The world lost one of its greatest musical talents on Thursday when the great Argentinian composer Lalo Schifrin died after complications from pneumonia. The sheer genius of Schifrin was evident throughout his storied career, which included composing music for film and television, with iconic themes from notable works such as “Mission: Impossible” and “Enter the Dragon.” However, he also played with some of the greatest jazz musicians in history, all while constantly musically redefining the term “cool.”
Through his stylistic tendencies for complex rhythms and use of piano and woodwinds, the influence of jazz on his soundtracks was considered one of his hallmarks. However, Schifrin’s talent was never confined to one genre, and he was equally adept at writing scores for a symphony orchestra or a minimal chamber ensemble. His career is peppered with thrilling jazz scores, such as “Bullitt” and “Dirty Harry,” but often takes a left turn into material like “The Amityville Horror” and his unused score for “The Exorcist,” music that unsettled Warners so much that they demanded he be taken off the film.
Schifrin’s career was also defined by collaborations with other artists, some of whom were some of the biggest names in their field. Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel–the actor and director of Dirty Harry, respectively–were regular collaborators, resulting in such films as “The Beguiled” and “Charley Varrick.” He scored the unforgettable “Cool Hand Luke” for Paul Newman, and provided the music for George Lucas’ first feature, the dystopian “THX 1138.” And of course, there was the bebop great Dizzy Gillespie, who recruited Schifrin into his circle, although only after the composer audaciously turned him down.
While he went by Lalo (a contraction of his second name, Claudio), his birth name was Boris. Born in 1932 in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, to Luis and Clara, he absorbed classical music from an early age thanks to his father’s position as the leader of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic. However, he was determined to become a lawyer, studying both law and music. An early encounter with the school band led him to reconsider his career. Still, he continued to study both until he won a scholarship to the prestigious Conservatoire de Musique in Paris.
Studying abroad also allowed him to indulge in one of his musical obsessions—jazz. Some of the biggest names in American jazz would come to France to play, such as Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald. Seeing them helped improve his own skills, which he honed while performing nights at the Club St Germain; after three years in Paris, he took everything he had learned back to Argentina, where he would start Lalo Schifrin Y Su Orquesta. The band introduced contemporary jazz to the country, and even had a big hit with a fabulous big band arrangement of Horace Silver’s standard “Doodlin’.” It was thanks to them that Schifrin had his first encounter with the great trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in 1956, who was touring Argentina.
Gillespie was so impressed he offered Schifrin a place in his band, but the composer was just beginning to branch out into the new medium of film scoring. He scored two features in Argentina—1957’s “Venga a bailar el rock” (“Let’s Dance to Rock”) and 1958’s “El Jefe” (“The Boss”). Once he had finished with those, he moved to America’s East Coast, where he recorded a five-moment jazz suite that he had written for Gillespie not long after the pair had met. An essential record, “Gillespiana” was a big success, and the collaboration reinvigorated Gillespie’s career.
Nominated for a Grammy, the album was released by the legendary jazz label Verve, which was sold to MGM in the same year. This meant Schifrin was under contract with the studio, and after three years and several albums with Gillespie, MGM decided to hire him to score his first American picture—1964’s “Rhino!”, a typical sixties adventure yarn with Robert Culp as a zoologist fighting rhinoceros poachers in Africa. Schifrin wrote about fifty minutes of exotic score with previews of what was yet to come, including elements of his beloved jazz music.
Schifrin would often play down how much jazz was in his film music, but it was jazz that helped his film and television music career explode. It was a case of both bringing something new and being in the right place at the right time. The new was his effortless ability to present complex music, including different time signatures, and the time was the mid-fifties into the sixties, where cool jazz had become the zeitgeist in New York.
Led by the likes of Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and Bill Evans, cool jazz had a huge effect on the genre, and this was reflected in film music of the time. 1951’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” was a powerful drama with an equally powerful jazz score by Alex North that underpinned the complex psychological makeup of the characters. Davis himself joined the fray in 1957 when he recorded a defining jazz classic score for Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows,” with a gorgeous, lonely trumpet becoming an icon of noir, despite coming at the end of the classic age of the genre. Meanwhile, Elmer Bernstein brought powerful jazz to film and television, with the soundtrack to Otto Preminger’s “The Man With the Golden Arm” and music for John Cassavetes show “Johnny Stattaco,” who himself was a jazz player as well as a private dick. Duke Ellington also got in the act with Preminger, composing a classic score for Anatomy of a Murder.
