Lalo Shifrin born June 21, 1932

 Lalo Schifrin (June 21, 1932 – June 26, 2025) was an Argentine and American pianist, conductor and arranger. He was the composer of some 100 works for classical and jazz orchestras and of more than 150 scores for film and television, but he will inevitably be remembered for just one piece of music he wrote in five minutes in 1966 – the theme to Mission: Impossible.

Boris Claudio Schifrin was born into a Jewish family in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was the son of Luis Schifrin, a violinist in the orchestra of the Teatro Colón, and his wife Clara, née Slifquin. “In my house it was Schubert and Beethoven,” he said. Lalo, as he was known, had been expected to follow in the footsteps of his father, who often took the boy to the opera. “If Verdi were alive today he would be one of the great film composers… Just listen to what the orchestra does in Otello,” Schifrin told Gramophone magazine.

At the age of six he began studying piano with Enrique Barenboim, the father of Daniel Barenboim. In case music did not work out he went on to read sociology and law at the University of Buenos Aires. As a student he declared his determination to pursue a career in jazz but was admonished by his parents for choosing a life full of “drugs, alcohol and ladies of the night”. Tango, he added, “was considered lower-class and was forbidden”, though he grew familiar with it while working as Astor Piazzolla’s pianist in the 1950s.

He went to lectures given by the composer and theorist Juan Carlos Paz, who had been a student of Schoenberg in Vienna and who spoke about Webern, Berg and the history of modern music. “I asked him if he would teach me privately,” he said, adding that “thanks to him I won a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire.” There, he worked with the composer Olivier Messiaen. “I had a double life. I would study at the Conservatoire with him during the day and play in jazz bands at night in places like the Club Saint-Germain,” he said. “Messiaen didn’t like jazz, but he was a very nice man, a Catholic mystic.” After Saturday evenings spent in jazz clubs he attended Mass the following morning simply to hear Messiaen play the organ.

Schifrin recalled this as a time of polo-necked sweaters, Juliette Gréco and existentialism. “Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir used to hold court in the cafés, and during the intermission in the club I used to come and hear what they had to say,” he added. In 1955 he represented Argentina at the International Festival of Jazz in Paris before returning to Buenos Aires and starting a jazz band. The following year Dizzy Gillespie, who was touring Argentina for the US State Department, heard him and whisked him to New York.

There he wrote Gillespiana, an extended work for big band that was both a tribute to the trumpeter and an exploration of the Latin rhythms that were an integral part of Gillespie’s repertoire. It marked the start of a period making music with Latin dance orchestras across the city interspersed with touring the world accompanying such legends as Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis. Over the next decade he produced more than 100 jazz albums, including for Gillespie and Stan Getz, and was the mastermind behind organist Jimmy Smith’s Grammy-winning album The Cat (1964).

                                  

Meanwhile, in 1963 he moved to Hollywood, where he wrote his first film theme, for the African adventure Rhino! (1964). He was much influenced by both Henry Mancini and Bernard Herrmann, but his finest work was altogether tougher than theirs, and adeptly set the mood for the hard-edged pictures for which he so often wrote, notably Once a Thief (1965), with Alain Delon, and Coogan’s Bluff (1968), with Clint Eastwood, while for television he composed the music for Dr Kildare and the private-eye series Mannix. In 1966 Schifrin took a call from the CBS television producer Bruce Geller, who needed a theme tune in a hurry. Within a matter of minutes he had produced the bones of the Mission: Impossible theme, a breathless beat played on the bongos combined with a sexy flute line.

This unmistakable tune helped to turn a TV show about secret agents into a hit, eventually spawning a vast film franchise culminating in this year’s $400 million Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. “It had to be like a call to the viewers to watch,” the composer explained of the music’s urgency. He them worked on the Oscar-nominated score for Cool Hand Luke (1967), the prison drama featuring Paul Newman. The director Stuart Rosenberg later called him in for The Amityville Horror (1979), based on the supernatural experience of a family from Amityville, New York, and was rewarded with a chilling score, again nominated for an Oscar, featuring creepy playground singing.

For the Bruce Lee hit Enter the Dragon (1973) Schifrin combined big funky guitar sounds and Chinese-sounding figurations with John Barryesque strings and Lee’s whoops and cries. The film inspired him to take up martial arts, reaching black-belt status, and he was delighted to learn that Lee had been practising his own moves to the Mission: Impossible theme. He also wrote the scores for the Winston Churchill kidnap thriller The Eagle Has Landed (1976), with Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Jenny Agutter, and The Fourth Protocol (1987) starring Caine and Pierce Brosnan.Being a keen footballer he was delighted to be asked to work with the Three Tenors, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras, on their 1990 World Cup concert by the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome. They collaborated again for concerts in Los Angeles (1994) and Paris (1998), with the composer demonstrating an uncanny ability to write in the style of operatic composers such as Puccini, Verdi and Bizet.

Schifrin, who spoke English with a melodious Spanish accent, lived in Beverly Hills in a large but homely house that had once belonged to Groucho Marx. He described how his studio, with leather sofas, a grand piano and a desk strewn with manuscript paper, was done up “like an English pub”. It was crammed with books, awards and antique scores, as well as a large collection of pipes collected on his travels.“People ask me how it is that I’m so versatile,” he once said. “But I say, ‘I’m not versatile. I just don’t see limits. To me all music is one music… The biggest difference between me and composers of the 19th century is that I embrace two art forms that didn’t exist then, jazz and movies.”

In 2008 Schifrin wrote an autobiography, Mission Impossible: My Life in Music. He had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and held the position of adviser on cultural affairs to the Argentinian government. In 1988 he was given a lifetime achievement award by the BMI and in 2018 Clint Eastwood presented him with an Academy Honorary Award "in recognition of his unique musical style, compositional integrity and influential contributions to the art of film scoring."

Schifrin died from complications of pneumonia at a hospital in Los Angeles, on June 26, 2025, at the age of 93.

(Edited from Telegraph obit & Wikipedia)