Orchestras Playing With Jazz

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Jazz meets the symphony - and don't they have fun with it.

Argentine-born jazz pianist / composer / conductor Lalo Schifrin is the archetypal multi-dimensional jazz-man who looks more at home in black turtleneck than white tux, and who pretty much single-handedly created the genre of symphony orchestra having fun in the playground of jazz.

While studying  the piano at the Paris Conservatoire under the influence of Ravel, and taking classes by Oliver Messaien, he spent (or misspent) his evenings playing in Parisian jazz bars. He formed his own jazz orchestra back in Buenos Aires, then played for Dizzy Gillespie's quintet in New York before heading west to for a starry Hollywood career composing for films and television. The themes for Coogan's Bluff, Dirty Harry, Rush Hour, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission: Impossible, amongst many, many others, are all his.

The jazz-symphony connection was born in 1993 with the first in a series of famous "Jazz Meets the Symphony" collaborations with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and notable jazz stars such as James Morrison, drummer Grady Tate and double-bassist Ray Brown (who all feature in this program).

 "Thinking  back," he says, "I believe the start of this project was really two of my early film scores: The Cincinnati Kid,' in which Ray Charles sang backed by a symphony orchestra, and the famous chase scene through the streets of San Francisco in 'Bullitt' wherein I wrote a symphonic score combined with saxophone solos playing at very fast tempos."

Years later, a tour with Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Grady Tate and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra cemented the realization that the two musical forms could happily be combined.

His understanding of music as mood-maker is second to none, and winningly demonstrated in this program as his spare, lugubrious figure moves between podium and piano-stool, urging the orchestra into bouncy jazz rhythms or spare, pared-back interludes, his hands dropping onto the keys with punchy certainty.

Among other treats, viewers around the world will recognise the opening number "Down here on the Ground" as the theme for the classic 60s Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke, which has since become ubiquitous  as a television news theme. Variations on The Battle Hymn of the Republic take a jingoistic tune a long way from its yankee roots. And in the Echoes of Duke Ellington it's a delight to watch an orchestral piccolo player really getting jazzy. Prepare to be charmed.

Picture by Getty Images