Lalo Schifrin
for The Wire Magazine - 2001
A match is lit, a fuselage burns. Accompanying it is possibly one of the most famous signature tunes in the world, a high paced mix of menacing piano, screaming horns and racing percussion. The 5/4 title theme to Mission: Impossible is known the world over. Like many of the pieces written by it's composer Lalo Schifrin it has entered the general lexicon and vocabulary of the 20th century, it's themes and motifs often more recognisable than the show they were originally composed for. Schifrin's varied career has seen him take on almost every genre going; from dabbling in everything from disco, rock and opera to conducting symphonic works. However it's probably for his many innovative jazz-influenced scores for film and TV that the composer is still best known for.
Born in Buenos Aires 1932 Schifrin was raised in a musical environment. His father, Luis, was concert master for the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, and along with the likes of Juan Carlos Paz, Enrique Barenhoim and Mariano Drago, helped Lalo to quickly become an accomplished pianist. Although taking university courses in sociology and law it was clearly music that occupied the mind of the young Schifrin. Thus at age 19 he applied for and received a scholarship to study composition at the Paris Conservatoire where lectures from Oliver Messiaen would help shape his musical outlook.
“He (Messiaen) opened my ears, my perception to many things I didn't know before. I'm always going to be grateful to him. The duration of time, what we call rhythm, he extended the idea. The augmentation and diminuation of values in mathematics are called rational numbers; 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. He instead used irrational numbers. What happens if you add a fifth of a value to each one of the notes of a figure? What happens if you add a dot to each note? It becomes extremely complex and complicated so you have to hear and perceive those rhythms. He created scales of dynamics, scales of attacks: marcato, staccato, legato, non-legato and composed with these kind of scales besides the scales of pitch. He taught me about modes of limited transposition. They were very useful to me in the music for films because there is a twilight zone between tonal music and atonal music. You create a grey zone in which it is not totally atonal but it is not totally tonal either to help create tension. I'll give you an example: one of the scales of limited transposition was the basis of the main theme for Mission: Impossible. Not the main title theme that became popular but the suspense theme, the one that sounds like a paramilitary operation (credited as The Plot on soundtrack recordings). This piece was totally based on one of the scales of Messiaen.”
At the same time however his love of jazz music was flowering and Schifrin entered a double life; studying classical music by day and earning a living at night playing in the jazz clubs of Paris. However because of animosity between the two parties Schifrin kept his double existence secret.
“When I became a teenager I discovered modern American jazz. However I also discovered that the jazz and classical people didn't like one another. They didn't understand each other. The best thing for me to do was to keep quiet. The jazz musicians would say that classical was long-haired music while the classical musicians would say 'I'm not interested in jazz that's not music'. This though helped me to develop my own voice, to put the two things together. I didn't think that there were any walls. It's like two streams being separated by a dam. If there is no dam then all of a sudden the water is one water. The music is one music.”
By the mid-1950's Schifrin had returned to his native Argentina and formed one of the country's first jazz orchestras, a 16 piece big band. As well as regular appearances on TV for the band the composer also started to take on numerous other film, television and radio projects. Having already written an extended work for Dizzy Gillespie's big band, Gillespiana, he found himself offered the post of pianist by the legendary musician. Relocating to New York for this job Schifrin soon starting working with numerous other jazz greats, amongst them Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Smith and Count Basie, his work varying from arranging to writing to performing.
“For Count Basie I arranged. Count Basie had a personality that was his personality and you had to adjust yourself to that. I happened to like what he did - I couldn't change him to my style. But people like Stan Getz came to me to make an album in which I would do things to take him somewhere else. All these artists are different. The main point of working collaboratively was to inspire them as writers. They're good already, they don't need me, they don't need anybody. It's to create an atmosphere that will bring the best out of them.”
With a steadily increasing number of commissions Schifrin soon moved to Hollywood where his jazz influenced scores for TV shows like Mission Impossible and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or films like Joyhouse (1964) and The Cincinnati Kid (1965) quickly gained widespread attention. Often encapsulating simple, memorable melodies with strong, complex rhythms, Schifrin's music, much like contemporaries Henry Mancini and John Barry, would heavily enhance and influence the character of the films themselves. Schifrin claims that his freedom to move away from the standard orchestrated score was helped immeasurably by the climate of film making of the time.
“The studios liked my music but at the time the United States public was going through a very traumatic moment in their history which was the war in Vietnam. There was a lot of protest amongst the students and as they were the principal movie goers many films were made for them. Things I worked on like Cool Hand Luke (1968) were really films of protest and that's why my music fitted. Even Bullitt (1968), he's a detective but a different kind of detective. Dirty Harry (1971), he plays his own rules. It was a different kind of attitude in general. It's mass psychology that helped me be with a new system of film making.”
