You are British?”, Lalo Schifrin asks down the line from Los Angeles, late one dreary November evening. “I had great times in London, Coventry, Ireland and Scotland . . . Incredible. British composers, Elgar, oh! Fantastic. I have a great appreciation.” He pauses, then adds, “I have a great appreciation for you talking to me, too, and I hope that we see each other one day in person.” This charm, grace and enthusiasm is what has propelled Schifrin to a career at the top of his field for seven decades.
There is little disputing Boris Claudio ‘Lalo’ Schifrin’s legendary status; his theme tune alone for Mission: Impossible is one of the most durable of all time. With every new instalment of the franchise – rebooted from the original TV series into blockbuster movies from the late 90s onwards – the unmistakable jazzy 5/4 splash further enshrines itself in the global collective consciousness. It could be said in its field that only Monty Norman’s James Bond theme has greater resonance.
“Mission: Impossible?”, Schifrin repeats. “I’m very pleasantly surprised. I cannot believe that is still going on. Everybody’s doing it and God bless them.” Everybody has – it has been covered by artists from The Ventures and Leonard Nimoy to the “other two” out of U2. Best of all was Lizzy Mercer Descloux’s wonky 1979 Ze Records take on it.
In 2010, the composition of the song became the subject of a Lipton’s Tea commercial screened in over 20 countries. Six years later, the piece was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame.
Mission: Impossible is the mere tip of the iceberg. But who is Lalo Schifrin? Is he a jazzer, a classicist, or a soundtracker? As he has said: “Leave [it] to the musicologists and the historians to put labels. I do my music.” And music is what he has done for a very long time. A career that began in his native Argentina in the 50s, before moving to Paris to study at the Conservatoire, then New York before settling in Los Angeles in the 60s. The son of the concert master at the Teatro Colon Opera House in Buenos Aires, the young Schifrin received an extensive course of piano tuition from Enrique Barenboim from the age of six. Steeped in classical, by his teens Schifrin became enthralled with jazz. It would be his intertwining of the two that would make him such a rare talent. He was influenced by Astor Piazzolla, 11 years his senior. “Astor was a friend of mine,” he recalls. “I was going to the Paris Conservatoire; he was studying music with me, too. We became friends – when he wrote his Concerto For Piano And Orchestra, he asked me to conduct.”
It was meeting Dizzy Gillespie that changed everything. “Working with Dizzy was great, one of the best periods of my life. I came back from Paris to Buenos Aires and, in March 1956, I put together a big band with the best Argentinean jazz musicians. In the same year, by coincidence, the US State Department sent Dizzy on tour all over South America. He arrived that September.
I played for him and he asked who had written the music.
I told him that I had. He said, ‘Would you like to come to the United States?” And that’s why I’m here!”
Gillespie took Schifrin to New York, where he worked for three years. He wrote the extended Gillespiana suite for Dizzy, earning his first Grammy nomination (he has won four) for original jazz composition. Schifrin became a US resident in 1963 and a naturalised US citizen in 1969. Then came the call that would change his life.
“A Hollywood impresario sent someone to get me and sign a contract with MGM, and then I came to Los Angeles,” he explains. Schifrin had scored film already in Argentina, and his marriage of classical and jazz would prove intoxicating.
That set him on a path that established him as the go-to composer. Though the Shirley Eaton vehicle, Rhino, may be long-forgotten, it gave Schifrin a lucrative toe-hold in Hollywood, working alongside peers such as Krzysztof Komeda, Ennio Morricone, John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith. His cool, jazzy, break-rich scores would grace films such as Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, the Dirty Harry series and Enter The Dragon. The score he offered Peter Friedkin for The Exorcist was so frightening and atonal that Friedkin, under pressure from Warners, had it replaced with music by early 20th century composer Anton Webern, and famously, Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. He also scored the 1976 disaster movie, Rollercoaster, famed for Sparks’ on-screen Hollywood moment, and Caveman, the 1981 Ringo Starr vehicle on which Starr met his future wife, Barbara Bach.
Back in the 60s, Schifrin was well placed to ride the bossa nova craze that swept the US in the early part of the decade, and his albums, Piano, Springs And Bossa Nova and Samba Para Dos, were well-reviewed. He also arranged and produced many a jazz great. “One of the first records I did when I got there was Jimmy Smith’s The Cat. I’d already met the young players with Dizzy, so we’d played the US and Europe,” Schifrin says. “When I came to Los Angeles, I knew them.”
