MRH: There’s a very telling moment in a recollection from your youth in Buenos Aires, where you write about playing one half of the piano with an extremely gifted colleague, and you saw a look on his face during the performance that not only signalled his appreciation of your own skill, but make you realize jazz was the music you had to play.

LS: That colleague was none other than one of the greatest pianists in the history of music, Friedrich Gulda, who was an Austrian pianist. He was one of the masters of classical music, and one of the greatest interpreters of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and all the great composers.

There were friends of his who told me that also played jazz, and one of those times he came to Buenos Aires to play a classical concert (he was very young, maybe a little bit older than me), they made a jazz jam session, and they asked me if I wanted to go, and I said ‘Of course!.’

They told him that I played good piano, and he invited me. He was already at the piano and he invited me to share the keyboard and play four hands, and that moment when I played a solo he looked at me with great admiration – I could tell – and for me that was like winning an Oscar. It was then that I made the decision to become a jazz pianist

My father, obviously being a classical musician, didn’t oppose it, but he didn’t want me to get into that…‘If don’t you want to get into classical music, then you should get into law or some other degree in university,’ but I decided for jazz.

MRH: Was there a moment when you similarly realized that film composing, like jazz, was something you had to do?

LS: Well, since I was a child, I’ve always been a film buff, and I always listened to the music scores. When I came back from France in the fifties, I had the opportunity to write the music for a short film, Venga a bailar el rock (1957). Then later on, the film industry in Argentina started to get the idea – especially with new producers – that I was the right guy - so I was hired to do a long one, El Jefe / The Boss (1958), a film which won the equivalent of an Academy Award [the Silver Condor]. This was right before I came to the United States.

MRH: And I guess from that experience, you thought this was definitely something that you wanted to pursue, because you thought it was invigorating and exciting.

LS: Oh yes. The chemistry between the visual and the music was very, very fascinating. It still is.

Now there are schools where they teach film composition (as a matter of fact, I taught for two years at UCLA, here in California), but in those days there was no schools where one could study this art form, and I learned it by instinct. Also, when I was a child, my father exposed me to opera, and opera [has] an audio-visual counterpoint, which is what happens in film.

MRH: I’m impressed that you’ve been able to balance film scoring and jazz music and concert work during the course of your career since the sixties, and I wonder if you have any thoughts on how you’re able to maintain the stamina? Is that energy level something you learned to exploit when you were very young, traveling and performing throughout the world?

LS: That’s a very good question. Nobody has asked me that kind of question. I’ve done many interviews, so congratulations for that question. You forced me to think of something new.

The reason why I do so many things is perhaps because I need to express myself in different areas. I do have already the technique of composition, orchestration, counterpoint, and harmony (it’s like talking or writing a letter or something), so I feel very comfortable in jazz, I feel very comfortable in movies, and I feel very comfortable in the so-called classical music.

As a matter of fact I don’t even understand why they have to make such a sensation between them. I have a series of records I’m doing called Jazz meets the Symphony, where I bring a group of virtuosi soloists and put them together with a real symphony orchestra, and it’s having a great success.

Classical musicians say, ‘Hey wait. I didn’t know I could swing!’ and the jazz musicians feel a different kind of stimulation from the atmosphere of a symphony orchestra. I’ve been lucky and fortunate.