Schifrin’s Prankish Take on Pre-Classical Music

from the Amazon.com Web page

Back in my student days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my primary extracurricular activity time was spent at the campus radio station, whose call letters at that time were WTBS. (WMIT had already been taken, so they went with “Technology Broadcasting System,” using the S the same way that CBS did.) My primary “beat” was classical music, but I was always on the lookout for innovative approaches to that repertoire.

So it was that in 1966 I encountered Lalo Schifrin’s studio album The Dissection and Reconstruction of Music From the Past as Performed by the Inmates of Lalo Schifrin’s Demented Ensemble as a Tribute to the Memory of the Marquis de Sade. The album title was probably a prankish attempt to get even with a play that may well have the longest title every to appear on a Broadway marquee, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, almost always known by the shorter title, Marat/Sade. The “play with music” (a genre frequently used by Bertolt Brecht) was originally written in German by Peter Weiss; but an English language version was prepared for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) by Geoffrey Skelton and Adrian Mitchell. That production was taken to Broadway at the end of 1965, probably providing Americans with their first encounter with Glenda Jackson in the role of Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday. (Jackson also appeared in the film adaptation that was made in 1967.)

Schifrin’s album had nothing to do with Weiss’ play or with the music that Richard Peaslee composed for the RSC, but he really dug the idea of a title that went on longer than anyone could reasonably expect. Instead, each of the ten tracks involved the reworking of a pre-classical composition for an ensemble that took a “symphonic” approach to making jazz. None of the jazz announcers at WTBS liked the album very much, but I could not get enough of it. I may even have done a bit of “side-by-side” programming, preceding one of the tracks with the source that Schifrin had taken as his point of departure.

When my wife and I left Palo Alto and turned our pied-à-terre unit in Opera Plaza into our full-time residence, lack of space required that I give up all my vinyls. This Schifrin album was one of them; but, by the time I let go of it, all the tracks had been deeply etched into memory. It was only about a month ago that pandemic conditions led me to restore the album as part of my library, this time through MP3 download. In the course of doing so, I discovered that Schifrin had released a “sequel” album with the much shorter title Return of the Marquis de Sade, which I added to my previous download.

My only regret is that neither download included a booklet. On the earlier album Schifrin had prepared a useful (if not particularly precise) track-by-track account of his sources; and I have no idea whether he did the same for his “sequel” album. What was interesting about the latter was that he revisited at least two of the tracks from the first album, giving these “second thoughts” pieces new titles. So it was a bit sobering to wonder if Schifrin had reached the limits of his imagination and was not prepared to go any further! In fairness to Schifrin, however, it is important to note that he took on one of the fugues in BWV 1080 (The Art of Fugue) for the track entitled “Bach to the Blues.”

On the other hand, since my knowledge of jazz was pretty limited back in the Sixties, I would only be impressed later at the performers that contributed to these albums. Schifrin had enough clout that he could summon any number of interesting jazzmen (and, yes, I am afraid that none of the players were women) for his Dissection album. I was particularly interested in Don Butterfield, whose tuba talents were divided between jazz and the avant-garde. However, Schifrin’s trumpet section included Clark Terry; and two of the trombonists were J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding. The drummer was Grady Tate, the only member of the group that also showed up to record the Return album. On the other hand that second album included participation by Ray Brown on bass.

Taken as a whole, I still enjoy listening to all of the tracks on these two albums, although I doubt that there will be any effort to put together a “revival concert” for all of this imaginative and engaging content.