The DUN-dun da-da, DUN-dun da-da commands attention, even amidst the New Boy’s cacophony as he alerts us to the arrival of the gas truck or a flight of king parrots hurtling down to sample the acorns.
There’s some debate here about which is more menacing – the Mission Impossible theme or the John Williams score for Jaws, which used the repeated, accelerating two-note “dun-dun, dun-dun” to scare the living daylights out of people and dogs.
The Boss claims the Mission Impossible theme has the edge, in both wit and playful swing: its famous Argentinian composer, Lalo Schifrin, who died last week at 93, veered between classical and jazz all his life and took neither too seriously.
He was born into a musical family – his father was lead violinist with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic. He learned to play classical piano at six, with a demanding teacher who rapped any errant fingers with a sharp pencil – but when he later heard the jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, he called it “a religious conversion.”
In his teens, the nationalist Peronist regime had restricted imports of US jazz records, so he befriended a merchant marine to smuggle records in for him.
He managed to escape Argentina via a scholarship to the Paris Conservatory, where he studied classical music by day and played piano in Left bank jazz clubs at night – much to his classical teacher’s disappointment.
Returning to Buenos Aires, he convened a big band, which played one night at the US embassy, where Dizzy Gillespie heard him. Diz immediately asked Lalo to join his band in New York as pianist and arranger - and he did.
Lalo went on to share the stage with the likes of Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald before tiring of touring and moving to Los Angeles, where he began writing for Hollywood movies. He loved it, and went on to write more than 100 film scores.
Mission Impossible’s creator, Bruce Geller, asked him to write “something exciting” to accompany the series opening image of a fuse being lit. Lalo wrote it in unusual 5/4 time, and the driving rhythm evoked a spy-drama tension. Just for fun, he aligned the Morse Code for “M” and “I” with his DUN-dun da-da beat.
Asked about his choice of 5/4 time (famously used by Paul Desmond in “Take Five,” which became a Dave Brubeck hit) Schifrin said he was thinking about visitors arriving from outer space: “They have five legs and couldn’t dance to our music, so I wrote it for them!”
He went on to score movies like “Cool Hand Luke” for Paul Newman, “Bullitt” for Steve McQueen and “Dirty Harry,” among eight collaborations with Clint Eastwood. Not to mention Bruce Lee’s “Enter The Dragon” and “The Sting II.”
He remained a prolific composer and visited Australia several times during his Jazz Meets The Symphony series, regularly collaborating with our horn supremo, James Morrison. He was nominated for six Oscars and won four Grammys; in 2018 Lalo received an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar, presented to him by Eastwood. Woof!
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