilson. Their repertoire focused on jazz standards by Quincy Jones and Dizzy Gillespie, with Perrin's imaginative French lyrics. The group's approach of vocalizing like instruments influenced later vocal jazz groups. Though short-lived, their legacy includes a Grammy nomination in 1965 for Best Vocal Group Performance for their album The Double Six of Paris Sing Ray Charles, losing to The Beatles. Their members' transition to the Swingle Singers extended their impact into classical-jazz fusion. The group's four albums, recorded between 1959 and 1964, remain examples of 1960s vocal jazz experimentation.

Did You Know?

• The group's name alluded to the sextet using double-tracking techniques to fatten the sound, a method that predated Brian Wilson's later use.
• Founder Mimi Perrin had contracted tuberculosis in 1949, which contributed to the group's dissolution in 1966.
• Many members of Les Double Six later joined the Swingle Singers, who reproduced Bach's works in jazz vocal style.

The Architecture of Doubled Sound

When Mimi Perrin assembled her sextet in 1959, she gave it a name that was itself a technical description. Les Double Six, or the Double Six of Paris, derived its identity from a recording method that was then considered cutting-edge: each of the six voices would lay down a part on one track and then lay down that same part again on a second track, effectively doubling every individual line. The result was a thickened, layered vocal texture that Perrin and her collaborators deliberately sought to fatten, a studio trick that drew a clear parallel to what Brian Wilson was achieving with the Beach Boys in American recording rooms. The membership was never fixed; singers rotated from session to session, and the roster included names like Monique Guérin, Ward Swingle, Eddy Louiss, and Bernard Lubat among others. What remained constant was the principle: six voices, each doubled, creating the illusion of a much larger ensemble without a single instrument being played.

Voices as Brass and Reed

The group's artistic philosophy was to make the human voice behave like a horn section. Drawing inspiration from several American vocal ensembles, the singers set out to recreate the kind of spontaneous, brilliant lines a saxophonist, trumpeter, or trombonist might improvise, letting their throats and mouths become the instruments themselves. The repertoire centered on jazz standards, with a particular fondness for themes composed by Quincy Jones and Dizzy Gillespie. What made the project distinctly French was Perrin's own contribution: she penned original lyrics, sometimes poetic and sometimes wryly humorous, that draped over these well-known melodic lines. The group performed entirely in French, which gave familiar jazz tunes an unexpected linguistic and cultural framing. This approach of treating vocal lines as instrumental solos, combined with the doubled-track production, created a sound that was both recognizably jazz and unmistakably novel.

Four Albums, Four Collaborators

Between 1959 and 1964, Les Double Six released four studio albums, each anchored by a different musical partnership. The debut, The Double Six Meet Quincy Jones (1960, Columbia UK; reissued in the US as The Double Six of Paris on Capitol in 1961), featured piano trios led by Art Simmons and included Jones compositions alongside a Horace Silver piece. Swingin' Singin' (Philips, 1962) expanded the palette with a full ensemble and tackled tunes like Night in Tunisia and Scrapple from the Apple. The 1963 session with Dizzy Gillespie produced a set of hard-bop and bebop classics including Anthropology, Groovin' High, and Hot House. The final album, Sing Ray Charles (1964), paired the sextet with the Jerome Richardson Quartet and Billy Byers, covering Charles songs from Georgia on My Mind to Hit the Road, Jack. A fifth recording, Warm Wave, appeared in 1964 on Verve as a collaboration with Cal Tjader. The first two albums were later reissued together in 1999 on RCA Victor with a bonus track.

A Short Life, a Long Echo

Les Double Six was never meant to be a permanent fixture. Mimi Perrin, the group's creative engine, had contracted tuberculosis in 1949, and the lingering health problems that condition caused eventually made continued performance untenable. The sextet dissolved in 1966, just seven years after its founding, leaving behind a compact but distinctive catalog. Yet the group's influence rippled outward. A significant number of its members went on to join the Swingle Singers, a vocal ensemble that carried the jazz-vocal approach into entirely new territory, most notably by reinterpreting the works of Bach in that same instrumental-singing idiom. The group's brief run also earned international recognition: in 1965 they received a Grammy nomination for Best Vocal Group Performance for their Ray Charles album, ultimately losing to The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. That single nod from the American recording industry, arriving just as the British Invasion was reshaping popular music, marked the Double Six as a serious contender on the global stage.