If you want to travel back to the mid 1960s without a time machine, all you need is a ticket to a Herb Alpert concert. At 90, Alpert is in the middle of a nationwide tour with The Tijuana Brass, the lively horn-driven band he created when JFK still sat in the Oval Office. After selling over 70 million albums, the original Tijuana Brass disbanded in 1971.
Alpert, a hugely successful producer and musician who co-founded A&M Records with record promoter/businessman Jerry Moss, kept busy with myriad other projects. (In 1989 they would sell A&M to Polygram for an eye-popping $500M.) Still, the iconic Tijuana Brass sound never went away. In 2024, Alpert, who could easily afford to buy an island and put his feet up, got the band back together. The reconstituted Tijuana Brass featured seasoned touring musicians who perfectly recreated the legendary sound, and they were off, filling venues and delighting fans.
His Las Vegas show telegraphed 1960s, from the psychedelic graphics on the screen, to brassy hit after hit like "The Lonely Bull", "Spanish Flea", "Tijuana Taxi" and many others, 25 songs in all. Alpert, a master showman, easily bantered with the crowd, sharing stories from his long and enviable career. Example: in 1968, a TV executive asked him to try singing on an upcoming music special. Alpert obliged, saying, "I could carry a tune, so I called up Burt (Bacharach) and asked if he had anything…" The famed songwriter sure did – the song was "This Guys' In Love With You". "We just needed to change the gender," he laughed as the song was originally written as "This Girl's In Love With You". After the special aired, CBS got so many requests for the song, A&M released it as a single and it shot to #1 on the charts. Almost six decades later, Alpert juggled vocals and trumpet on the song, his voice raspy with age, but still delivering a touching rendition.
No Herb Alpert show would be complete without the appearance of his beloved wife of 50 years. They met when Sergio Mendes' band was going to tour with The Tijuana Brass. "I told the guys that it wasn't a good idea to get involved with the women in Sergio's band… but I was just getting them out of the way," Alpert recalled, getting a huge laugh from the audience. He was captivated by Mendes' lead singer; a dark-haired, Chicago-born beauty named Lani Hall and they married in 1974. Onstage, Alpert greeted her with a warm kiss and stared at her, enraptured as she performed several songs, including "One Note Samba". In a business where relationships are transactional, theirs is bedrock deep and obviously rooted in mutual love and respect.
Many of the concert videos were culled from Alpert's vintage TV specials that recalled a gentler time when families gathered in front of the TV to share an experience. They showed the young, strikingly handsome trumpet player riding horseback, striding over majestic sand dunes or taking a romantic walk in the verdant hills of Malibu. His memorable 1966 video for "Whipped Cream" featured Alpert walking into Chaplin's old movie studio – then the home of A&M Records – and dodging a variety of Chaplins doing skits and pratfalls all over the backlot. Midway through the show, this writer got a jolt of pure childhood nostalgia when a 1965 commercial for Teaberry Chewing Gum featuring The Brass' catchy "Mexican Shuffle" played.
The show's most poignant moment occurred when the band played "Smile" (originally composed by Charlie Chaplin) as images of people Alpert had lost flashed by – Jerry Moss, Sergio Mendes, Karen Carpenter and Burt Bacharach. As Herb Alpert well knows, time inexorably marches on towards the common fate that awaits us all, no matter how healthy or well off. Yet, in a world seemingly gone mad, spending a couple of hours in the warm embrace of 1966 isn't such a bad place to be.
Lani Hall performing with Herb Alpert. Photo ©Mark Cerulli