But it was Schifrin who brought his unique style to the heart of new American culture, with the television. 1965 saw him not only scoring two episodes of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”, but also rearranging Jerry Goldsmith’s theme. Schifrin brought his Latin heritage by placing it into a bossa nova setting that transformed it into something much catchier, and more likely to have viewers running to the television. And then producer Bruce Geller called.
Geller wanted that instant identification for his new show, “Mission: Impossible.” A branding just like the Wrigley’s Doublemint gum commercial or the Oscar Mayer Weiner jingle, Schifrin went above and beyond and created a theme that became cultural shorthand for achieving difficult tasks, much like Monty Norman and John Barry’s James Bond theme. Written in an off-kilter time signature of 5/4, it continues to reverberate around the world, with the eighth instalment of the film series—“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,”—having been released in May. The films have afforded the likes of Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, and Michael Giacchino the chance to put their own stamp on Schifrin’s theme. But while it’s had all sorts of different orchestrations, the melody itself hasn’t changed a bit. And probably never will.
As well as “Mission: Impossible,” Schifrin wrote a number of popular themes for the small screen, including another Geller project, “Mannix,” “Medical Center,” and “Petrocelli.” He also wrote a fanfare for Paramount Television in 1974 and composed the main titles for the first season of “Starsky & Hutch.” The theme was replaced for the second season in favour of Tom Scott’s “Gotcha” ditty, however, it was another pair of detectives that threw Schifrin into the ring of major film scoring, and once again, jazz was at the centre of it all.
Peter Yates’ 1968 thriller “Bullitt” saw Steve McQueen as a cool but hardened detective in San Francisco investigating the murder of a gangster, with the accompaniment of Schifrin’s ice cool jazz score. It was perfect for the picture, not only for the title character, but the way he used the unique textures and colours of jazz to create a murky world of crime and death. Just listen to ‘Ice Pick Mike’ and its deft snare combined with a threatening low piano motif, instantly tense and threatening.
By the time Schifrin scored “Dirty Harry” in 1971, he had already worked with Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel several times, composing music for such pictures as “Coogan’s Bluff” and “The Beguiled.” For the title character, Schifrin decided on mood instead of theme—like Bullitt, Harry is as cool as can be. Schifrin employed a groovy jazz-funk approach in the main titles, which instantly establishes Eastwood’s nonchalant attitude. He did, however, write a theme for the villain of the piece, psychotic sniper Scorpio. It’s almost like a horror movie score, with a chilling female vocal that both captivates and haunts us, much like the city he’s terrorising.
While jazz is the style for which Schifrin was known, he consistently demonstrated his talent in other musical idioms. For 1967’s “Cool Hand Luke,” he used a blend of country music and Aaron Copland-esque Americana to underline Paul Newman’s folk hero, and he went on to write a number of symphonic scores in his career, with 1973’s iconic “Enter the Dragon” mixing both eastern and western influences. The same year, he was asked to compose the music for “The Exorcist,” but when Warners heard the score to the film’s teaser trailer, they demanded director William Friedkin ask Schifrin to make it a little less intense. Friedkin, stubborn as ever, fired Schifrin instead.
False rumours later abounded that the composer used some of that music in his score to 1979’s “The Amityville Horror,” but they are clearly different tonally. Schifrin’s score is quite lyrical in places, with an undercurrent of religious doom that is responsible for much of the picture’s overall effect, which garnered him a fourth Oscar nomination. He received a total of six nominations and was presented with an honorary statue in 2018.
Schifrin often found his home with genre pictures, not only scoring a further three Dirty Harry instalments, but also films such as “The Cat From Outer Space” for Disney and violent thriller “A Stranger is Watching,” which was director Sean S. Cunningham’s first film after the notorious “Friday the 13th” (1980). Genres like science fiction gave Schifrin the opportunity to experiment, such as with his fascinating score for George Lucas’ debut “THX 1138,” and he liked the way electronic synthesisers added another range of colours to his palette.
Schifrin is survived by his second wife Donna, whom he married in 1971. He had two children, William and Frances, from a previous marriage, and later had a son, Ryan, with Donna. Both have collaborated with Schifrin in their own ways; Donna founded the record label Aleph Records in 1997, which served as a springboard for releasing many of Lalo’s soundtracks, as well as new compositions by him. Ryan became a filmmaker, and his father composed music for two of his projects, 2013’s “Abominable” and 2015’s “Tales of Halloween.”
Lalo Schifrin was 93. A legend of jazz and one of the figureheads of the silver age of film music, he never rested on his laurels and always created fascinating music, for movies or otherwise. He will be missed tremendously, but he will be even more greatly remembered.
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