Transcript for the Piece Audio version of WNYC's Fishko Files: Lalo Schifrin

Lalo Schifrin Script

As often happens with people from far-away places, composer Lalo Schifrin's first glimpse of America... was in the movies. He was a child growing up in Buenos Aires....

Schifrin: ...I was very young at the time, maybe 12 or 13 years old. And we went to see the movie Rhapsody in Blue with my mother and my father and it was... I really like it.

'Rhapsody in Blue' was the 1945, Hollywood-ized version of the life of George Gershwin....And it was the music, even more than the movie, that floored young Lalo.

Schifrin: In Rhapsody in Blue he uses the blue notes. It was fantastic. I didn't know anything about Gershwin.. I went right away to a bookstore that sold American scores and I bought it and I learned it.

Next thing you know -- he'd mastered it.

Schifrin: As a matter of fact I played it in Buenos Aires with Symphony Orchestra. And I was very good. And then I, the next year I played “Concerto in F.”

You could say this was the beginning of a lifetime - Lalo Schifrin's lifetime -
of falling in love with, pursuing, influencing -embracing the American sound.

A few years later, when Louis Armstrong came to perform in Buenos Aires, that clinched it...

Schifrin: ...it was like I became converted, it was like a religious conversion because I came from a classical background. My father was the concertmaster of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic and ..My first piano teacher was Enrique Barenboim, who was the father of Daniel Barenboim....so I didn't know anything about jazz...

His awakening continued through high school..

Schifrin: Of course when I discovered modern jazz, modern American jazz, I converted to that, you know: So Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, George Shearing - all these great players of that school. I remember the first time I heard a Charlie Parker record. was 'Billy's Bounce'-I was very moved by it...

By the time Dizzy Gillespie came to Buenos Aires as part of a 1956 State Department tour, Lalo Schifrin was in his 20s - and he'd formed his own big band. He'd swallowed the sound whole...and he was asked to play for the great Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy heard Schifrin, and asked him what was by then the obvious question:

Schifrin: He said: “Would you like to come to the United States?”... I thought he was joking, but here I am. A handshake with Dizzy was better than any contract you could have with lawyers or anything. He said that, and I came.

Schifrin spent the early 60's playing and touring with Dizzy Gillespie's band: this Schifrin, soloing at Carnegie Hall in 1961.

And on tour in Paris with the band.

And at the Museum of Modern Art in New York around that time.

Through Dizzy, he met everyone, and played everywhere…

Schifrin: I played with Coltrane, with Stan Getz, I did records with them…with everybody…I mean, the greatest musicians of that era.

And that's all very nice, but none of this is what made Lalo Schifrin famous. What we know him for in this country is his work as a very North American composer of film and television scores. He blames that on his early boyhood, too...

Schifrin: I like opera. My father introduced me even when I was a child to opera. I was fascinated by the idea of dramatic story that develops with music. And I paid attention to Verdi, Puccini, Bizet…

Especially the Verdi “Otello” seemed to Schifrin to be just like movie music.

Schifrin: So that gave me the basis of becoming a film composer...Otello and all the others, Carmen, and Tosca -

Although the composer hastens to add...

... the movies I had to do were not Tosca!

The shows and movies Schifrin scored were, indeed, not Tosca. But somehow he took his European influences, classical music, opera, and so on, and wrapped them in his conversion to American jazz, and made something distinctively, popularly American. The Mission Impossible theme, for example, is still one of the most memorable, imitated, parodied and beloved tunes in existence - as well as being one of the more inevitable-sounding uses of 5/4 time - 5 beats to the measure.

He went somewhere else again with the score to Norman Jewison's The Cincinatti Kid, about the battle between a Jr. and a Sr. poker player.
Steve McQueen the arrogant youngster to Edward G. Robinson's old hand...

And there’s the celebrated Cool Hand Luke music...

Schifrin: You remember, what we've got here is a failure to communicate. It became iconic... I learned a lot about bluegrass music because it happens in the South in a southern prison during the Korean war.

Another movie, another American style…

And another in The Amityville Horror.

If Lalo Schifrin had his way, we’d be combining all these forms…

Schifrin: There’s an imaginary world in which a street in Vienna intersects an avenue in New York. And in that corner there is a tavern. And in the tavern there is a piano. And there is Duke Ellington…Gustav Mahler…Ludwig von Beethoven…and Dizzy Gillespie. And they are exchanging ideas.
A gigantic jam session takes place.

That gigantic fantasy jam session is pretty much what goes on in Lalo Schifrin’s brain with every piece he writes.

From the Fishko Files, I’m Sara Fishko

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