Mark R. Hasan: I found the early years under Peron really fascinating, and I think most people don’t really know that much about Argentina, aside from (and maybe it’s unfortunate) because of just Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1978 stage musical Evita; they’ve heard of the musical and its leading characters, are probably familiar with the tango, but they don’t know very much about the political history.

Lalo Schifrin:  Argentina is a very interesting country. It has many cultures, almost like the United States; the only difference is there’s no British influence. There’s the Spanish conquest, the indigenous Indian population, and the mixture of Spanish and Indian, especially the gauchos. Like the United States, very many Europeans migrated and came to work the land and develop industries. It’s a very interesting country.

MRH: I wonder the arrival of all those different cultures during Argentina’s recent history were one of the reasons you were so fascinated with world music?

LS: Well, first of all, my father was the concert master of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, and since I was a child, he was taking me to concerts and to see opera, and for me, I couldn’t consider any other life without music. Then when I was in high school, I was exposed by friends to American jazz, and I embraced that immediately, so I had classical music and jazz.

MRH: You described in your autobiography the way in which you acquired jazz records at the time under Peron’s regime, and it’s probably hard for us to relate to a world where there was only one major kind of music or a certain style of music (the tango) that was acceptable, and everything else was more or less forbidden.

It’s kind of funny, and at the same time kind of frightening to think that you were risking a little bit of your neck when every few months you were picking up jazz LPs from an American naval officer on shore leave, and your efforts to smuggle the records under a raincoat, whatever the weather.

LS: Oh yes, but you have to realize that Peron came to power in 1943 during the Second World War, and he was helped by the Germans. If Germany had won the war, Peron was assigned to be like the representative of the Germans in Argentina, and this was very serious.

What happened is that in 1943, I was eleven years old, and in 1945, when Germany finally lost the war, United States in particular started to put pressure on Peron, so finally he had to call for elections. Because they were supervised, he couldn’t do any fraud, so he had to make very clean elections.

However, the opposition presented two candidates for president and vice president that were discredited for political reasons. (There were other politicians that were a big danger to Peron, but they were not elected through the democratic process, and were not elected to be candidates for the presidency.)

Peron very demagogic, but he was also very popular, and he had married Evita. The masses liked them, and they didn’t care about fascism or Nazism; the majority of the population voted for them, and they won the election.

MRH: There’s one episode where you describe having to get your passport by going to a government building where some very scary things were done to people, and the scenario you recount recalls a similar memory David Korda wrote about in his book about the Korda family, when his father or uncle had to pass a chilling interrogation in order to leave Hungary, and it’s frightening to think that an artist like yourself had to use his wits to avoid the dangerous whims of a government bureaucrat who had the power to prevent your ‘escape’ to France.

LS: Well, it was a legal escape, because I had to do it with a passport. First of all, at that time in Argentina, Peron was so much in charge that it would be suicidal to try and do something against the government, including trying to escape, so I had to do it legally, and it wasn’t easy, as you can read in the chapter of my book, but finally they let me go; they gave me the passport and then I could go to the French consulate and get the student visa.