Lalo Schifrin: Cuban Connections, Tango, Bossa Nova, "Spanish Piano"

The "Mission Impossible" composer was a maestro of “the modern Latin form.”

Lalo Schifrin plays with the Xavier Cugat Orchestra (Source::YouTube)

Argentines hug their heroes hard, and Lalo Schifrin, who died June 26 at 93, is one of the greatest in the country’s proud cultural pantheon. I first learned his name not growing up in the U.S., where as a girl I heard his music out at the movies with my parents, but from the rock musicians I hung out with as a young journalist in Buenos Aires. They revered his fast and furious virtuosity, and shared his tango soul and lifelong pursuit of something new.

The son of a violinist in the orchestra at the prestigious Teatro Colón, Schifrin was studying piano seriously at age 16, when he also discovered jazz, and was granted a scholarship by the Paris conservatory when he was 20. Shortly thereafter, in the mid-fifties, he was already writing music for film and TV when a meeting with Dizzy Gillespie in Buenos Aires prompted his move to the United States. In 1970, after Schifrin had composed the Mission Impossible theme song and the scores for Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen’s Bullit, the press had already crowned the “dark-haired pipe smoker” Hollywood’s hottest composer.

As one reporter noted around that time, Schifrin’s work derived from “a seemingly endless supply of music, from rock to symphony.”

That well-spring included of course jazz, the music he had fallen in love with as a teen and pursued despite his father’s misgivings. And also the tango, Brazilian bossa nova, Cuban dance music, and flamenco and medieval instrumental music from Spain.

Schifrin first recorded with the new tango pioneer Astor Piazzolla in 1955, when they were both living in Paris.

“Astor and I talked a lot about jazz,” Schifrin later recalled in an interview with the Argentine newspaper La Nación. “Jazz and his loves, who were Ellington, Gillespie, Gershwin.”

According to Schifrin, Piazzolla told him, “I need a pianist who has swing because my tangos have swing.” Schifrin had swing.

The Argentine pianist was absorbing the Latin tinge that had seeped into jazz at the time. Schifrin plays on a version of the Duke Ellington standard “Caravan,” composed by the Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol, on an album by Eddie Warner titled 100% Mambo. The estimated recording year is also 1955, according to a detailed Lalo Schifrin discography compiled by Doug Payne.

The young Schifrin then moved back to Buenos Aires and formed his own jazz big band. He recorded his first solo album in 1957. Spectrum was a set of jazz standards. He soon had a taste of what would be his lifelong success in film: he composed the soundtrack for the 1958 movie El Jefe, which won the Best Spanish-Language Film Award at the Mar de Plata Festival. The theme song features saxophonist Gato Barbieri.

Famously, the course of Schifrin’s future had been largely determined when in 1956 he met Gillespie, who came to Buenos Aires as part of a State Department good will tour and was impressed by the arrangements played by the Argentine pianist’s jazz band. With “Gillespiana,” a composition he wrote for Dizzy, in hand, he headed to New York in 1958. His sights were set on joining the authentic American jazz scene, but for a time he’d be encapsulated as a Latin player.

“Schifrin was a jazz wunderkind with a deep love of bebop and no interest in the tango or in any other Latin American musical genre,” Matthew Karush, author of the book Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music, writes in a blog post on the Duke University Press website. Nevertheless, by the mid-1950s, the idea of ‘Latin jazz,’ conceived as a mixture of jazz improvisation with Cuban rhythms, was well established. This category, and the larger one of Latin music, created opportunities for someone like Schifrin, who combined impressive musical skills with Latin American ancestry. Shortly after moving to New York, Schifrin took a job as pianist and arranger for the Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat.”

While I would argue with Karush’s statement about Schifrin’s total rejection of Latin music, it is clear that playing with rhumba king Cugat was not what the young pianist had in mind. In an interview years later in the Argentine paper La Nación, Schifrin was blasé about his work with Cugat, then past his prime as an exuberant international personality and bandleader who led the house orchestra at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.

As Karush notes, this video of a TV performance by the band “demonstrates Schifrin’s showmanship, but it also reveals the way he was able to play the role of an authentic practitioner of what the television announcer calls ‘the modern Latin form.’”

Schifrin recalled the job with Cugat only as a way to make some money while waiting for Gillespie to return from touring; he almost went back to Buenos Aires when the wait extended to two years. But then the offer came from Gillespie, both to record “Gillespiana” and to join his band as the piano player.

