To Him, Music Is the Great Unifier

Composer and pianist Lalo Schifrin is best known as a movie composer, for obvious reasons. Schifrin has written more than 100 scores for film and television, including the memorable “Mission: Impossible” TV series in the ‘60s and, more recently, the Jackie Chan blockbuster “Rush Hour.”

What people may not know about the prolific Schifrin is that he’s also an accomplished classical orchestral composer (he’s written for some of the world’s top symphony orchestras and conducted the Three Tenors in concert) and a jazz pianist.

The son of the concertmaster at Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, and classically trained at the Paris Conservatory, Schifrin was brought to New York in the 1950s by Dizzy Gillespie, who invited him to be his pianist and arranger.

For his accomplishments in the world of jazz, Schifrin, 67, will be inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame at this weekend’s Latin Jazz Institute’s Los Angeles Latin Jazz Festival, along with timbale player and composer Tito Puente and pianists Eddie Palmieri and Jesus “Chucho” Valdes. A portion of the concert’s proceeds go for scholarships at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Schifrin and his big band will headline Saturday’s bill at the California Plaza downtown, performing for the first time in the U.S. his new composition, “Latin Jazz Suite.” The big band features saxophonist David Sanchez, trumpeter Jon Faddis and percussionist Alex Acuna, among others.

In a recent interview, Schifrin took a break in the cozy music studio that his wife of 28 years, Donna, built for him behind the lush backyard garden of their spacious Beverly Hills home--which once belonged to Groucho Marx.

“She built it just so, thinking of the way the light would come in on the piano,” Schifrin said, drawing a line through the air from one window to the black grand piano in one corner, his face beaming with affection for the woman he describes as his manager, label head and best friend.

“It’s a good life we have,” Schifrin said with a satisfied smile, his longish, graying hair combed back over the top of his head.

On the coffee table rested a framed photo of brown-eyed Donna in her jewels. On the wood-paneled walls hung dozens of framed awards, including four Grammy certificates. Everywhere else, there were books and photos--of Gillespie and Schifrin, of his three children.

As he spoke of his inspiration for the new “Latin Jazz Suite,” Schifrin’s mind seemed to move faster than most, his complex thoughts coming out in complete, poetic sentences, his stories skipping across decades and back, from the time jazz trumpeter Chet Baker approached the jazz pianist son of Italian dictator Mussolini in Europe and said, simply, “What a drag about your old man,” to the time Schifrin’s own mother sat in the audience as Faddis played and commented that he sounded like Dizzy, to current preparations for this weekend’s concert.

The best way to understand Schifrin’s inspiration for the piece, he said, is to read the Latin Jazz Musician’s Manifesto, which he’d written and included in the linernotes for the “Latin Jazz Suite” album, released this year.

The manifesto reads as follows:

“1. There are no spiritual borders between our rhythms, melodies and harmonies.

“2. Tradition must be reinvented.

“3. All the Gods are one God, all the fires one fire.

“4. No more taboos . . . only totems.

“5. Let mother earth give us the chord progressions so that our imaginations fly to the stars.

“6. We are our music.

“7. It is forbidden to forbid.

“8. Some of our values are the dotted quarter notes and eighth-note triplets.

“9. The concept of dissonance is nonexistent.

“10. Our intuition is our only parameter. Everything else is allowed.”

In conversational language, Schifrin explained his concept further, saying, “I had hoped barriers were going to be broken with this piece. Latin jazz itself means the breaking of borders. We don’t ask for a passport when we’re playing. We don’t care where we were born. The thing is: The music creates a certain brotherhood.

“We come from a century of too much intolerance and prejudice. . . . Latin jazz, in a way, reaffirms that this is the only planet we have for the time being, so let’s coexist, at the very least. Emotionally, the music can do that for us, bring us together.”

Even though he was raised in Argentina, Schifrin’s love for Latin American music was kindled when, as a Paris Conservatory student in the 1950s, he attended a lecture and workshop given by a Cuban composer and author named Julio Gutierrez, then the dean of the Havana Conservatory.

“He was brilliant,” Schifrin said, “the first man to really write about the African influence in Cuban music. He wrote a book called ‘Mambologia,’ or Mambology.”

Not surprisingly, Schifrin said, he didn’t listen to much popular music growing up, including tango.

“In my house, it was Schubert and Beethoven. You couldn’t ignore tango, of course, but I didn’t start to pay attention to [tango composers Astor] Piazzolla and [Horacio] Salgan until I started paying attention to composers like Bartok, and to jazz.”

Schifrin fell in love with the risky sounds of modern composers and jazz as a young man in Paris, and, to his father’s surprise, he began to play in experimental jazz groups there.

“I led a double life,” he said. “I was a classical pianist during the day, and a jazz musician at night.”

Gillespie Heard Him Performing in Argentina

He returned to Argentina after his studies in Paris and formed his own big band. Gillespie heard the group on a trip to Argentina and whisked young Schifrin to the U.S.

Schifrin said he came to Hollywood because he wanted to combine jazz with symphony, and film composition appealed to him because it allowed a certain degree of freedom, and because it was a completely new form of musical art, one that required the “counterpoint between the audio and the visual.”

“People ask me how it is that I’m so ‘versatile,’ ” Schifrin said. “But I say, ‘I’m not versatile. I just don’t see limits. To me, all music is one music.’

“I was thinking the other day: The biggest difference between me and composers of the 19th century is that I embrace two art forms that didn’t exist in the 19th century--jazz and movies.”

BE THERE

Los Angeles Latin Jazz Festival, Saturday at 5 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., Watercourt, California Plaza, 350 S. Grand Ave., downtown. $16 for one-day pass (standing only); $25 for two-day pass; $50 and $75 for general seating. Ticketmaster: (213) 480-3232.