Lalo Schifrin, composer of jazzy ‘Mission: Impossible’ score, dies at 93

Lalo Schifrin, the Grammy-winning composer who brought a jazzy, pulsating immediacy to dozens of film and TV scores - most memorably the “Mission: Impossible” theme - and who chose a radical absence of music to supply tension in the exhilarating car-chase scene in “Bullitt,” died June 26 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 93.

The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Donna Schifrin.

The son of a Buenos Aires concertmaster, Schifrin performed demanding classical works as a child. He compared his awakening to jazz, sparked by a live performance by trumpeter Louis Armstrong, to “a religious conversion.” Before he was 30, Schifrin was a pianist and arranger for the globe-trotting bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

As a composer, Schifrin distinguished himself with “Gillespiana,” an ambitious jazz suite for big band and a showcase for Gillespie’s soaring and blindingly fast trumpet. The 1960 album, infused with Latin and African ingredients, sold 1 million copies and catapulted Schifrin to the next phase of his career: working in Hollywood.

Composers such as Henry Mancini and Johnny Mandel had imported jazz into TV and film scores, but Schifrin was credited with bringing a jazz-symphonic fusion to the craft. By 1969, Time magazine was calling him “the most inventive composer of movie scores in the business,” noting his “deft jazz touch” and expressive “Latinesque” blues style.

He set a compelling musical tempo for three icons of rebellious cool: Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), Steve McQueen in “Bullitt” (1968) and Clint Eastwood in “Dirty Harry” (1971).

“Bullitt” used sensual, sinuous flutes, Latin rhythms and big band sounds to accompany McQueen’s maverick San Francisco detective. Yet the film’s most celebrated scene, the 10-minute car chase, was done without background music. Director Peter Yates initially opposed the unorthodox decision, the composer told the Film Music Foundation.

“Silence is also music,” Schifrin said he replied. “The lack of music is going to make a great effect.”

The race pitted a Ford Mustang (piloted by McQueen, an experienced racecar driver) against a Dodge Charger carrying hired assassins in one of the most riveting scenes of its kind ever filmed. The squealing wheels and revving engines as the cars bounced along hilly city streets provided an aural and visual spectacle that helped make the film a massive box-office success.

By that time, Schifrin was a veteran composer for TV shows. The tune that reverberated loudest and longest was his main title theme for the CBS spy series “Mission: Impossible,” which aired from 1966 to 1973.

Bruce Geller, the show’s creator, had asked Schifrin to compose a theme that was “exciting but not too heavy,” Schifrin told NPR in 2015. He recalled Geller saying: “When people go to the kitchen and get a Coca-Cola, I want them to hear the theme and say, ‘Oh, this is “Mission: Impossible.”’”

The theme, with its unusual 5/4 time signature, burned into the popular consciousness and was reanimated in the ABC-TV reboot in the late 1980s and in the later feature films starring Tom Cruise.

In 1967, Schifrin won two Grammy Awards for the theme and the album “Music from Mission: Impossible.” (His two other Grammys, in 1964 and 1965, respectively, recognized “The Cat” for jazz organist Jimmy Smith and Schifrin’s hepcat spin on the Catholic Mass, “Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts,” featuring jazz flutist and saxophonist Paul Horn.)

Schifrin became a top composing choice for action-minded directors. After the eerie acid-rock and jazz score of “Dirty Harry” and several sequels, he scored an uneven parade of movies, including the Charles Bronson spy film “Telefon” (1977) and “The Concorde … Airport ’79” (1979). He also wrote “Enter the Dragon’s” mash-up of Asian idioms and funky jazz in 1973 - a job that came his way reportedly because martial arts star Bruce Lee liked to train to the “Mission: Impossible” theme.

Schifrin earned six Academy Award nominations, for “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Fox” (1967), “Voyage of the Damned” (1976), “The Amityville Horror” (1979), “The Competition” (1980) and “The Sting II” (1983).

After a professional dry spell, he had a late-career resurgence with his Chinese-funk-action scores for “Rush Hour” (1998) and its two lucrative mismatched-cop sequels starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. Their director, Brett Ratner, told the trade paper Variety: “Lalo Schifrin never stopped being hip.”

Schifrin eventually attempted his jazz-and-classical blends in the concert hall. His 50 concert works included seven concertos, a ballet and a symphony. He also devised a new notation system to help symphony musicians “swing.”

He released a series of albums titled “Jazz Meets the Symphony” between 1992 and 2011, with groups such as the London Symphony Orchestra playing the music of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis accompanied by a jazz band.

His classical efforts had a lukewarm reception. Reviewing the composer’s second concerto in 1992, New York Times music critic Bernard Holland wrote: “Its jumble of allusions is bound together by a cocktail-bar piano style … that ‘whitens’ Black music through a familiar filtering process. Picture the Harlem River running through Beverly Hills, Calif., and you will get the idea.”

Nevertheless, Schifrin continued to prosper from his earlier work. Royalties from his “Mission: Impossible” theme and a track from “Cool Hand Luke” poured in constantly. Music from the road-tarring sequence in the prison camp drama - with its clanging, alarm-like bells and urgent brass - became the ABC “Eyewitness News” theme for many years. His film and TV scores were frequently sampled by hip-hop and dance artists including Portishead, Dr. Dre and N.W.A.

Boris Claudio Schifrin - Lalo was his childhood nickname - was born in Buenos Aires on June 21, 1932. He grew up near the Teatro Colón opera house, where his father, Luis, was concertmaster of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic.

He began taking piano lessons at 6, and his first teacher was Enrique Barenboim, father of pianist-conductor Daniel Barenboim. The film “Rhapsody in Blue” (1945), a Hollywood biopic about George Gershwin, along with the Armstrong concert, helped spur his interest in jazz.

American jazz records were severely restricted under the nationalist regime of Juan Perón, but a friend of Schifrin’s smuggled them in from New Orleans while serving in the U.S. Merchant Marine. (“Even in the summer, I wore a raincoat and hid the LPs around my waist,” Schifrin recalled.)

In 1952, he left for the Paris Conservatory and studied with teachers including Olivier Messiaen while moonlighting as a nightclub pianist. Back in Argentina, he led his own band, which for a time included the noted saxophonist and future film composer Gato Barbieri. Gillespie was visiting Buenos Aires with a State Department-sponsored group when he first encountered Schifrin in 1956 and found himself dazzled by the young pianist.

Schifrin left Gillespie’s orbit in 1963 to work in film. One of his first efforts was “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965), a hit McQueen poker drama that featured Ray Charles singing Schifrin’s swaggering title song.

He contributed jazzy theme songs and scores to series including “Mannix” and “Medical Center” (which imitated a siren with its opening synthesizer wail). He also wrote a theme used in the first season of the ABC police drama “Starsky and Hutch” that later was replaced.

His concert work was prolific, if not especially influential. He conducted orchestras around the world, including in several “Three Tenors” concerts, and held music director posts at the Glendale Symphony Orchestra in California and the Paris Philharmonic.

Schifrin’s first marriage, to Sylvia Schor, ended in divorce. In 1971, he married Donna Cockrell, who managed his business affairs and record label, Aleph. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children from his first marriage, Will and Frances; a son from his second marriage, Ryan; and four grandchildren.

Schifrin wrote an autobiography, “Mission Impossible: My Life in Music” (2008), whose title reflected what he knew was his most enduring legacy. “It’s satisfying, and rejuvenating,” he told the London Daily Telegraph that year. “It starts a communication with different cultures, different ages, a bridge across time.”