“Hollywood was always conservative. The main thing was to break that conservatism and try and do something different. But if the film is conservative you can't do an avant-garde or jazzy score, you have to be with the movie. Many of the action films today are so expensive, and film making is not only an art form but also an industry, so you have to sometimes write the sort of music that goes with the scene. Now the movies have gone back to being simply sheer entertainment. I've done many of those too - you don't have to think too much. But I prefer doing the ones where I have to think because the contribution makes more sense.”
Part of the cult status of Schifrin's work was undoubtedly caused by the films and actors his music was associated with; Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Bruce Lee. However the public fascination with these actors is no doubt partly due to the laid-back cool of the themes and scores that accompanied their celluloid appearances.
“Those kinds of films helped me and I helped those films,” says Schifrin, “I had to think a lot before I wrote one note because I was not just writing music for the background, I was making a contribution to the whole film. In the case of Cool Hand Luke I started with just one guitar solo. These things were not done in Hollywood before and they loved it because it was fresh, it was something new.”
Considering the status of Schifrin's work it's surprising how much of it is still relatively hard to get hold of; despite recording numerous projects for labels such as Verve, Colpix and MGM, most have yet to be reissued on CD. Even the soundtracks to high profile films such as Dirty Harry are only really available through rigorous searching of specialist second hand shops. However that seems not to have affected a current fashionability in his music, sparked off by everything from hip-hop heads sampling early Schifrin breaks to advertising executives using the theme from Bullitt to help flog cars. “I feel pleasantly surprised but on the other hand I always wrote that music for the time, for the moment. Because Hollywood is an industry they create fashions like wide lapels, narrow lapels and that's not my fault. Film composers are now getting a lot more recognition as well. People are talking about music like they are talking about actors or directors which they didn't do when I first did it. Then it was just something in the background.”
Other high profile fans of Schifrin's work include Portishead who sampled a huge chunk from his beautifully mysterious piece “The Danube Incident” to form the basis of their track Sour Times. Impressed by the results (no doubt aided by a generous royalty agreement) Schifrin has an open-minded view towards this kind of reappropiation.
“I actually started sampling - I was a preclusior to all this,” he jokes, “I say this without bragging - it was true. When I did Enter The Dragon (1973) I used the voice of Bruce Lee from the movie in the actual soundtrack. I recorded the music and then mixed on the voice of Bruce from the film together. In Sudden Impact (1983) with Clint Eastwood I did the same thing. The beginning is so surreal; the music is so violent but what you see is a very peaceful scene of San Francisco at night, all tall buildings and lights. I needed to create a bridge between that reality to the reality of a detective working for the Police department in San Francisco. After the picture was shot I had a good idea; I wanted to use Clint's voice through a car radio asking for help. Clint called a friend of his who worked in the Hollywood Police Department and he wrote us a small script using all the correct terminology and I directed Clint reading this in the recording studio. I integrated his voice with the ending of the main title music. And the fact that people like Portishead are doing the same thing with my music now means that we're all in the same boat - I like it!”
Schifrin also gathered acclaim through his use of unorthodox instrumentation, incorporating everything from cymbalums, sitars, calliopes and banjos alongide unusual big band set ups. However he denies that he was trying to be experimental simply for the sake of it.
“I was just trying to create the sound in my head. I don't experiment. Someone once asked Picasso what he was looking for. He said 'I'm not looking for anything, I've found it' and I'm the same way. I don't look for things, I don't experiment. When I go to the score paper I already know what I'm going to do. The work of art is in the details. I do my experimentation in my head - I think a lot before I write things down. I go for walks and I hear things and put them together in my mind. I don't want you to think that I know everything - I always have something to learn. But I am usually well prepared. For instance with Enter The Dragon I felt equipped to recreate the music of the orient. And if I couldn't find an instrument in Hollywood - there were some koto players who could read the music but weren't good enough - I would get the koto sound by using either a different instrument or a combination of instruments that could be played well enough to get the same sound.”
Today Schifrin concentrates more on his classical leanings; alongside writing and conducting numerous symphonic works he's also become the arranger for popera outfit The Three Tenors. However it's for his work written between the early 60's and mid 70's that the composer remains at his most influential. Having covered so many different aspects of music I wondered if there was anything he still wanted to do:
“My wife always told me to be careful what I wish for,” he jokes, “Because it usually always ends up happening. I remember when I was very young, before I went to Paris, when I went out I said to my mother as a joke 'If Dizzy Gillespie calls tell him I'm not here.' Ten years later I ended up working with him. So who knows what the future holds.”?
