There was a door that led you through Argentina to New York more than 40 years ago and it was called jazz, personified by great Dizzy Gillespie; but you didn’t come to the US empty-handed; you had considerable musical background behind you back; what was it that you were able to teach Dizzy and other musicians there and what you learned from them?

There’s a long answer to this question. I wouldn’t say teach but I was bringing some contribution of my classical education. For instance, there was that Moris Ravel song, “Chanson Naturel,” for voice and piano and when I played it to Dizzy he went, “wow!” Dizzy didn’t know about Ravel but that was the genius he had, to grasp things and try to use them… So, he incorporated Ravel into Monk’s “Round the Midnight.” But then, of course I learned from Dizzy too, like, how to accompany… Many jazz musicians think that while accompanying, you can do anything. Dizzy gave me some rules and that was an eye opening experience.

This is a Julio Cortazar quote who spent most of his creative life in Europe: “Like Orpheus, I looked back so many times and paid great price for that… and yet, I continue to look back at you Eurydice – Argentina. Does this quote somehow make sense to you after all those years?

Yes, Argentina has some feeling for me. That’s where my formation happened, that’s where I studied music, that’s where I studied everything, geography mathematics, etc. I studied my culture, literature, etc. there. I met Borghes in Argentina who was Cortazar’s teacher in a way. I went to his lectures there. It meant a lot to me and he had a lot of influence, and he helped in my formation. Also, besides music and literature, art scene in general was a big influence too; going to the galleries and stuff like that. And my friends and my family, of course. My father was a very good man and my mother, she was great. So, they all left a big influence on me and of course, the discovery of jazz when I was a teenager in Argentina. You have to realize that the country meant a lot to me and not too many years ago I made a film “Tango” that I recorded in Buenos Aires and I was very moved by the whole experience.

You once said that writing and performing music is not work but the continuation of your teenage years when you discovered all the music and you were blinded by it. Can you please talk about your early discoveries in the field of music?

Well, my early musical influence, local, even before Astor Piazzola, that was a pianist who is still alive and his name is Enrique Barenboim. He is around 86 now and his playing is still great. I introduced him to Carlos Saura and he played a piano for Saura in Paris and Saura put him in his movie (“Tango”) and if you’ve seen it, a guy, pianist, playing in the movie is him. And all the musicians say this guy never makes a mistake, just never makes them. Also, in general, I would say that there are three great pianists in the American continent. One is Oscar Peterson in jazz; I’m talking about big ones, Chucho Valdes in Cuba and Horacio Salgan in Argentina.. They are the same level. But Barenboim is special… And I heard him when I was very, very young and he was a big influence. Of course influences came from my family as well. My father was playing string quartets and Beethoven and Brahms and he was taking me to the opera and symphony concerts. For instance, once I attended a concert of Heitor Villa-Lobos. He came from Brazil to conduct his own music and I was amazed by the amount of the exotic instruments that he had in his very big orchestra. I told my father I wanted to meet him. So, instead of taking me to his dressing room where there were too many people, he took me to the banquet that the Buenos Aires Philharmonics threw for him after the concert. And my father sat me next to him and I asked him: “Maestro, I would like to be a composer; what would you advise?” And he said: Contrapunto, contrapunto, contrapunto! (Counterpoint, counterpoint, counterpoint). Later, when I heard the music of Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Arnold Shoenberg, Webern, and Messiaen… I mean, that was something! I even heard Messiaen before I went to France. So, they all influenced me. And, of course, when I started to listen to jazz and when I heard the music of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, it became like the road to Damaskus. I became totally converted.

We usually say that somebody is a musician with his/her own style; how much the style depends on musical training or education and how much on personality?

Well, Jorge Luis Borghes once said that the genius is the one who knows how to select his influences. I don’t know about my genius but at least I didn’t fail to select good influences. Tthere’s so much music around! If you select poor influence, it means that something is wrong with you. It means that mediocrity is going to inhabit you. So, I was lucky enough to select good influences. I was surrounded by good music and I selected good influences.

Do you think that in case of great musicians, sometimes the personal charisma or the context that’s not strictly musical sometimes influences the way a listener listens to the music? In other words, do you think that the fact that you are the great Lalo Schifrin sometimes adds something that’s completely out of the confines of the musical idiom? Or does music speak for itself each time we listen to it?

