In a detailed post last month, I covered Lalo Schifrin’s 1976 disco-oriented version of John Williams’s familiar theme to the movie Jaws, the world’s first blockbuster film and a hit from the previous summer. There are very few covers of the Williams theme and Schifrin – himself a notable composer for film and TV – offers up a particularly compelling version here. This post opened up an intriguing conversation with my friend Mark Cathcart of Creed Taylor Produced that propelled me to reconsider as well as add to – and correct – my original text.
I.
Lalo Schifrin’s remarkable cover of John Williams’s well-known “Jaws” theme kicks off the second side of the jazz pianist and film/TV composer’s Black Widow LP. Released in June 1976, Black Widow was the first of Schifrin’s non-soundtrack releases since 1971’s Rock Requiem (Verve) and the first of only two albums Schifrin waxed for Creed Taylor’s CTI Records label.
Taylor had previously produced several of Schifrin’s “jazz” records for Verve and MGM between 1962 and 1966. When the producer and pianist reunited a full decade later, jazz – as it was known then – was undergoing yet another revolution: one fusing the improvisational form with overt commercial pop and disco.
Indeed, Black Widow kicked off CTI’s newly-minted “Pop Series” – which accounts for the added “PS” in the label’s logo – and a wholly new numbering system (moving away from CTI’s 6000 series to the newly-fashioned 5000 series, and a lower suggested retail price of $5.98). These discs dumped the label’s iconic gatefold sleeves for single-pocket jackets (although there were exceptions to this “rule,” including Schifrin’s 1977-issued Towering Toccata being one of them) and kept technical information about the songs on the inside sleeve.
Other artists in the series included Patti Austin, CTI house arranger David Matthews and drummer Harvey Mason’s productions for the West Coast group Seawind. Ultimately, only eight LPs were issued in the “CTI PS” series in its mere year-long run.
II.
“Jaws,” of course, is John Williams’s main theme to one of the very first “blockbuster” films that rocked audiences and the film industry in 1975. The Steven Spielberg film is memorable for many reasons, not the least of which is the classic line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
The film’s perfectly-simple main theme was previously covered by guitarist Billy Strange – a studio musician on many Beach Boys and Nancy Sinatra sessions, as well as “The Munsters” theme and, notably, a co-writer of “Limbo Rock” and Elvis Presley’s great “A Little Less Conversation.” Coincidentally, Strange’s compelling version of “Jaws” sounds very much like it was informed by Schifrin, of all people, on a soundtrack like, say, Dirty Harry.
Schifrin, unlike, say, Henry Mancini, did not often record other film composers’ material. A few exceptions of note here include the film themes included on both Between Broadway and Hollywood (1963) and Hitchcock: Master of Mayhem (1990) as well as the “Jaws”-like take on John Barry’s 1976 theme to “King Kong” from Schifrin’s next CTI album Towering Toccata (featuring a cover with Schifrin in black fur and black gloves towering over the Twin Towers of the sadly decimated World Trade Center).
Like Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho string jabs, the theme to “The Twilight Zone” and even Schifrin’s own “Mission: Impossible,” Williams’s “Jaws” became as instantly iconic as his five-note theme to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) later would.
But Schifrin’s take on “Jaws” – which Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen called “a killer jazz galloper with menacing strings and an icy flute melody” in their book “Saturday Night Forever” – attempts to make commercial hay out of this iconoclastic bellwether in a way that hadn’t been done since, say, Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” (1975) or Deodato’s 1973 CTI-released “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (a.k.a. “2001”).
No doubt that was producer Creed Taylor’s intention in the first place. The Deodato hit – although it originated as a Bob James-oriented highlight to the live CTI All Stars events – was a huge hit for the label and a transforming moment for jazz in the seventies (at least until George Benson hit with Breezin’ in 1976).
Here is “Jaws” as featured on the British TV program “Top of the Pops,” which aired on October 28, 1976:
III.
With its throbbing bass line – powered by bassist Anthony (“For the Love of Money”) Jackson’s electric undercurrent and a spiky rhythm guitar – “Jaws” suggests dark, ominous waves that are relentless in their furious mystery. It is a sort of proto-Eurodisco that predates Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s synth-driven hit “I Feel Love.” Little wonder that the track fared so well in Europe.
The insidious groove is abetted in no small measure by Schifrin’s deft use of strings and horns, with funky solos by Schifrin or Clark Spangler on piano and Hubert Laws – a long-time CTI leader and sideman, who was, at the time, working on his own Columbia debut Romeo & Juliet – on flute.
