Mission Impossible

Mission Impossible: My Life in Music is the engaging autobiography of Lalo Schifrin, the musician, conductor, and composer of more than 60 jazz and classical works and over 100 film and television scores, including Bullitt, the Rush Hour series, Cool Hand Luke, The Dead Pool, Tango, The Fox, Voyage of the Damned, The Amityville Horror, The Sting II, and Mission Impossible. Edited by Richard Palmer, this autobiography is a journey from Schifrin's formative years in Argentina to the classical and jazz atmospheres in Paris in the 1950s; and from his jazz career in the United States with Dizzy Gillespie from 1958-1963 to his development as a film and television composer from 1963 to the present.

Organized in eight parts, the book reflects on Schifrin's cosmopolitan experience and provides impressions and vignettes of the extraordinary people with whom he worked. As a composer whose works bridge three main musical styles—jazz, classical, and film and television—his autobiography offers invaluable insights on all three genres, as well as politics, literature, and travel. This significant volume includes over 30 photos, appendixes listing Schifrin's works, and a discography, as well as an audio CD featuring some of Schifrin's greatest compositions.

Lalo Schifrin has received four Grammy Awards and six Academy Award nominations, and recently established a jazz and classical composition scholarship at University of California in Los Angeles.

Richard Palmer is director of general education at Bedford School in the UK. He is the author of Sonny Rollins: The Cutting Edge (2004), and editor of Jazz Writings (2005).