Mimi Perrin was a French pianist and singer who founded the vocal group Les Double Six in 1959 and wrote its French lyrics and vocal arrangements. She was born on February 2, 1926 in Saint-Maurice, just southeast of Paris, and her working life falls into two parts: roughly fifteen years in jazz, as a Saint-Germain-des-Prés pianist, a group and studio singer and the leader of the Double Six, and then close to four decades as a literary translator from English into French, which is how many French readers know her name. She passed away in Paris on November 16, 2010, at the age of 84.

Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father an accountant, and French Wikipedia says he helped build her musical culture. She studied classical piano as a child, discovered jazz as a teenager and took a degree in English at the Sorbonne, then taught for two years. In 1949 she contracted tuberculosis and spent time in a sanatorium, an illness that returned later and would end her singing career. After her recovery she played in the cellars and cabarets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where French Wikipedia describes her as one of the few women pianists, and she became known there as the leader of her own trio. The French Wikipedia article on Sacha Distel also puts her at the piano of the young guitarist's modern jazz group, formed soon after 1948, with the saxophonist Hubert Damisch, the bassist Jean-Marie Ingrand and the drummer Jean-Louis Viale; the band won the prize for best small modern orchestra at a jazz night at the Colisée, though the article gives no year. In 1951 she met Jacques Perrin, an engineer and double bassist, whom she married; he gave her the nickname Mimi, and they had two children, Gilles and Isabelle.

Her own record from these years is Dancing-Party à Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a ten-inch LP made in Paris in 1958 for the Club National du Disque (CV 208) and billed to her and her quintet: Claude Marchand on alto saxophone, Pierre Cullaz on guitar, Jacques Perrin on bass, Jean-Pierre Drouet on drums (and on piano for the later tracks) and Jean-Louis Conrozier on drums for the later tracks. The programme is bebop and cool-school material played for dancing and listening, among it Jimmy Raney's "Motion", Bud Shank's "Fluted Columns", "Walkin'", "Just One of Those Things" and "Speak Low". Fresh Sound's 2026 reissue lists Perrin at the piano on the first five numbers and singing on "Fine and Dandy" and "Just One of Those Things", then singing alone on "We'll Be Together Again" and "How About You"; the personnel lists for the original LP differ in some details, so the exact division of piano and vocals is not settled.

She also sang in groups and in the studios. English Wikipedia says that from 1956 to 1958 she was a member of the Blue Stars of France, the vocal group around Blossom Dearie, and Discogs credits her with vocals on the group's 1957 album Pardon My English (Mercury). It also lists her among the members of Les Angels, a studio vocal group founded in October 1956 whose singers included Christiane Legrand and Ward Swingle. She sang backing vocals for variety and yé-yé records, and French Wikipedia says that her session work for Henri Salvador led to her meeting Quincy Jones.

In 1959 she founded Les Double Six, a sextet modelled on the American vocalese trio of Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert and Annie Ross. Perrin was its leader and main arranger: she took recorded arrangements and solos by big bands and small groups, wrote French words that fitted them phrase for phrase, and gave each voice an instrumental line, while two layers of voices recorded over each other made six singers sound like twelve. Quincy Jones's "For Lena and Lennie" became "En flânant dans Paris" in her version, and the Rhuthmos site notes that she sang the trumpet solo that Joe Newman had played in Count Basie's orchestra. The group made four albums between 1960 and 1964: Les Double Six Meet Quincy Jones, which carries the Grand Prix du Disque sticker, the 1962 LP known in the United States as Swingin' Singin', a 1963 album with Dizzy Gillespie with Perrin's French lyrics and Lalo Schifrin's arrangements, and The Double Six of Paris Sing Ray Charles, which was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1965. English Wikipedia says that her solo on John Coltrane's "Naima", on the 1962 LP, established her as one of the great jazz singers. Universalis adds that DownBeat named the group the best international vocal group in 1961, 1965 and 1966. The Swingle Singers grew out of her ensemble under Ward Swingle, who left the group to lead them. The full account of the group and its records is on the Les Double Six page.

In 1965 her health failed again. AllMusic says she led a second version of the group that year and that, when she fell ill, the pianist and bandleader Jef Gilson tried to hold it together until it split in 1966. She stopped performing. In 1968 her husband was offered an engineering post in Philadelphia, where French Wikipedia says she taught singing at a school; the family came back to France in 1970.

From 1972 she worked as a translator, and the list is long. She began with science fiction and fantasy, among them Roger Zelazny, Robert Sheckley, James Blish and Dean Koontz, and Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17; French Wikipedia adds Salman Rushdie's first novel Grimus (1975), which she sometimes signed as Maud Perrin. In the 1980s and at the start of the 1990s she turned to Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Louise Erdrich's Tracks and Love Medicine, and to musicians' lives: the memoir of Dizzy Gillespie, the autobiography of Nina Simone and, with her daughter Isabelle, the memoir of Quincy Jones. From 1989 she and Isabelle were the regular French translators of John le Carré, and later of Ha Jin. French Wikipedia lists the Prix Halpérine-Kaminsky of the Société des gens de lettres, awarded in 1999.

Music kept turning up. French Wikipedia says she appears on the recording of "Manque de classe", a track on Jacques Higelin's 1982 album Higelin '82, and that she wrote the lyrics of "Les Saisons du plaisir" for Jean-Pierre Mocky's film of that title, with music by Gabriel Yared. Henri Salvador's 1985 album Henri credits her as writer of two of its songs, "L'Année de nos 20 ans" and "Jamais la magie". In 1991 she was the vocal supervisor of Boppin' in French, recorded by the vocal group Vox Office with Laurent de Wilde on piano and released in 1992: a dozen pieces, mostly bebop standards with French lyrics, from "Four Brothers" to "Round 'Bout Midnight", the method of the Double Six passed to a younger group. English Wikipedia cites a death notice in Ouest-France and a Washington Post obituary of November 18, 2010 for her passing.

She came to jazz as a bebop-era pianist, and the first record under her name shows a player and singer at home in the cool, small-group side of the style, with Raney, Shank and Weill alongside standards. Her real mark is as an arranger and lyricist. She worked from recordings: each part of a big-band chart or each solo became a vocal line, and the French words were written to carry the rhythm and vowels of the original phrasing, sometimes witty, sometimes poetic, so that a voice stands for a trumpet or a baritone saxophone. Her model was Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and the repertoire she set ranged from Basie and Parker to Mulligan, Miles Davis and Coltrane; AllMusic lists her as co-writer of "Boplicity" and "Scrapple from the Apple". Her own voice is documented mostly in the group setting and in the "Naima" solo. No interview in which she names her teachers or her own favourite pianists was found.