Lalo Schifrin

Lalo Schifrin
Schifrin in 2006
Background information
Birth name	Boris Claudio Schifrin
Born	(1932-06-21)June 21, 1932 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Died	June 26, 2025(2025-06-26) (aged 93) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Genres	Jazz big band rock contemporary classical
Occupations	Musician composer arranger conductor
Instruments	Piano keyboards
Years active	1952–2025
Labels	Tico Roulette Audio Fidelity MGM Verve Colpix Colgems Dot Warner Bros. Paramount EntrActe CTI Tabu Palo Alto Atlantic Aleph

Boris Claudio "Lalo" Schifrin (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈlalo ˈsifɾin]; June 21, 1932 – June 26, 2025) was an Argentine-American pianist, composer, arranger and conductor. He was best known for his large body of film and television scores, incorporating jazz and Latin American musical elements alongside traditional orchestrations.

Schifrin's best known compositions include the themes from Mission: Impossible (1966) and Mannix (1967), as well as the scores to Cool Hand Luke (1967), Bullitt (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Enter the Dragon (1973), The Four Musketeers (1974), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979), and the Rush Hour trilogy (1998–2007). Schifrin was also noted for collaborations with Clint Eastwood from the late 1960s to the 1980s, particularly the Dirty Harry film series. He composed the Paramount Pictures fanfare used from 1976 to 2004.

Schifrin was a five-time Grammy Award winner; he was nominated for six Academy Awards and four Emmy Awards. In 2019, he received an Honorary Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in recognition of his successful career.

Early life and education

Schifrin was born in Buenos Aires on June 21, 1932 and named Boris Claudio. The nickname "Lalo" was the normal Argentine diminutive for his second name of Claudio. When he came to the US, he changed his name to Lalo legally to simplify his contracts.

His father, Luis Schifrin, led the second violin section of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic for three decades. His father was Jewish and his mother Catholic, exposing him early to both kinds of worship. At age six, Schifrin began a six-year course of study on piano with Enrique Barenboim, the father of pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. Schifrin began studying piano with the Greek-Russian expatriate Andrea Karalin, the onetime head of the Kyiv Conservatory, and harmony with Juan Carlos Paz. During this time, Schifrin also became interested in jazz.

Although Schifrin studied sociology and law at the University of Buenos Aires, he became more interested in music. At age 20, he successfully applied for a scholarship to the Conservatoire de Paris where he studied from 1952, including with Olivier Messiaen. He also studied African drumming. At night, he played jazz in Paris clubs. In 1955 Schifrin played piano with bandoneon player Ástor Piazzolla and represented his country at the International Jazz Festival in Paris.

Career

1956–1963: Jazz composer

After returning home to Argentina in his twenties, Schifrin formed a jazz big band, a 16-piece band that became part of a popular weekly variety show on Buenos Aires TV. He also began accepting film, television, and radio assignments. In 1956, he met Dizzy Gillespie and offered to write an extended work for Gillespie's big band. Schifrin completed the work, Gillespiana, in 1958, which was recorded in 1960. Later in 1958, Schifrin began working as an arranger for Xavier Cugat's popular Latin dance orchestra.

While in New York City in 1960, Schifrin again met Gillespie, who had by this time disbanded his big band for financial reasons. Gillespie invited Schifrin to fill the vacant piano chair in his quintet. Schifrin immediately accepted and moved to New York City, as Gillespie's pianist and arranger. Schifrin wrote a second extended composition for Gillespie, The New Continent, which was recorded in 1962.

On 26 May 1963, he recorded an album, Buenos Aires Blues, with Duke Ellington's alto saxophonist, Johnny Hodges. Schifrin wrote two compositions for the album; Dreary Blues and the title track B. A. Blues. In the same year Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had Schifrin under contract, offered the composer his first Hollywood film assignment with the African adventure Rhino! Schifrin moved to Los Angeles in 1963. He would become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1969.

1964–1989: Film composer

One of Schifrin's most recognizable and enduring compositions is the theme music for the long-running TV series Mission: Impossible that started in 1966. It is a distinctive tune written in the uncommon ⁵
₄ time signature. The meter (dash dash, dot dot) is Morse Code for the letters M and I. Similarly Schifrin's theme for the hugely successful Mannix private eye TV show was composed in 1967 as a jazz waltz; Schifrin composed several other jazzy and bluesy numbers over the years as additional incidental music for the show.

