This article addresses issues of translation and transnational exchange, taking as a case study the two-pronged collaborative relationship between the French jazz singer, lyricist, and translator Mimi Perrin (1926–2010) and the African American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), whose memoir Perrin translated into French and with whom she collaborated on a 1963 jazz album. Perrin, who is the article's principal focus, founded the successful vocalese singing group Les Double Six in 1959 and then, after abandoning her musical career for health reasons in 1966, forged a new career as a literary translator. The article begins by examining her work as a translator of African American literature and demonstrates that her French edition of Gillespie's autobiography lacks some of the original's connotative cultural signification, in particular meanings conveyed through the book's use of black dialect. The article then turns to Perrin's work as a vocalese lyricist, which is notable in that she conceived of her lyricization of jazz improvisations as a sort of translation process, one that involved carefully selecting words in order to mimic the sounds of musical instruments. Her musical innovations are exemplified by a series of original French texts, set to Gillespie's music, on science fiction themes.

This article reconsiders the cultural significance and historical impact of the well-known virtuosic piano composition The Banjo by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Throughout the early nineteenth century, the banjo and the piano inhabited very specific and highly contrasting performance circumstances: black folk entertainment and minstrel shows for the former, white middle- and upper-class parlors and concert halls for the latter. In The Banjo, Louis Moreau Gottschalk lifted the banjo out of its familiar contexts and placed it in the spaces usually privileged for the piano. Taking its inspiration from both African American and minstrel banjo playing techniques, Gottschalk's composition relaxed and muddled the boundaries among performance spaces, racial and class divisions, and two conspicuously different musical instruments in an egalitarian effort to demonstrate that, contrary to the opinions of some mid-nineteenth-century musical critics and tastemakers, both the piano and the banjo have a place in the shaping of American music culture.

With the American Dream seizing center stage, reality television competitions often feature disabled auditionees and their moving tales of overcoming adversity. Musical—and frequently singing—abilities potentially normalize and envoice contestants while silencing vital conversations about the exploitation, stigmatization, and corporate politics at work in these seductive narratives. How do chronicles of overcoming overcome consumers? And how might inspiration porn about disability disable beholders’ emotional, intellectual, and rhetorical faculties? As fans and scholars resist or succumb to the tearfulness induced by sentimental stories, they must chart tricky routes through the heady skepticism of Scylla and the naïve waterworks of Charybdis.