Schifrin’s solo work is arguably the most overlooked aspect of his career. He has released 54 albums, and a similar number of soundtracks. It is hard to pin him down to one style. There was a very good reason that his rare 1962 CBS release was simply called Lalo = Brilliance. His 1966 Verve release, The Dissection And Reconstruction Of Music From The Past As Performed By The Inmates Of Lalo Schifrin’s Demented Ensemble As A Tribute To The Memory Of The Marquis De Sade, was an album of stupendous improvisations around predominantly European classical pieces. Working with producer Creed Taylor, Schifrin created a fabulously intricate masterwork. The single taken from it was Beneath A Weeping Willow Shade, a gentle Rose Marie Jun-sung harpsichord piece; a poem set over a reimagining of a work by early American composer Francis Hopkinson, with, as Schifrin wrote in the sleevenotes, “The purpose of conveying my musical impressions of the Mona Lisa’s moustache.” It then breaks down to one of the breathiest, dirtiest flute solos that you’ll hear by Mingus flautist Jerome Richardson. And everyone thought it was just The Mothers Of Invention who were having a Freak Out! that year.
Schifrin also worked with the absolute cream: Crusaders’ drummer Stix Hooper on Enter The Dragon, CHIC orchestrator Gene Orloff on his Verve sides, bass legend Carol Kaye on a variety of work; the list is lengthy and distinguished. Did he have favourites? “Shelley Manne on drums, Conte Candoli on trumpet, Frank Rosolino on trombone; many of them were recommended to me, and they were very, very good,” he replies.
He frequently returned to his classical roots, arranging the groundbreaking first and subsequent Three Tenors concerts with Placido Domingo, Jose Carrreras and Luciano Pavarotti. In 1995, he recorded his first long-form classical work, the Lili’uokalani Symphony, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
His work has resonated via sampling: he can be heard on hundreds of records.
His Marxophone-heavy Danube Incident from 1968’s collectable More Mission: Impossible became the spine of Portishead’s Sour Times; Scorpio’s View from Dirty Harry did similar for Approach To Danger by NWA; the Enter The Dragon soundtrack, too, has been mined. He loves that his work endures. “I wrote Enter The Dragon – what people do with it is their problem,” he says. “If they want to use it as a sample, they have to pay royalties!”
Schifrin simply doesn’t stand still. He works with full orchestras to solo piano, depending, he says, “on the size of my ideas: sometimes it may be a piano solo. One of my latest works is solo piano; Miriam Conti, a great player.”
At the other end of the scale, Schifrin recently wrote a concerto for Tuba And Orchestra, working with Gene Pokorny, the tuba player of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He is only the third composer to be honoured by the Academy – the other two were Alex North and Ennio Morricone. He is grateful, but, as always, looking forward. “The Oscar is the point of departure for other adventures,” he asserts. “I’m not staying in one place, or saying that I have arrived. It’s a great honour, but I have to continue – I still have not done everything that I’ve wanted to do. I’m not retiring; I keep writing music.”
How would he like to be remembered?
“You are asking a question that you can answer, not me,” he laughs. Through sampling and Mission: Impossible, it’s clear that Schifrin’s influence will last. He is gracious that RC should think so, but adds: “I think the influence of Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin is far more important.” When I offer that he is too modest, his voice sharpens. “I’m not – I’m telling you the truth. For instance, to me, one of the most important compositions that I love and need is Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony – every night before going to sleep, I play it in my mind. Believe it or not, it swings, just like jazz; the second movement, there are amazing variations which are like improvisation in jazz; there is an energy that is incredible. I heard it the first time when
my father was the concert master of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic. He would always take me to opera. There was an Italian conductor, Victor De Sabata – the first time
he came to Buenos Aires, I saw his rehearsal of the Seventh Symphony. That, for me, changed everything. My father wanted me to be a lawyer – and I’d studied law for six years in Buenos Aires. Everything I do is due to the Seventh Symphony.”
With that, the line crackles and Schifrin bids us farewell, looking forward to his next challenge.
The Early Years is on Enlightenment.