(Clark Spangler [1933-2001] is a name that might be unfamiliar to most CTI listeners. An L.A.-based studio musician, Spangler played keyboards on many film and TV soundtracks, including “Mission: Impossible” and “Mannix.” Like Mike Lang [1941-2022], Spangler often served as Schifrin’s keyboard foil on the composer’s film and TV scores. Spangler also appeared on such Schifrin-related records as Towering Toccata [1977], Dizzy Gillespie’s Free Ride [1977], Paul Horn’s Dream Machine [1978] and Stan Getz’s Children of the World [1979].)
To these ears, Schifrin’s “Jaws” is a sort of a “punk funk” that would have ideally suited the club scenes in William Friedkin’s film Cruising (1980). Friedkin – who rejected Schifrin’s music for the 1973 film The Exorcist – sought in Cruising a tougher, more menacing type of dance music than the Donna Summer and Village People that the popper-fueled leather crowd there was enjoying. He and Jack Nitzsche, the film’s composer, instead populated their soundtrack with the starkly anti-dance music of Willy DeVille and John Hiatt.
IV.
“Jaws” was mastered as a five-minute and 47-second take that kicked off the second side of the Black Widow LP (Japanese issues list the song at 5:48). Six of the LP’s eight tracks, including “Jaws,” were also released in Japan as Stereo Laboratory, Vol. 21 in 1977.
When Black Widow was reissued on CD in 1997, “Jaws” gained an additional 14 seconds, rounding out the song to six minutes and one second – although the digipak sleeve listed the song as 6:47. All subsequent issues of “Jaws” on American and European releases and compilations list the song with the 14 added seconds. The reason for this is because the tapes in Sony’s hands are not the ultimate “masters” that were released on LP. Those masters are in the hands of Japan’s King Records, who continue to issue the song as a 5-minute and 48-second version.
It’s clear that CTI initially hitched Black Widow‘s fortunes on the success of “Jaws.”
Several weeks before the release of the LP, a promotional 12-inch single of “Jaws” began circulating among DJs in the New York City metro area. The 12-inch single was a fairly recent phenomenon at the time: the first such disc that was commercially issued was Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” on Salsoul Records in 1976 (earlier discs, primarily on the Atlantic label, were issued as promo-only releases for DJs). The idea was to take an existing dance track and do a “disco mix” of the song, either by extending or remixing it, especially by amping up the bass lines.
The concept initially took off in the black and gay club scenes, but soon began breaking out in to the mainstream.
For its very first foray in to the promotional 12-inch single, CTI tapped Lalo Schifrin’s “Jaws.” It is likely and most probable that Tony Sarafino supervised this version of the record. Sarafino had recently been brought in to the CTI fold as an unofficial A&R advisor for more pop-oriented projects.1 It’s even possible that Sarafino, who receives a “special thanks” credit on Black Widow‘s inner sleeve for his assistance, chose “Jaws” himself.
Here, the track is extended in to a hypnotic and commanding eight-minute and 15-second dance extravaganza. While the new mix of “Jaws” does little more than repeat the existing piano and flute solos, one key difference is that Anthony Jackson’s bass is brought way up in the mix.
These ears detect only one simple edit to the original recording of “Jaws”: at the 5-minute and 19-second mark, the song reverts back to the 2-minute and 19-second spot (approximately at the middle point of the piano solo) and plays out to the end, thereby repeating half the piano solo and all of Hubert Laws’s solo. Oddly, the repetition works well for the format.
The 8-minute and 15-second mix of “Jaws” was issued on both sides of the promotional disc and was given the catalog number of CTI 6791, which is not part of any numerical series, but rather the reverse of the year it was issued. Likewise, the date listed on the pressing sheet above, April 26, 1976, indicates the date of the record’s pressing.
“CTI has been giving out advance test pressings of a cut off the Lalo Schifrin’ new ‘Black Widow’ LP,” wrote DJ, producer, “father of the disco remix” and one of the inventors of the 12-inch single, Tom Moulton.2 “The song is ‘Theme From Jaws,’ and for those DJs who have it the response has been excellent. The sound is something different and it could be called military marching disco music. The test pressings are 12-inch disco-disk; the length is 8:15.”
“In quite a different vein,” wrote Vince Aletti (in referencing The Ritchie Family’s “The Best Disco in Town”) in his June 12, 1976, Record World column Disco File, “there’s the ominous undertow of Lalo Schifrin’s vibrant jazz interpretation of the theme from ‘Jaws,’ just released by CTI on a 12-inch disco disc of exceptional quality. Creed Taylor produced, Schifrin arranged, and together they take the theme to a length of 8:15 and a depth the original movie score never dreamed of. Feels like the whole dance floor is suddenly underwater, fathoms down. “Jaws” will be available commercially in a slightly shorter version later this week when Schifrin’s album, ‘Black Widow,’ is released.”3
The extended version of “Jaws” was also issued as one side of a German 12-inch disc (here timed at 8:18), backed by fellow CTI/Kudu artist Idris Muhammad’s David Matthews-arranged “House of the Rising Sun.”
