Films and music – do you know Lalo Schifrin?

Do you know Lalo Schifrin? No? Maybe you are not so familiar with the name. However, what you know very likely are a few of the film music that the native of Argentine composed, over 200 pieces, many of them legendary. Schifrin loves to have his classic and symphonic training across genre in order to bait and to be bewitched generations. As one of the first film composers, he adapted jazz rhythms. He lived musically between the chairs – but made the big wave out of it.

In 1966, Boris Claudio Schifrin, just 34 years old, composed the sound for the US television series “Mission: Impossible” (which in the ARD “Kobra, she was” called “). Frenetic violins, a rapid wind tapkato, the hiding piano- music for eternity, one of the immortal recognition melodies of TV and cinema history. Schifrin had written the opening credits “blind”, he didn’t know the pictures. “We follow your music. Give us something rhythmic «was the announcement that he had received from the television station CBS. This is how it can work. Journalists dream of it. Sometimes you are lucky.

Schifrin’s problem solution was a tough, cheeky, stirring 5/4 stroke that revolutionized the cinema. He saw things like this: »The behavior of the composer with regard to a film is similar to that of Mozart, Verdi, Donizetti and Wagner towards their dramas and comedies. The art of writing for the cinema has to do with realizing the counterpoint between picture and music. ”Sounds simple than it is. Talent is not enough for this synthesis. Fanatical search for cinema in the Calle Lavalle in the Microcentro of his birthplace Buenos Aires was a strict precondition. And of course the good old obsession.

Fortunately, Schifrin came on the wrong track early on. You don’t get wrong anymore. His father Luis was a concert champion and first violinist of the Philharmonic Orchestra in the world -famous Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires. At first he sent Lalo to the piano classes of Enrique, the father of the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. He was taught in composition at Juan Carlos Paz. Lalo was about to graduate as a lawyer when the muses were happily intervene: the 20-year-old was taken as a scholarship holder at the Paris Conservatory. During the day, he mostly took part in the classes of Olivier Messiaen, at night he drove through the same jazz-spelled cunken as his compatriots and soon friends Astor Piazzolla and Julio Cortázar, who should soon become famous. And Lalo drog into the keys wherever possible, because of giving bread.

A few years later (1956), now again in Buenos Aires, fate waved him again. Hello, Lalo! With his own big band (including the tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri, first cream), he played in a Kaschemme called “rendez vous” when one day one day during the week none other than the Bebop god and jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie opened with his buddy Quincy Jones. Together with Schifrin and Piazzolla, it was then jam. Ad hoc gillespie took the Argentinian under his wing. The first work for the trumpeter was a suite in five sets entitled “Gillespiana”, which Schifrin completed in 1958. He had started on the ship, which both transferred to New York. They were now a quintet, the Argentinian until 1962 its undisputed musical director; In addition to his work as a composer and arranger, he played the piano.

Then Lalo Schifrin devoted himself more and more to Latin Jazz and Bossa Nova. The path of the composer, jazz pianist (he subsequently played with Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Eric Dolphy) and now also orchestral conductor (for example, he conducted the bandoneon concerts from Astor Piazzolla) to La and Hollywood. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer knocked on. The Argentinian emphasized that the canvas was by no means too big for him. For the film “Der Standing” (1967) with Paul Newman, he created the music, which resulted in the first of his six Oscar nominations.

Two years earlier he had already composed the music for “Cincinnati Kid” (with Steve McQueen and Karl Malden). In 1968 he set “Bullit”: This McQueen thriller has no action, the cutting technique is great and the Cool Jazz film music by Schifrin is the best that has ever been created. With »Bullit« the credo of Schifrin’s ingenuity is most evident: the cinema images are not simply accompanied, but driven. Not only for this time the bright madness. Best plate in the world, still before »Revolver« (Beatles)!

Lalo Schifrin was also responsible for the music of the technocratic science fiction dystopia “THX 1138” by George Lucas (1971). However, the mega success only came through the Clint-Eeastwood films. After “Coogan’s big bluff” (1968) and “cheated” (1971, for my terms the best film with Clint Eastwood as an actor), Schifrin from then on also made the film music for the “Dirty Harry” series by Don Siegel, in which Eastwood chased Harry Callahan Murderer and other rapists (all domestic). Schifrin, rather elegiac tones, composed the brutal Callahan. The proceeds on the box office went through the ceiling. In addition to various film music for John-Sturges films, 1973 was “the man with the death claw”. The whole world loved these Bruce Lee Schmonzettes. It was his last film. The sound was atmospheric, Schifrin had ventured into new terrain and mixed radio elements with samples and tones from Asia.

In 1975 Schifrin approached even more soul and radio music and composed his last real success for the TV crime series “Starsky & Hutch”. 1974 to 1976 ran on ZDF “Petrocelli”. I have ever preferred to see nothing (except “Arpad, the Gypsy”). In 1990 Schifrin conducted the “three tenors”, high culture for stupid. In 1998 he returned to his roots with the top film “Tango” by Carlos Saura. In autumn 2018 he finally received the honor Oscar for his life’s work from the hands of his buddy Clint Eastwood.

Lalo Schifrin died 93-year-old in Beverly Hills a week ago. Only cineastes still remember him. And two handful of Porteños, the inmates of Buenos Aires, who consider themselves something better, namely for Europeans. It is rather the poor ones.