While he waited for Gillespie, Schifrin also recorded his second solo album. It was released by Tico Records, the New York Latin label known as home to Tito Puente and a precursor to the salsa label Fania in the sowing of the U.S. Latin music market.

This may seem surprising given Schifrin’s early ambitions to be a jazz musician, not an Argentine pianist playing tropical music, but it makes sense as a further indication that he was considered above all a “Latin” musician during those first years in New York. Schifrin’s Piano Español follows a typical format for Latin music albums during that golden age of Cuban music, a track list surely suggested to Schifrin by the label for maximum sales potential.

It includes standards like Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernandez’s “El Cumbanchero” -(my pick on this album)- and Mexican songwriter Alberto Domínguez’s crossover hit “Frenesí.” As with so many other records of the time, a cha-cha-chá is included - in this case a “cha-cha-chá flamenco”, and an Afro number -Ismael Morales’ “Jungle Fever”-that Schifrin plays with hard jazzy flourishes surrounded by the beating of drums and random whistles. Also typical, the album includes a selection from the American songbook: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “All the Things You Are.” Schifrin approaches the numbers with a verve that in retrospect gives some indication of his future larger-than-life sound.

That sound would come through more clearly on his 1964 album New Fantasy. Schifrin’s wow take on “The Peanut Vendor” converts the benign 1930 Cuban hit into a spine-tingling thriller.

Schifrin made a later Cuban connection when he scored the 1969 film Che! The Che Guevara biopic, starring Omar Sharif with a messy beehive hairdo, continues to get miserable reviews to this day (Example: “A soggy saga so noncommittal that the Cuban Revolution ultimately seems no more monumental a historical event than the Iowa State Fair.” Matt Brunsun, Film Frenzy).

But the soundtrack is a discovery, featuring Cuban percussion masters Mongo Santamaría and Francisco Aguabella, among other notable musicians.

Doug Payne calls it a “a brilliant, varied collection of Latin themes.” Read his notes on the album that in Schifrin’s words featured the “hot Latin sounds from the rhythms and colors of Cuba, Argentina and the Bolivian Andes” here.

Schifrin’s fruitful working relationships with Cuban musicians in the United States also featured his fantastic 1962 collaboration with another of the greatest Cuban percussionists of all time: Candido Camero, who also played with Gillespie, and was another musician who clearly felt his place was in the jazz world. Candido’s Conga Soul, on Roulette Records, was a groundbreaking jazz record, led by Candido, who came up with idea of using three congas to play melodies, a technique that became his trademark. On Conga Soul, he shares writing credits with Schifrin,

Schifrin’s 1960s explorations also included recordings of then-new sound coming from Brazil - the Bossa nova.

While his Hollywood career continued to flourish, Schifrin would come together with Astor Piazzolla in the studio again in 1987, to record the album Concierto para Bandoneón y Orquesta in New York. He later told La Nación journalist Claudio Parisi that during that trip he took Piazzolla to Manhattan’s Victor’s Café to eat Cuban food, expressing amazement that Piazzolla had never been there.

“He liked to eat well. First class. That’s why I took him to Victor’s.” Piazzolla died in 1992.

In 1998, Schifrin would bring his music home once again, composing and arranging the soundtrack for the film Tango, from the Spanish director Carlos Saura, which was nominated for an Oscar.

In 2006, Schifrin recorded Letters From Argentina, an album of his own beautiful tangos and Argentine folkloric music.

“Like the clear sky, like the rain, like the clouds, music has always been part of the Argentinean atmosphere. The strumming of the Gauchos’ guitars, the rhythms of the Indian drums, the expressive melodies of the bandoneon were the aural medium in which I grew up,” the composer wrote in the notes to the album. “In Argentina, the music was ever present in the literature, in the visual arts, and in the history of the country.

Tangos coming from radios, folk music sang and danced in festivities, Milongas and Candombes celebrating Mardi Gras surrounded my childhood in Buenos Aires.

“Letters from Argentina” are the musical memories enhanced by my imagination and converted into impressions of my homeland. Working on this project helped me to recreate an unreal past in which a memory persists and invites us to a journey full of promises and dreams.”

RIP Lalo Schifrin.

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Further reading:

More music movies from director Carlos Saura: