Only five days after his 93rd birthday, I’m sorry to have to say adios to Lalo Schifrin.
Schifrin, the composer of perhaps the most indelible of all television themes – that for “Mission: Impossible” – was born Boris Claudio Schifrin (Lalo was a childhood nickname) in Buenos Aires on June 21, 1932.
At university, he studied sociology and law, but by then a life in music had been seemingly preordained. His father was concertmaster of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, and by the age of 6, Lalo was studying piano with Enrique Barenboim, father of Daniel Barenboim. He took further lessons with Andreas Karalis, one-time head of the Kyiv Conservatory (then living in Argentina), and studied harmony with Juan Carlos Paz.
Schifrin entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of 20 (Olivier Messiaen was among his teachers) and indulged his love of jazz while moonlighting in the city’s clubs. At home, American jazz had been strictly forbidden under the nationalist regime of Juan Perón, but a friend serving in the U.S. Merchant Marine was able to smuggle some in some records from New Orleans. Schifrin described his jazz conversion, at a live performance of Louis Armstrong, to “a religious awakening.” He was also taken with the Gershwin biopic “Rhapsody in Blue.”
When Lalo returned to Argentina – Perón was deposed in 1955 – it wasn’t long before he formed his own 16-piece jazz orchestra, which received national exposure on a weekly variety show on Buenos Aires television. In 1956, he came to the attention of Dizzy Gillespie, for whom he composed an extended work for big band, “Gillespiana,” in 1958. That same year, he found work as an arranger for Xaver Cugat’s Latin dance orchestra.
After Gillespie was forced to disband his own orchestra for financial reasons, Schifrin was hired as a pianist in his new quintet, allowing him to move to New York City. He became a U.S. resident and moved to Los Angeles in 1963. His naturalization would follow in 1969.
In Hollywood, screen composers such as Alex North, Elmer Bernstein, and Henry Mancini had already been experimenting with jazz in their music, beginning in the 1950s, but, after Duke Ellington’s “Anatomy of a Murder,” Schifrin took jazz-symphonic fusion in film to new heights.
In all, Schifrin was the composer of over 100 film and television scores, including those for “Cool Hand Luke,” “Bullitt,” “Dirty Harry,” “Enter the Dragon,” “Mannix,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “Rush Hour,” and of course “Mission: Impossible.”
Not everyone was a fan. Director William Friedkin was so displeased with Schifrin’s music for “The Exorcist” that he hurled the master tape out into the parking lot, in the presence of the composer. Schifrin had written music for the trailer, which had reportedly scared the pants off preview audiences, so the executives at Warner Bros. told Friedkin they wanted him to tone it down. Friedkin being Friedkin – this is, after all, the guy who fired guns on set to unnerve his actors and filmed the chase scene in “The French Connection” without a permit – he didn’t convey the message. Instead, he fired Schifrin and crammed his soundtrack with equally disturbing music by avant-garde masters Krzysztof Penderecki, George Crumb, Anton Webern, and Hans Werner Henze, not to mention Mike Oldfield.
Happily, most of Schifrin’s other collaborators were more genial. He worked frequently with Clint Eastwood and scored George Lucas’ first feature, “THX-1138.” In all, he earned 22 Grammy nominations (winning five), four Primetime Emmy nominations, and six Academy Award nominations. He received an honorary Oscar in 2018.
Schifrin made a very healthy living arranging and composing across genres, including bossa nova, jazz, bebop, rock, and classical, all the while cashing those lucrative Hollywood paychecks. Alongside the theme to “Mission: Impossible,” the music he composed for the road-tarring sequence in “Cool Hand Luke,” picked up as the theme for ABC “Eyewitness News,” kept those sweet royalties rolling in.
If anything, when “Mission: Impossible” made the leap to the big screen in 1996, the theme gained renewed vigor in a franchise that has spanned nearly 20 years.
The four-note motto that propels Schifrin’s most memorable music sprang from Morse code for “M” (dash dash) “I” (dot dot). The composer claimed he wrote it in only a matter of minutes, spurred by the idea of a lighted fuse and a desire to keep the tone light and fun, with the promise of adventure and excitement, but with a sense of humor. Further, he employed 5/4 rhythm to lend it a sense of unpredictability.
For Lalo Schifrin, a multifaceted talent in so many fields, even the impossible was effortlessly, elegantly possible. R.I.P.
“Concierto Caribeño” for flute and orchestra
Lalo Schifrin and Dizzy Gillespie
“Cool Hand Luke”
Rejected score from “The Exorcist”
The disturbing trailer
Lalo receives his honorary Academy Award from Eastwood
Schifrin’s greatest hit
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