Jean-Jacques Perrey, one of the pioneers of making the synthesizer a showpiece for pop music, died on November 4th. Along with Juan Garcia Esquivel, Wendy Carlos, Gershon Kingsley, Brian Eno, Raymond Scott, Isao Tomita and dozens of others, Perrey took electronic music out of the hands of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and gave it to the listening public in the form of easily digested pop snippets.
Perrey and Kingsley wrote and performed Baroque Hoedown on their 1967 album Kaleidoscopic Vibrations. The song would be used as the basis of Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade.