Long a top collectible LP, Kritzerland’s limited CD rescues a very rare Mario Nascimbene score from oblivion, as well as providing some details on an even more rare film – the first and only movie presented in the branded Smell-O-Vision process…
Lalo Schifrin is showcased in this amalgam of reviews featuring Twilight Time’s new Blu-ray of Che! (1969), the soundtrack CD (Aleph Records) + the composer in an episode of Jazz Casual (Rhino) and the 2001 concert doc Movie Music Man: A Portrait of Lalo Schifrin (Image / Kultur).
Produced two years after the death of Argentine-born rebel Che Guevara, Richard Fleischer’s film is infamous for being a grand piece of cinematic kitsch, starring Omar Sharif as the eponymous anti-hero whose face became a brand on T-shirts, sheets, posters, and buttons for decades, and Jack Palance as a cigar-chomping Fidel Castro who led his band of rag-tag rebels into Havana after 2 years of guerilla warfare in the rural areas of Cuba…
Even though Fox’s Che! was a cash-in biopic – the film was released roughly two years after Che Guevara’s death – Lalo Schifrin approached the project as a golden opportunity to apply his musicological interests to the rhythms of Latin America…
Between roughly 1961-1968, syndicated jazz columnist Ralph Gleason hosted a half-hour show on San Francisco’s KQED, part of NET, where various jazz notables from the past, present, and emerging powerhouses would perform and chat (if they desired) with Gleason about their art form…
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