Well, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know, you have to decide that. I’m not a listener, you are the listener. I can not answer that question for you because it is your problem not mine…Well, not a problem but a situation. You have to decide if all the things I’ve done or all the musicians I’ve been surrounded with in jazz or in classical music and all the movie directors or actors I worked with, in Hollywood or outside Hollywood, affect you somehow when you listen to my music. The most important thing is that I’m not thinking about what surrounds me; I can write music in a telephone booth. For example, I wrote the music to film “Tango” and I was very excited to meet Carlos Saura in Buenos Aires. He flew from Madrid to meet me there. We decided to do it in Argentina because, like you have to listen to jazz in New York, you have to learn tango in Buenos Aires or you have to do Brazilian music in Rio or Bahia. We had Argentinean choreographers because they are the best tango dancers in Argentina. That was something very special! What happened in that particular case was that I had to write the score first because they couldn’t shoot the movie without having the music first… So, after the meeting I was on the plane going from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles to write it and I couldn’t wait to start writing music but I didn’t have music paper with me in the plane and it takes 14 hours to get from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles. I asked the stuardese to give me paper cocktail napkins and I did the lines of the score and I wrote the music in the plane. So, it doesn’t matter where I am. I don’t think about the surroundings and where I’m coming from but I think about where I’m going to. It is important to know where you are going next. I already have ideas for 2004 –2005 and I’m not thinking about influences. Of course, when you play with the symphony orchestra the musicians have to be good because the baton has no sound, they have to play. And when you play with jazz greats it also affects you somehow. I played with Max Roach, Ray Brown, Christian McBride, and Ron Carter. Recently I played with Ron in New York… And that fantastic drummer, – Lewis Nash who is new Max Roach… And before that I played with Dizzy, Coltrane and Miles. Yeah, they all made a big impact on me…

Listening to music means something completely different for every person and it depends on the thoughts or memories of the individual. What is your opinion: how is it possible that while listening to the music an audience of individuals despite all differences, feel connected to each other and to the music they listen to?

Few years ago I wrote a long piece called “Esperanto” with the jazz band of WDR in Cologne and also some additional classical instruments and musicians and electronic instruments as well. I had two synthesizers. I brought soloists from all five continents; I had Trilok Gurtu from Aisa, I had Don Byron from US and Jean-Luc Ponty from Europe and Karl Heinz Stockhausen’s son, Simon Stokhausen. And on percussion there was a guy from Senegal, Africa. I invited James Morrison from Austarlia and Nestor Marconi from Argentina who is the best bandoneon player today. /He was the first bandoneon player with me in the movie “Tango” and we are going to do something together in 2005 with the New York’s Lincoln Center chamber ensemble./ So, I had five virtuosi and I did something I’ve never done before; to put five soloists together that I’ve never played with before. However the music is called Esperanto! Why? Because Esperanto is the universal language. And it came out great, absolutely great and the audience reaction was fantastic; we had a standing ovation that lasted for twenty minutes. And they reacted to the universal language! Now, the audience should react the same way when it comes to movies but in a slightly different way. Duringthe concerts I’m doing here I’ll perform many themes that I wrote myself but I’ll also perform some music of my collegues whom I admire. I don’t know, maybe the listeners here have seen all the movies music from which I’m going to play or maybe not, but in case they haven’t, they have to use their imagination to put their own images. If they didn’t see all those movies then they have to make their own stories. The concert I’m playing tomorrow needs the listeners’ participation, they have to put their imagination at work and that’s how they can be united during the act of listening.

Jazz at the one hand and symphony music on the other. When did you begin to realize that the two distinct musical forms could be combined?

I always wanted to combine the two. I never could understand why the music of great masters of European classical music couldn’t be assimilated or integrated with the great music of jazz. I could never understand why the record shops have these sections for classical music or jazz, etc. So, this is a long story: I wrote a suite called “Gillespiana” that sold one million copies and actually that opened the door to me to Hollywood because the record company I recorded with was VERVE and it was a subsidiary of MGM records and MGM at that time was the biggest movie studio in the world. So, when I recorded “Gillespiana” with big orchestra, Gunther Shuller was playing at that time a French horn in Metropolitan Opera in New York. He called me and said that he was doing the series of concerts at the Carnegie Hall combining jazz and classical music. Some of them were going to be how the classical composers saw jazz; for instance, “Ragtime” by Stravinsky or music of Paul Hindemith, some Aaron Copland, etc. and how they see jazz from their point of view. And the other concerts he planned were how the jazz composers could write in a classical context. So, he called to commission me to do this and I wrote some piece of music and some others also did it like, John Lewis and Eric Dolphy. I remember it was composers who new both sides of things. And Gunther Shuller conducted it and I realized that if I go with that music to Count Baise or New York Philarmonic orchestras they would have said, “Get out of here!” and I don’t blame them because they have their own criteria. But I kept telling myself, “Why, why so?” while I kept a friendship with Gunther. As a matter of fact, we met once at Monterey jazz festival and we took a tour around the island of Alcatraz in a boat and we talked about this subject. So, slowly, I discovered that there were composers like Henry Mancini who was not strictly a jazz musician but he loved jazz and there already were jazz musicians like Johnny Mandel and Neil Hefty who already did movies so I fugired out for myself that in movies I could do jazz with the symphony. That’s how it started. In one of my firts movie, “Cincinnati Kid” I had Ray Charles singing with symphony orchestra and it was followed by “Bullitt” and then TV shows like “Mission Impossible” and many more. Believe it or not but I went to Hollywood not for financial reasons; people think “Oh, he wanted to make more money!” but it was only for artistic reasons. They pay good money in Hollywood that’s great but my main interest was artistic. And I kept doing it.