Schifrin's "Tar Sequence" from his Cool Hand Luke score (also written in ⁵
₄) was the longtime theme for the Eyewitness News broadcasts on New York station WABC-TV and other ABC affiliates, as well as Nine News in Australia; it was used into the 1990s. CBS Television used part of the theme of his St. Ives soundtrack for its golf broadcasts in the 1970s and early 1980s. Schifrin's score for the 1968 film Coogan's Bluff was the beginning of a long association with Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel. Schifrin's strong jazz-blues riffs were evident in Dirty Harry. The well received, jazzy Bullitt score for this Peter Yates directed film was recorded in December of the same year. In 1973 he incorporated funk and traditional film score elements into soundtrack for the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon. He composed the score by sampling sounds from China, Korea, and Japan. The soundtrack has sold over 500,000 copies, earning a gold record.

Schifrin's working score for 1973's The Exorcist was rejected by the film's director, William Friedkin. Schifrin had written six minutes of difficult and heavy music for the initial film trailer, but audiences were reportedly frightened by the combination of sights and sounds. As reported by Schifrin in an interview, Warner Bros. executives told Friedkin to instruct Schifrin to tone it down with softer music, but Friedkin did not relay the message. Schifrin also said that working on the film was one of the most unpleasant experiences in his life. He later reused the compositions in other scores. In 1976 he released a single called "Jaws", a version of the John Williams theme from the Universal Pictures film Jaws, on CTI (Creed Taylor Incorporated) records. The single spent nine weeks on the UK chart, peaking at number 14. He also composed the 1976 fanfare for Paramount Pictures, which was used mainly for their home video label and was adapted for the television division 11 years later until it was renamed to CBS Paramount Television (now CBS Studios) in 2006. In 1981, he wrote the music for the 1981 American slapstick comedy film Caveman.

1990–2025

In the 1990s, Schifrin wrote many of the arrangements for The Three Tenors concerts. In the 1998 film Tango, he returned to tango music, with which he had grown familiar while working as Piazzolla's pianist in the mid-1950s. He brought traditional tango songs to the film, as well as introducing compositions of his own, in which tango is fused with jazz elements.

In 1998, the composer founded Aleph Records. He also wrote the main theme for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. Schifrin made a cameo appearance in Red Dragon (2002) as an orchestra conductor. He is also widely sampled in hip-hop and trip-hop songs, such as Heltah Skeltah's "Prowl" and Portishead's "Sour Times". Both songs sample Schifrin's "Danube Incident", one of many themes he composed for specific episodes of the Mission: Impossible TV series. In 2003, Schifrin was commissioned to compose a classical work entitled Symphonic Impressions of Oman by Sultan Qaboos bin Said.

On April 23, 2007, Schifrin presented a concert of film music for the Festival du Film Jules Verne Aventures (Festival Jules Verne), at Le Grand Rex theatre in Paris, France – Europe's biggest movie theater. This was recorded by festival leaders for a 73-and-a-half-minute CD named Lalo Schifrin: Le Concert à Paris. In 2010, a fictionalised account of Lalo Schifrin's creation of the "Theme from Mission: Impossible" tune was featured in a Lipton TV commercial aired in a number of countries around the world.

Collaboration with Rod Schejtman

After Rod Schejtman won the WorldVision Composers Contest in Vienna in 2024, Schifrin invited him in 2024 to jointly compose a symphony dedicated to their country. They composed a 35-minute symphony in three movements, subtitled "Long Live Freedom", for an orchestra of nearly 100 musicians. Intending it as a tribute to Argentina, they drew inspiration from the nation's history over the past 40 years and fused cinematic and classical elements.

The symphony was premiered at the Teatro Colón on April 5, 2025, marking the theater’s 100-year anniversary, in the presence of the President of Argentina, Javier Milei. The premiere also featured a symphonic rendition of Mission: Impossible, ahead of the release of the new Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning film starring Tom Cruise on May 23, 2025, and other film music by Schifrin. The program was then played on tour at prestigious concert halls of the world.

Personal life, illness and death

Schifrin was married to Donna; they had three children. In 2008, he wrote an autobiography, Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, summarizing:

In music, the choices are infinite. The possibilities of sound combinations with the acoustic instruments of a symphony orchestra, a jazz band or a chamber ensemble have not yet been exhausted. What has been done in the field of electronic music so far has not even scratched the surface of a vast continent to be explored.

