Cool Hand in Hollywood

"I'm not putting his piano playing down," says Dizzy Gillespie, "but he's a better writer than a pianist." Gillespie was talking about Argentina's Lalo Schifrin, 37, who used to jam with Dizzy's band in Birdland days. Today Schifrin is widely accepted in Hollywood as the most inventive composer of movie scores in the business. Since quitting the Gillespie quintet in 1963 to try his luck with films, he has scored 21 features (Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt), three TV serials (including Mission: Impossible, with its pulsating, wide-open jazz theme) and half a dozen TV specials. Almost all the scores are good, and almost all are different in style and sound.

Schifrin epitomizes the outlook of a new school of conservatory, or college-trained, Hollywood composers. Among others: Leonard Rosenman, 44 (Fantastic Voyage); Dave Grusin, 35 (Winning); Jerry Goldsmith, 40 (Planet of the Apes); Quincy Jones, 36 (In the Heat of the Night). They use jazz, pop and rock as freely as the latest serial and electronic techniques. Like Henry Mancini, who started the trend toward mod sound in the late '50s, they know when to support the plot if the characters are of secondary importance, and vice versa. Schifrin has a deft jazz touch that only Mancini and Jones can match, although his personal leaning is toward Latinesque blues. Schifrin's version of the blues is a way of expressing passion and depicting people in a cooler and less sentimental mood than would have been likely a generation ago. That attitude fits in with the new approach to film scoring. "Today's composers are a little more subdued, a little more inward looking," he says. "We are suggesting and implying things through our music rather than directly expressing things."

Golf Balls. A case in point is The Fox, in which Schifrin used a lone flute with a sad, fragile melody to frame the film's lesbian theme against its bleak, Canadian country background. He can make points just as effectively with unusual sounds and effects. For Hell in the Pacific, he wrote mostly in a serialistic orchestral style, but at one point bounced golf balls on the strings of a piano to underline the irrational hatred between the film's antagonists, Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune. In the recent Che!, he suggested the primitiveness of the Bolivian mountains by conjuring up an original score based on the sullen, pentatonic folk music of the ancient Inca tribes, even using native instruments like the armadillo (strings stretched across an armadillo shell). The film was a disaster, but Schifrin's score won widespread acclaim.

Part of Schifrin's versatility stems from his parents' background. His grandfather had traveled from his native Russia to Amsterdam, intending to catch the first ship to the U.S. The only boat leaving immediately was bound for Buenos Aires, so he took it. Thus, Lalo (his real first name is Boris) was born in 1932 in a city that drew no cultural and social lines between various forms of music. Argentine folk music, Spanish songs, American jazz and pop, the classics, were all treated on a par--especially in the household run by Schifrin's father, concertmaster of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic.

Sensual Pastiche. After diverse musical training, including a year of studying Debussy, Ravel and Schoenberg at the Paris Conservatory, Schifrin moved to New York in 1958. He formed a jazz trio, and began arranging for Xavier Cugat's orchestra. On the side, he composed a suite called Gillespiana, intended, of course, for Dizzy, whom Schifrin had met in South America. Gillespie loved it (still does: "It's the best thing he's done, as far as my taste goes"); in 1960 Schifrin became Dizzy's regular pianist and arranger, a harmonious alliance that lasted three years.

Unlike some Hollywood composers of the past, who regarded film scoring as a well-paid distraction from their real work, Schifrin believes in movie music as a legitimate form of its own. That has not kept him from writing a Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts for RCA Records, however, or Variants on a Madrigal of Gesualdo, which was premiered at a music festival last May in Ojai, Calif. Next year will see the first performance of a score for jazz band and full symphony that was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. What particularly intrigues Schifrin is the oft-posed possibility that film, music and art will someday merge into a new, mixed-media form. "We are at the very beginning of a new era in perception," he says. One of his favorite pastimes is to tune two TV sets to different channels, put a record on the stereo--and then turn on to the resulting pastiche of sensual experiences.

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