Georges Michel

Lalo Schifrin is one of the most important composers of modern cinema (Joy House, Bullitt, The Fox, The Beguiled, Dirty Harry, La Pelle) but also of Hollywood as a whole, from fantastic or SF movies like The Amityville Horror, THX 1138, to Enter The Dragon (Tarantino never kept it secret that he really liked the music of this film) and Rush Hour, not to mention the scores for cult TV series like Mannix, Starsky & Hutch and Mission : Impossible. Prolific creator of scores for the screen (more than three hundred), he is also a jazz musician. Indeed, he was, as a pianist, a composer and an arranger, one of the privileged fellow musicians of Dizzy Gillespie – for whom he wrote, in 1961, the famous Gillespiana. He also produced classic works and contemporary pieces for strings.

Georges Michel met Schifrin in Los Angeles. For a week, the artist evoked his years of apprenticeship, his association with the jazz scene, his ideas about film music, his own methods of composition, the amazing people he worked with such as René Clément, John Sturges, Don Siegel, John Boorman, George Lucas, Clint Eastwood, and Peter Yates. He told fascinating anecdotes about the personalities of those he was involved with (Gillespie, Count Basie, Quincy Jones…), going back on his stormy relations with Friedkin on The Exorcist of which he wrote the first score. The book, which lists the complete discography of the artist, is completed by an important iconography.

It is the first worldwide publication dedicated to Lalo Schifrin that gave access to rare documents such as pages of famous scores, a letter from Norman Jewison recalling his collaboration with the musician on The Kid of Cincinnati, the working session of The Osterman Weekend during which we can follow a conversation between Sam Peckinpah and the composer.

ISBN : 2-915083-16-9, format 15,5 x 21,5 cm, parution janvier 2006, 208 pages.