Films and Music | Do you know Lalo Schifrin?

Do you know Lalo Schifrin? No? Perhaps the name isn't that familiar. What you most likely know, however, are a few of the film scores the Argentinian-born composer composed—over 200 pieces, many of them legendary. Schifrin's favorite genre was jazzing up his classical and symphonic training to entice and entice generations. He was one of the first film composers ever to adapt jazz rhythms. Musically, he lived between two stools—but he made a big splash out of it.

In 1966, Boris Claudio Schifrin, just 34 years old, composed the soundtrack for the US television series "Mission: Impossible" (which was called "Kobra, nehmen Sie" on ARD). Frenetic violins, a rapid staccato of brass instruments, a shredding piano – music for eternity, one of the immortal theme songs in TV and cinema history. Schifrin had written the opening credits "blind," he didn't know the images. "We'll follow your music. Give us something rhythmic," was the message he received from the television station CBS. That's the way to work. Journalists dream of it. Sometimes you get lucky.

Schifrin's solution to the problem was a tough, bold, stirring 5/4 time signature that revolutionized cinema. He saw things this way: "The composer's attitude toward a film is similar to that of Mozart, Verdi, Donizetti, and Wagner toward their dramas and comedies. The art of writing for the cinema has to do with realizing the counterpoint between image and music." Sounds simpler than it is. Talent is too little for this synthesis. Fanatical cinema visits on Calle Lavalle in the Microcentro of his hometown of Buenos Aires were a strict prerequisite. And, of course, good old obsession.

Fortunately, Schifrin got off on the wrong track early on. Once you're crooked, you can't really straighten out. His father, Luis, was concertmaster and first violinist of the Philharmonic Orchestra at the world-famous Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. At the age of six, he sent Lalo to the piano classes of Enrique, the father of pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. He studied composition with Juan Carlos Paz. Lalo was about to graduate as a lawyer when the muses happily intervened: the 20-year-old was accepted on a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. So by day, he mostly attended Olivier Messiaen's classes, and by night, he hung out in the same jazz bars as his compatriots and soon-to-be friends Astor Piazzolla and Julio Cortázar, who would also soon become famous. And Lalo pounded the keys wherever he could to earn a living.

A few years later (1956), back in Buenos Aires, fate beckoned him again. Hello, Lalo! With his own big band (including the top-notch tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri), he was playing in a dive called "Rendez Vous" when, by chance, none other than the bebop god and jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and his friend Quincy Jones showed up there one weekday. They jammed with Schifrin and Piazzolla. Gillespie immediately took the Argentinian under his wing. Schifrin's first work for the trumpeter was a suite in five movements entitled "Gillespiana," which Schifrin completed in 1958. He had begun it on the ship that had taken them both to New York. They were now a quintet, and the Argentinian was its undisputed musical director until 1962; in addition to his work as a composer and arranger, he played the piano.

Lalo Schifrin subsequently devoted himself increasingly to Latin jazz and bossa nova. The path to LA and Hollywood for the composer, jazz pianist (he subsequently played with Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Eric Dolphy, among others), and now also orchestral conductor (he conducted Astor Piazzolla's bandoneon concertos, for example) was clear. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came knocking. The Argentinian emphasized that the big screen was by no means too big for him. He composed the music for the film "The Unbreakable" (1967) starring Paul Newman, resulting in the first of his six Oscar nominations.

Two years earlier, he had already composed the music for "The Cincinnati Kid" (with Steve McQueen and Karl Malden). In 1968, he scored "Bullit": This McQueen crime thriller has no plot, the editing is superb, and Schifrin's cool jazz score is the best ever created, regardless of genre. Schifrin's credo of genius is most evident in "Bullit": the cinematic images aren't simply accompanied, but driven. Absolute madness, not just for its era. The best record in the world, even before "Revolver" (Beatles)!

Lalo Schifrin was also responsible for the music for George Lucas's technocratic science fiction dystopia "THX 1138" (1971). However, its mega-success only came with the Clint Eastwood films . After "Coogan's Bluff" (1968) and "Betrayed" (1971, in my opinion the best film with Clint Eastwood as an actor), Schifrin went on to compose the soundtracks for Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry" series, in which Eastwood plays hardboiled cop Harry Callahan, hunting down murderers and other rapists (all Germans). Schifrin composed more elegiac sounds for the brutal Callahan. Box office revenues skyrocketed. In addition to various soundtracks for John Sturges films, "The Man with the Death Claw" was the order of the day in 1973. The whole world loved these Bruce Lee rom-coms. It was his last film. The sound was atmospheric; Schifrin had ventured into new territory, mixing funk elements with samples and sounds from Asia.

In 1975, Schifrin moved even closer to soul and funk music and composed for the TV crime series "Starsky & Hutch," his last real success. From 1974 to 1976, "Petrocelli" aired on ZDF. There's nothing I've ever watched more (except "Arpad, the Gypsy"). In 1990, Schifrin conducted the "Three Tenors," high culture for idiots. In 1998, he returned to his roots once again with Carlos Saura's top film "Tango." In the fall of 2018, he finally received an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement from his friend Clint Eastwood.

Lalo Schifrin died a week ago in Beverly Hills at the age of 93. Only cinephiles still remember him. And a handful of porteños, the inhabitants of Buenos Aires who consider themselves superior to others, namely Europeans. They tend to be the poorer ones.