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

Filmography

Main article: Lalo Schifrin discography

Selected credits:

Film

• Dark Intruder (1965)
• Cool Hand Luke (1967)
• Bullitt (1968)
• The Fox (1967)
• Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968)
• Che! (1969)
• Kelly's Heroes (1970)
• Dirty Harry (1971)
• The Beguiled (1971)
• THX 1138 (1971)
• Joe Kidd (1972)
• Enter the Dragon (1973)
• Magnum Force (1973)
• The Eagle Has Landed (1976)
• Voyage of the Damned (1976)
• Rollercoaster (1977)
• The Amityville Horror (1979)
• The Competition (1980)
• Amityville II: The Possession (1982)
• Sudden Impact (1983)
• The Sting II (1983)
• Black Moon Rising (1986)
• Rush Hour (1998)
• Tango (1998)
• Rush Hour 2 (2001)
• Bringing Down the House (2003)
• After the Sunset (2004)
• Rush Hour 3 (2007)

Television

• 1965: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
• 1966: Mission: Impossible
• 1967: Mannix
• 1969: Medical Center
• 1974: Planet of the Apes
• 1975: Starsky & Hutch
• 1976: Most Wanted
• 1982: Chicago Story
• 1984: Glitter
• 1987: Sparky's Magic Piano
• 1988: Mission: Impossible (revival)

Awards and nominations

Schifrin won five Grammy Awards (four Grammy Awards and one Latin Grammy), with twenty-two nominations, one CableACE Award, and received six Academy Award and four Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2016, it was announced that his Mission: Impossible theme was to be inducted into the Grammy Award Hall of Fame. 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."

Year	Association	Category	Project	Result	Ref.
1967	Academy Awards	Best Original Score	Cool Hand Luke	Nominated
1968			The Fox	Nominated
1976			The Voyage of the Damned	Nominated
1979			The Amityville Horror	Nominated
1980		Best Original Song	"People Alone" (from The Competition)	Nominated
1983		Best Original Score	The Sting II	Nominated
2018		Academy Honorary Award		Honored
1976	Golden Globe Awards	Best Original Score	Voyage of the Damned	Nominated
1979			The Amityville Horror	Nominated
1980			The Competition	Nominated
1966	Primetime Emmy Awards	Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition	The Making of a President: 1964	Nominated
1967			Mission: Impossible	Nominated
1968			Mission: Impossible (Episode: "The Seal")	Nominated
1969			Mission: Impossible (Episode: "The Heir Apparent")	Nominated
1962	Grammy Awards	Best Original Jazz Composition	Gillespiana	Nominated
1963			Tunisian Fantasy	Nominated
1965			The Cat	Won
1966			Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts	Won
		Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media	The Man from U.N.C.L.E.	Nominated
1967		Best Original Jazz Composition	Marquis De Sade	Nominated
1968		Best Instrumental Performance	Theme from Mission: Impossible	Nominated
		Best Instrumental Composition		Won
		Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media	Mission: Impossible	Won
1969		Best Theme Composition	Theme from The Fox	Nominated
		Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media	The Fox	Nominated
1971		Best Instrumental Composition	Theme from Medical Center	Nominated
		Best Instrumental Arrangement		Nominated
1994			Dizzy Gillespie Fireworks	Nominated
1997			Charlie Parker: The Firebird (Medley)	Nominated
		Best Pop Instrumental Performance	Theme from Mission: Impossible	Nominated
1999		Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media	Rush Hour	Nominated
2000		Best Instrumental Arrangement	Fiesta	Nominated
2002			Scheherazade Fantasy	Nominated
2000	Latin Grammy Award	Best Latin Jazz Album	Latin Jazz Suite	Nominated
2006		Best Tango Album	Letters from Argentina	Nominated
2010		Best Classical Contemporary Composition	Pampas	Won
2011			Romerías	Nominated

Discography

Main article: Lalo Schifrin discography

External links

• Lalo Schifrin at IMDb
• Lalo Schifrin discography at Discogs
• Aleph Records discography at Discogs
• Aleph Records (record label operated by Schifrin)
• Duffie, Bruce: Lalo Schifrin, (interviews, June 23, 1988, and October 9, 2003)
• Cinema Retro attends Lalo Schifrin's London concert
• Lalo Schifrin Interview for WeirdMusic.net / UKtop40Charts.com Magazine
• Lalo Schifrin at The Interviews: An Oral History of Television
• Lalo Schifrin Interview NAMM Oral History Library (2014)
• Mission: Impossible on YouTube