PERSPECTIVE — As you get older, the departures of famous and not-so-famous people who played significant roles in your work and imagination become more numerous and saddening. Certainly the passing of Lalo Schifrin on June 26 affected me this way — more than I thought it would. Facebook and the web in general had just celebrated his 93rd birthday five days before, and now this happened.
Music historians of the future are going to have a tough time with Lalo, especially if they are wedded to a particular musical category. Schifrin had no patience for categories. He did it all, separately or together.
If anything, one could link Schifrin with André Previn and John Williams as a jazz pianist who made it big in Hollywood scoring films and then tried to establish a reputation as a classical composer. The latter is notoriously difficult to do, given the historical stigma about “going Hollywood.” Previn might be the only figure who escaped the stigma completely over time, and Williams is starting to emerge from it in his 80s and 90s. Schifrin still hasn’t, alas, despite a burgeoning catalog of classical compositions that this former student of Olivier Messiaen had been compiling throughout his career. Not the least of them were two attractive guitar concertos written for Angel Romero 30 years apart — the first in a neo-Spanish Renaissance style, the second, Concierto de la Amistad, a thoroughly idiomatic (for the guitar) flamenco-informed work from his 85th year.
More than either Previn or Williams, Schifrin was the ultimate pragmatist. Whatever style happened to be in vogue or whatever the situation demanded, he would write to it. As soon as the bossa nova hit the U.S. in the early 1960s, Schifrin wrote bossa novas, and the rhythms stayed in his tool kit for a long time. When electronic keyboards, synthesizers, and wah-wah pedals on electric guitars started to become dominant in the 1970s, Shifrin was right there with an arsenal of keyboards and plenty of funk to play on them.
When disco was in vogue later in the decade, Schifrin dove in, incorporating its relentless beat into jazz-funk albums like Black Widow, his sponsor and mentor Dizzy Gillespie’s Free Ride, and film scores. There’s even an example of Schifrin paying tribute on Black Widow to Williams with an ingeniously percolating disco/funk transformation of the Jaws motif. He was also comfortable with kitsch, as in several elegantly arranged symphonic medleys of popular tunes for the Three Tenors concerts of the 1990s — but not at the cost of his sense of humor, like ending “Singin’ in the Rain” with a kidding strain from “Stormy Weather.”
Take just one of Schifrin’s dozens of film scores, The Cincinnati Kid. There is an instantly memorable title tune heard over the credits, a soul/jazz waltz for symphony orchestra, and Ray Charles, no less, delivering one of his greatest vocals. There is bluegrass banjo, New Orleans funeral music, lush string-laden mood music, passages of quiet suspense, and tense intrigue that he could conjure masterfully. And Schifrin’s “signatures” are audible amid this varied stylistic palette — the use of the xylophone on top of the tunes, distinctive big brass, lush string voicings.
As a result of Schifrin’s limitless versatility, several of his fellow, mainly classical composers would not take him seriously. They didn’t consider him part of their club. I remember hearing a story — possibly apocryphal — about Schifrin being considered as a possible music director for the feisty, incorrigibly adventurous, definitely prestigious Ojai Music Festival one year. After being interviewed, it became apparent that he and the factotums in charge did not see eye-to-eye about certain things. Said to have been crestfallen, he left the meeting, walked to his white Rolls-Royce, and drove back home to Beverly Hills. You could say that, like Liberace, he cried all the way to the bank.
This Southern California-based music critic saw Schifrin perform in all kinds of situations — leading a wailing big band on the vast Hollywood Bowl stage and at the more intimate space of the Catalina Bar & Grill jazz club, backing flutist Paul Horn with a disco/jazz/funk ensemble at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, conducting the Glendale Symphony, playing beautifully articulated, always swinging jazz piano.
Most memorable of all, I was fortunate enough to have interviewed Shifrin a few times over a period of decades, and I found him to be delightful — laconic and funny in that gravelly, heavy Argentine accent that he never quite lost. I recall our first talk in the office of his publicist — I was a young kid at the time — in which the publicist broke in for a second, and Schifrin dismissed him with the flattering (to me) comment, “You’ll have to excuse us; we’re talking shop.” He also confided that his father, a classical musician himself, tried to warn him against taking up jazz, citing the hazards of the jazz lifestyle that can trip you up — “you know, the drugs, the cocaine.” Schifrin added with a twinkle in his eye, “He was right.”
Skipping ahead a decade and a half, I visited Schifrin in his Beverly Hills home near Sunset Blvd., where he used a guest house on the property as what my friend, writer A. Scott Galloway, called his “man cave.” I most remember the grand piano (a Bösendorfer) facing the southwest corner of the studio, and the only CD I could see was a boxed set of his idol Igor Stravinsky conducting all of his works. Probably he didn’t want too many distractions from his work around. “I’m a doer, not a dreamer,” he told me, which is pretty good advice for procrastinators everywhere.
At the time of our talk in his home, Schifrin was proudest of his ongoing Jazz Meets the Symphony project, a series of albums that contained fusions of hypothetical musical encounters like George Gershwin meeting Bud Powell (An American in Paris/Parisian Thoroughfare) or Charlie “Bird” Parker exchanging ideas with early Stravinsky circa The Firebird.
Whereas in earlier times Schifrin was forever going back and forth between his jazz and classical sides, for the most part, he would keep them in their places even when introducing elements from one idiom to another. On his New Fantasy album, he translated tunes from Copland’s El Salon Mexico and Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance into strictly jazz language for a wailing big band (Big Bands were doing that already back in the Swing Era). He turned to Baroque music for inspiration on another big-band album that probably has the longest, zaniest title ever concocted — and I quote — The Dissection and reconstruction of music from the past as performed by the inmates of Lalo Schifrin’s demented ensemble as a tribute to the memory of the Marquis de Sade (probably a parody of the title of a then-current Peter Weiss play).
Conversely, Schifrin was perfectly capable of writing a convincing, modernistic classical piece like his piano trio Hommage à Ravel, where Middle Eastern scales, traces of jazz, and African and South American influences are completely subsumed within the abstract texture. Or he’d take jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to the extremes of the classical avant-garde in his little-known Dialogues for Jazz Quintet and Orchestra.
But with Jazz Meets the Symphony, Schifrin was able to fuse the two idioms together instead of depositing them in separate modules, and the fusions grew tighter and bolder with each installment. As I wrote in the All Music Guide then, “The immovable objects of symphony orchestra and jazz group are getting more closely in sync, thanks to the irresistible forces of Schifrin’s long experience in both camps and his own luscious personal orchestral signatures.” “I’ve finally figured out how to do it,” he told me. Two decades later, in an interview in his studio for a DVD, Schifrin offered another key to his fusions of genres. “In music,” he said, “the best thing is to have discipline to allow freedom, because freedom alone is anarchy.”
I’ve mentioned just a portion of the huge, highly varied output of Lalo Schifrin over several decades, for there is a helluva lot more to him than his famous theme from Mission: Impossible, which has dominated mass-media coverage of his passing. We’ll leave it to historians to try to wrap their heads around all of that. Yet if there is one tune he wrote that touches me the most deeply, it is a recording of “Down Here on the Ground,” with Wes Montgomery’s moody, soulful guitar and Herbie Hancock on piano in the young Eumir Deodato’s velvety arrangement. That’s a performance and tune for the ages that never gets old.
