By Jim Farber
For years, Herb Alpert talked by phone with Burt Bacharach once or twice a week. One day, two years before Bacharach’s death in 2023, he called Alpert with concerning news. “He told me he had to go to the hospital to have some fluid drained from his lungs,” Alpert said. “At the time, he was working with a musician who arranged a string part for him that he really liked. So he had the guy send him the part to bring with him to the hospital, so between shots and draining, he could study it.
“Man, he was 92 then and still studying!” Alpert exclaimed. “That’s a quality I really admire.”
It’s also one he seems to share. This week, Alpert, 89, will release his 50th album, under the title “50,” even though, he pointed out, he hadn’t realized he’d reached that milestone until he finished recording. His oversight shouldn’t be surprising given his schedule. Besides the new release, Alpert has been working on two other albums, in between playing dates on a tour that lasts through the end of the year. He’s also been enjoying his second career as a sculptor, having just completed a 14-foot-tall piece for the New Orleans Jazz Museum that depicts a man playing Alpert’s instrument, the trumpet.
“People will look at it and say, ‘Is that you playing? Is it Miles Davis?’” Alpert said. “It’s nobody. I was just trying to capture the feeling of playing.”
Communicating that feeling remains his primary concern whenever he performs or writes. “There are lots of artists who try to impress other musicians with their playing,” he said. “They’ll play these dizzying things, and you say, ‘Wow that’s fabulous!’ But is it touching anyone?”
Over the years, Alpert’s music has touched multitudes. Since his debut album with the Tijuana Brass, “The Lonely Bull” in 1962, his sets have topped the Billboard album chart five times, generating No. 1 singles in three consecutive decades. To this day, he’s the only artist to top the charts fronting both an instrumental track (“Rise” in 1979) and a vocal piece (“This Guy’s in Love With You,” penned by Bacharach and Hal David in 1968). In the same time frame, he and Jerry Moss co-founded and ran one of the mightiest and most respected indie labels in music history, A&M Records, which they sold in 1989 for a reported $500 million.
Despite the potential distractions of wealth and success, Alpert found a firm anchor for his life in consistency. Since 1972, he has lived in the same Malibu, California, home with his wife, singer Lani Hall, whom he wed 50 years ago (a time span the new album title also toasts). “The real reason I’m excited by this mark is my marriage,” he said.
As we spoke via video call, Alpert sat in his garage-turned-home-studio, stuffed with microphones and tapes but few mementos of his career. “I don’t look back,” he said. “I go forward.”
Most of the trumpet parts for the new album were recorded here. The sound he got from his instrument — clean in tone, tidy in arrangement and joyous in character — also speaks of consistency. From the first note of the opening track, “Dancing Down 50th Street,” his playing evokes the brisk and flirty mood of his ’60s hits, from “A Taste of Honey” to “Spanish Flea,” a sound that represents midcentury modern culture as eloquently as an Eames chair or an Ossie Clark frock. While he greatly evolved his sound in the ’70s and ’80s with a funkier gait, he retained the essential joy in his playing.
At the same time, he treasures a nuance one fan located in his work in the ’60s: “Your music is playful,” she said, “but in a melancholy way.”
He credits the mournful undercurrent to his father’s rearing in a shtetl outside what is now Kyiv, Ukraine. When referring to his father in the interview, Alpert spoke in an accent that underscored his Eastern European Jewish heritage. His parents performed music at home (his father, the mandolin; mother, violin), but when presented with a range of instruments to pick in school at age 8, he chose trumpet.
“When I finally made the right sound out of it, I got intrigued,” he said. “I was a quiet, insecure kid, and this instrument could talk for me.”
For practical purposes, he entered the business as a singer-songwriter. Though the recordings he fronted under the name Dore Alpert went nowhere, some songs he wrote with his partner, Lou Adler, later a music business mogul, became hits for Jan and Dean and Sam Cooke, including the standard “Wonderful World.”
On a shoestring, Alpert formed A&M with Moss for the first Tijuana Brass album, a Top 10 smash. People often incorrectly describe the tart horn sound in “The Lonely Bull” as mariachi. It was actually Alpert’s approximation of the improvised fanfares he heard brass bands play at Tijuana bullfights. On his own recordings there was no Tijuana Brass. He played all the horn parts himself. And he has no Mexican heritage. The latter drew muted criticism at the time for what’s now considered cultural appropriation. While Alpert said he never liked using the Mexican tag, “my partner was adamant in using it as a starting point,” referring to Moss.
Regardless, his music quickly broadened to become a key soundtrack for the swank sensibility later depicted in shows such as “Mad Men.” By the later ’60s, however, the culture turned darker and heavier, and Alpert experienced burnout. His first marriage, to his childhood sweetheart, collapsed, affecting him so badly he could barely play. “I was stuttering through the horn,” he said. A mentor cured him by saying, “The trumpet is just a piece of plumbing. You’re the instrument!”
He rallied in a big way in 1979 with “Rise,” a song that countered the typical beat of then dominant disco with a slower, funkier rhythm that connected so deeply, it has been sampled by over 30 hip-hop artists, including the Notorious B.I.G. on “Hypnotize.” In the years since, Alpert has released albums at a reliable clip, 11 in the past decade. He also plans to tour next year when he turns 90.
“My sister, who is 98, said, ‘Why are you still doing 40, 50 concerts a year?’” he said. “I’m not doing it as a ‘victory tour’ or so that people will say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that he’s still alive and playing?’ When I’m onstage and the band is behind me and the audience is there, for me that’s everything.”
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