Herb Alpert

Herb Alpert was born on March 31, 1935, and grew up in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was the youngest of three children in a Jewish immigrant family; his father was a tailor who played mandolin, his mother taught violin, his older brother was a drummer, and his sister played piano. Alpert started playing trumpet at age eight.

He attended Fairfax High School from tenth grade onward, was on the gymnastics team in eleventh grade (though an appendectomy sidelined him before a meet), and focused on trumpet in his senior year. At the University of Southern California in the 1950s, he played in the USC Trojan Marching Band for two years. He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, playing in the 6th Army Band, and appeared uncredited as a drummer in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments.

In 1957, Alpert began writing songs with Lou Adler for Keen Records, co-writing top-20 hits like "Baby Talk" and "Wonderful World." He started his recording career as a vocalist at RCA Records in 1960 under the name Dore Alpert. In 1962, he and Jerry Moss founded Carnival Records, releasing "Tell It to the Birds" as its first single. After discovering the name was already taken, they renamed the label A&M Records.

The Tijuana Brass years

Alpert's performing career took off with the song "The Lonely Bull," originally titled "Twinkle Star." Dissatisfied with early attempts to record it, he visited a bullfight in Tijuana, Mexico, and was inspired by the crowd, mariachi music, and trumpet calls. He adapted the tune, added crowd noises, and funded the single himself. It became a top-10 hit in fall 1962.

His debut album, The Lonely Bull, credited to "Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass," was A&M's first release (number 101), though recorded for Conway Records. At first, the Tijuana Brass was just Alpert overdubbing his own trumpet slightly out of sync. He recorded with the Los Angeles session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, whom he greatly respected.

Alpert's 1965 album Whipped Cream & Other Delights was the number-one album of 1966, outselling the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, and the Rolling Stones. Its popularity forced Alpert to turn the Tijuana Brass into a real touring band. The album's cover, featuring model Dolores Erickson seemingly covered in whipped cream, was notoriously racy—though Alpert later confirmed in a 2025 concert that it was actually shaving cream. Two other Tijuana Brass albums, Going Places (1965) and What Now My Love (1966), also ranked high on the 1966 year-end chart.

Several Tijuana Brass songs were used as theme music for the ABC game show The Dating Game. In 1966, a short animated film by John and Faith Hubley, A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1967. In 1967, the Tijuana Brass performed the title track for the film Casino Royale.

Alpert's only number-one single during the 1960s, and A&M's first number-one hit, was the vocal performance "This Guy's in Love with You" (1968), written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. He sang it to his first wife on a 1968 CBS special. Alpert has released 28 albums on the Billboard 200, five of which hit number one, and has earned 14 platinum and 15 gold albums.

Awards and honors

He remains the only musician to top the Billboard Hot 100 as both a vocalist and an instrumentalist (with "Rise" in 1979). He has sold an estimated 72 million records worldwide. His honors include a Tony Award, eight Grammy Awards, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, and the National Medal of Arts, awarded by President Barack Obama in 2012.