Some people might be content to let the dueling engines of a Mustang and a Charger provide all the soundtrack they’d ever want for a chase scene as legendary as the one in Bullitt. Lalo Schifrin knew better. The score to Peter Yates’s Steve McQueen cop thriller has a few down spots — the lite bossa-jazz of “Room ’26’,” “The Aftermath of Love,” and “The First Snowfall” is a lot more pleasantly mellow than it is memorable in any way — but when the mood rises to meet the film’s feeling of action and suspense, its sense of swing connects straight to the jaw. And while the album’s soundtrack release saw the music re-recorded to work a little better as a home-listening LP than a pure film score, the retooling works — in part because Schifrin had the ruthlessly accomplished genre-polyglot Wrecking Crew session players backing him up, letting Schifrin’s compositions breathe like the upbeat pop-jazz it really was. The biggest glow-up goes to the main title theme, which gets an uptempo jolt wrapped around a mile-deep bassline, and a lead guitar that’s gradually unmoored from its smooth groove and spirals into a barely-controlled freakout in the face of an increasingly insistent horn section. (The seething last-moment Hammond B-3 sting in its waning moments is just the chef’s kiss.) That cinematic dynamic’s also well translated through the brassy freneticism-a-go-go of “Hotel Daniels” and the spacious jazz-rock tension-building of “Ice Pick Mike,” but it’s that reconstituted chase theme, “Shifting Gears,” that really pulls it all together: the ready-to-snap highwire strings, the sour taunts and brisk scrambling exclamations of the horn section, the way the rumbling bass sounds like it’s about ready to spring off the line in a tire-smoking burnout.