You are a tightrope walker in this regard. What are your criteria when you choose a piece of jazz that adapt to symphonic idiom?

I’m like a bull fighter and I have to fight very close to bulls. Very close. In some cases, like when I did Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” Charlie Parker was a bird, a bird on fire and I thought it would be great to combine his music with music of Stravinsky. Or take “Miraculous Mandarin” by Bartok. I wrote “Miraculous Monk” based on Bartok’s music because I think that his aesthetics is very close to Bela Bartok. I also thought that Joe Zawinul’s “Birdland” would be very good to adapt to to the symphonic idiom. I did tributes to Duke Ellington, Luis Armstrong and Fats Waller and I also did some music combining Barroco and blues. And I did a tribute to John Coltrane; I did Naima and David Sanchez played on that. I also had some soloists like Paquito de Riviera who played Charlie Parker and of course Jon Faddis who played Dizzy Gillespie and James Morrison who played sometimes trombone and sometimes trumpet or flugelhorn. In the Charlie Parker suite “Firebird” I decided to have a quintet, like the be-bop quintet. It was Paquito, Jon Faddis, Grady Tate, Ray Brown and myself surrounded by the symphony orchestra. It sounds so natural, the whole thing. I knew I was doing dangerous things but I was getting a lot of air play all over Europe; I even performed with that kind of music at the Saltsburg Festival doing jazz with symphony and the musicians loved to play it. I told them: “If you can play Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Messiaen and Stockhausen, and there are so difficult rhythms there, so why can’t you play swing?” I decided to make the analytical, mathematical approach to what is swing. Of course you have to feel swing and they didn’t have that feeling but if you write it in notes and they read what they see you can make them swing. And all of a sudden they looked at each other and said: “Look, we are swinging!”

This is a Dave Brubeck quote: “In the 50-es, we crusaded to have jazz recognized as a legitimate art form; we are now victims of our own success. Jazz may be an art form but it is not longer the popular music of America. Do you agree that this shift made damage to jazz?

Well, that shift started to happen with the appearance of be-bop. During the swing era people could dance to the music and people like to dance. But be-bop musicians like Kenny Clark, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy, Bud Powell and many more, well, they were so against swing. They choose tempos that were extremely fast and people couldn’t dance. And Kenny and Max Roach were coming out with the accents that people didn’t know how to react to. So, that was the beginning of the divorce in late forties and early fifties and it went on and it was surprising and that’s how jazz became the art form. But it’s not something that occurred only in connection of jazz; For instance, Shubert and Hugo Wolf wrote art songs while others wrote pop songs. The same thing can be applied to the blues forms and other music as well. So, the musicians who played be-bop started to divorce from the public and next moment, for example in case of “It Takes Two to Tango” you needd a collaboration of the audience to understand what the artist was doing. Things like that happens in the history of music.

You travel a lot and sometimes you meet the orchestra you are going to perform with for the first time; I believe you already met the Georgian musicians yesterday; what were your feelings during your first encounter?

Well it’s like a blind date when I was young and I dated a girl I didn’t know. You always hope for the best. We had a good experience yesterday; The Orchestra welcomed me warmly. Initially, the musicians in the orchestra were a bit shocked like in all orchestras when they are exposed to the music and the style of music they never played before. But then they liked it and they had to work hard to get it straight and that’s the purpose of the rehearsal; to make progress. This evening we have our second rehearsal so by time of the concert I hope it’s going to be all right.

What is the difference between a kid who spent countless hours in Buenos Aires cinemas and a man who writes soundtracks for the films; are you still a movie buff?

Oh yes. Well, I like all good movies. I’ve been a movie buff since I was a child. I don’t know, but for some reason I’m not a snob and I selected the two arts of the 20th century: Jazz and films. A person who helped me when I was a child was my father who was a concert master of Buenos Aires Philharmonics. We had opera seasons and I went to see a lot of opera. And I was very touched by what was going on there.Some of them were fantastic and sometimes scary. I still have nightmares when I think of some scenes in Donizatti’s “Lucia de la Mermoul.” One thing I feel grateful for is that I learned not only music but also the dramatic aspects of music, – drama, tragedy or comedy that helped me to write music for films. So, today I react the same way. I’m still a movie buff. I remember I saw Fellini’s “La Strada” when I was a student in Paris and I went to see Alexander Nevsky many times because of Prokofief’s collaboration with Eisenstein. Sometimes I also go and watch horror movies or B-movies. I like the music there and I went to see movies 14-15 times for audio-visual context, to see what contribution music makes to the images.

Well, and the last one is: What are your expectations and what’s going to happen tomorrow?

Oh, I’m not a prophet. I’m optimistic and after the rehearsal we did yesterday I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be great. Now, I can not give you any guarantee because as I said I’m not a prophet but I have the expectation that we are going to have a good time.