With the 2007 publication of his autobiography, Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, by Scarecrow Press, Lalo Schifrin has involved himself in another discipline – book writing – although this should hardly come as a surprise to jazz and film music fans well acquainted with his fascination for art, literature, music, and history.

Schifrin will always be best-known for his jazz music and the Mission: Impossible theme, but even a passing familiarity with those endeavours show a man who has consistently been a part of contemporary music history – as an innovator within popular music forms like jazz, samba, and fusion – and as a dynamic voice in film scoring, applying ideas from classical  and ethnic music to craft some memorable scores for films like the Dirty Harry series, the original (and far superior) Amityville Horror, and the searing dissonance in his rejected music for The Exorcist (released as a bonus CD with the old Warner Bros. boxed VHS set).

The composer has also been involved with the work of son Ryan Schifrin, most notably in providing a straight-faced, menacing score for the sasquatch film Abominable (2006), and themes for the comic book Spooks (2008).

For jazz and film fans, there are actually two ways to read about Schifrin’s lengthy career: his autobiography, and for those with a decent command of French, Georges Michael’s seriously persistent Q&A session with the composer, Lalo Schifrin: Entretiens avec Georges Michel, published in France by Rouge Profond in 2005.

(Schifrin is quite fluent in French, having learned the language in high school in Argentina, and later when he studied for four years at the Paris Conservatory.)

One book doesn’t take material away from the other, and together they form what’s probably the most complete, candid, and often quite funny portrait of a musical life that began in Argentina, was formatively schooled in France, toughened by earning one’s keep through live performing and composing, and achieved diverse success by exploring the purity and marriage of elements from jazz, classical, and film.

One senses that with Schifrin, music is music; the labels “jazz” and “classical” are there for convenience, if not for marketing music to whatever groups need a name to recognize what they like. Schifrin’s Jazz meets the Symphony series was a daring an attempt to open the minds of musicians as well as audiences, but it’s still about bringing music to people, and he clearly thrives on the energy he conducts in live and studio concerts on smaller scales like jazz combos, and massive events like Cantos Aztecas at Mexico’s Teotihuacan ruins.

Georges Michel’s book delves heavily into Schifrin’s influences, teachers, professional associations, and film scores, but his early years remain anecdotal, and it’s that period under Juan Peron during the forties that Schifrin wanted to expanded upon in his autobiography, and where our edited interview begins.