V.
Moulton and Aletti’s reported enthusiasm for “Jaws,” however, apparently did not seem to comport with CTI’s expectations.
A three-minute and 30-second edit of “Jaws” was originally scheduled as the A-side to the CTI single OJ-29, with Black Widow‘s “Turning Point” as the B-side. But, for some unknown reason, that single was never released. What did happen is that OJ-29 was released as a 3:37 edit of Black Widow’s “Flamingo” (a 1941 hit for Duke Ellington and a 1966 hit for Herb Alpert), backed with the originally-planned B-side of the album’s “Turning Point.”
On the other hand, “Jaws” was issued in its full album-length glory (5:47) as a single throughout Europe. The song reached an astounding number 14 on the British charts in 1976 (CTI CTSP-005, a single backed by Black Widow‘s “Quiet Village”), proving that Creed Taylor’s cold feet with the song was probably misguided.
The single did pretty well throughout Europe, as well, as the emerging Euro-disco scene was beginning to take shape. The picture sleeves of the European versions of the song even make it look like “Jaws” was Schifrin’s own theme:
At the same time CTI launched its brief-lived “PS” series, it entered the commercial 12-inch “disco single” market. The first of these releases was George Benson’s “Summertime/2001” (mixing the live Gershwin cover from the In Concert – Carnegie Hall LP with David Matthews’s studio overdub of the “2001” theme).
The second commercial CTI 12-inch disc release was a Lalo Schifrin disc with full LP versions of Black Widow‘s “Flamingo” and “Quiet Village” on one side and the 5:47 album version of “Jaws” on the other (both were considered “A-sides”). Although the record’s “cover” advertises these as a “Disco Mix,” the actual recordings match the exact LP versions of the songs:
Although Sony included four bonus tracks (one alternate take and three previously-unreleased tracks) on its 1997, 2001 and 2014 CD releases of Black Widow, the extended “Jaws” was not among these extras. That is probably because Sony either doesn’t have it or, more likely, does not know anything about the 8:15 version of the song in its possession.
CTI would return to John Williams again for David Matthews’s “Theme from Star Wars” (1977), a single that had little chance against Meco’s hit version of the song that year. Former CTI All-Star Ron Carter also later covered Williams’s music from The Empire Strikes Back on his disc Empire Jazz (1980), featuring such musicians from Schifrin’s “Jaws” as Hubert Laws and Jon Faddis as well as former CTI players like Bob James, Billy Cobham, Ralph MacDonald and Jay Berliner.
Lalo Schifrin’s version of “Jaws” was also used (uncredited) in two Turkish films, Silah Arkadaslari and Seref Sözü, both directed by Osman F. Seden in 1977, as well as another Turkish film, Çöl (1983), itself a remake of Jaws. Schifrin’s “Jaws” was also used – with proper credit – in the 2017 HBO documentary film Spielberg, that features a plethora of John Williams’s original music from the original Steven Spielberg films.
Mark Cathcart reminded me recently that Black Widow “was more, much more than just ‘Jaws’ in the U.K.” Growing up in London, Mark recalls the album’s impact on the dance scene there at the time. “Much of the disc was a dance album in London clubs: ‘Black Widow,’ ‘Flamingo,’ ‘Jaws.’ Even ‘Moonglow/Picnic’ was a real couples dance-floor filler. The U.K. changed its gay laws about that time and there was an explosion of gay clubs in and around London.”
He added that the album’s “Turning Point” would come up again in the late seventies when Afro Caribbean Jazz dance, “a high speed form of dance,” swept London, letting the Afro Caribbean guys, “really strut their stuff.”
Endnotes:
- Tony Sarafino’s first CTI credit was “material selection” for Esther Phillips’s 1975 album What a Diff’rence a Day Makes, whose title track was a surprise disco hit. He went on to provide similar assistance on Hank Crawford’s I Hear a Symphony (1976) and contributed lyrics to several of Idris Muhammad’s Kudu records, including the dance hit “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This.” ↩︎
- Billboard, June 12, 1976. ↩︎
- Aletti, Vince, The Disco Files 1973-78: New York’s Underground, Week by Week (New York: D.A.P., 2009), p. 212. ↩︎