Herb Alpert seems to be everywhere.
The six-time Grammy-winning trumpeter is recording, performing live and showing his artwork in a Palm Springs gallery. In addition, he owns a jazz club in Bel Air.
At age 90, he’s doing it all for fun.
“I make music for myself, and it keeps me going,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Malibu.
His 51st album, “Christmas Time Is Here,” will come out on Friday, Nov. 7.
“It’s a bunch of songs that came up in my brain for one reason or another. I don’t have a master plan. I was just thinking about Christmas, and one of my managers said why don’t you do another Christmas album,” he said. “I guess a couple of songs I recorded before. But when I record, in general I try to do something that hasn’t been done quite that way before.”
Those 12 tracks range from “Jingle Bells” to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You.”
“I pick all songs by melody. I’m a melody person,” he added. “I think you can have a great rhythm and a great groove and no melody and it’s going to go no place. It’s not fun to listen to. But when there’s a good melody involved and you can put all the right elements to it, I think it’s fun to listen to.”
A week later, Nov. 14-15, Alpert will be at the Dolby Theatre, part of a tour celebrating the 60th anniversary of his most famous LP, “Whipped Cream & Other Delights.” Both shows are long sold out (resale seats were available at press time), but tickets are available for a San Diego show next year on June 17.
“I wanted to play at the Dolby, but they said nah, that’s a big place, 3,300 people. I said well, I think we’ll do OK. Anyway, they sold out in 10 days, and then they put on the extra concert the night before the original concert was booked, and that sold out, too. So I’m flying high on all this stuff. I’m having a good time. And I can’t believe at my age all this is coming to me.”
The show is called “Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass & Other Delights” and, according to the crowd-sourced website Setlist.fm, recent concerts have been a mix of songs from that LP and other hits, including his first as a solo artist, 1962’s “The Lonely Bull,” “This Guy’s In Love With You” and “Rise.”
Lani Hall, lead vocalist for Sérgio Mendes & Brasil ’66 and Alpert’s wife of nearly 51 years, will be part of the Hollywood shows, according to representatives.
Catching fire
“Whipped Cream” was Alpert’s fourth LP with the Tijuana Brass, although there initially was no band. Alpert created the illusion with overdubbing for “The Lonely Bull” and also used L.A. session musicians known as the “Wrecking Crew.”
The record is perhaps best known for its bold album jacket, featuring model Dolores Erickson seemingly wearing only a gown of shaving cream in front of a green background. It was No. 1 on Billboard’s list of top-selling LPs for 1966 and has taken Alpert from vinyl to TikTok.
“‘Whipped Cream’ was the result of a distributor in New Orleans who called me and said Al Hirt had turned down a song that you might like. So I asked him to play it for me over the phone. It happened to be ‘Whipped Cream’ by Alan Toussaint, this composer from that part of the country. And that opened up the idea for my brilliant partner Jerry Moss, who said why don’t we collect a bunch of food titles into a concept album. I wasn’t thinking like that. I was just thinking song after song that touched me. But he was into concepts.”
“Surprise of all surprises — I’m jumping ahead of the story now — but there’s a song on there called ‘Ladyfingers.’ Somebody on TikTok picked it up. They didn’t know me, obviously. But they just liked the song and they used it as a background to one of their videos. And all of a sudden it caught fire. People started using that same song, and to this day I’ve had over 4 billion streams on this song that I did 60 years ago.”
Snippets of his 1965 track “Ladyfingers” have been used in more than 7,900 videos on the social platform to date, his clear trumpet cutting through the chatter of product pitches, fashion shoots and cat videos.
“I was born in 1935. Just out of curiosity I asked Siri, or however you get that information, what was the population of the world in 1935. And the population was 2.7 billion people,” he said (It’s now over 8.1 billion).
“Whipped Cream” was released on A&M Records, a label he founded with Moss. They would acquire their own studio in 1966, but the album was recorded at Gold Star Recording Studios at Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine Street. The building has been replaced by a strip mall, but it in its day it was known for Phil Spector’s use of its echo chambers in creating his “wall of sound.”
“There’s certain studios that have a particular sound, like the sound at Capitol Records and the echo chambers there. They have a distinct, warm quality. Other studios, technically they’re good but acoustically, for some reason the sound inside the recording studio, even though they might be using similar microphones than other studios use, it just changes, doesn’t have the character all its own,” Alpert said.
“What happened at Gold Star, it was a surprise. When you record in the recording studio and you go back into the control room to listen to the result, it’s almost a little better than what you remembered being in the studio. There was a quality in the studio that was pretty good. I finally talked them into letting me see the echo chamber that they use.”
“So I went in there one afternoon, and it was like a mess in there. It was like beer cans and paper and a speaker here and a microphone over there. So that was the sound. It had nothing to do with the beer cans. It was a surprise. I thought everything was kept really neat and tidy.”
The A&M years and beyond
A Los Angeles native, Alpert was raised in Boyle Heights and attended Fairfax High School, where his interest in music began to gel. He was performing in clubs as a teenager, and after a stint in the U.S. Army, he attended USC and played in the Trojan Marching Band. Then he broke into the recording world. He wrote a song with fellow Boyle Heights native Lou Adler, “Wonderful World,” which became a hit for Sam Cooke in 1960.
He and the late Jerry Moss, then a record promoter, started their own label in 1962 on an investment of $100 each.
Alpert, who shows the utmost respect for Moss in interviews, said he believes his partner was responsible for A&M’s logo, featuring the silhuette of a trumpet.
Initially, A&M was known for Alpert’s sound, which 1960s record reviewers called Ameriachi, a blend of pop, jazz and Latin influences. Alpert follwed up the Tijuana Brass with the Baja Marimba Band. Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66, known for the bossa nova, joined the label in that year.
A&M’s catalog became more diverse in the 1970s and ’80s. Artists included the Carpenters, Cat Stevens, the Captain & Tennille, Peter Frampton; Janet Jackson and the Police. Sting delivered the tribute speech when Alpert and Moss were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.
The duo acquired Charlie Chaplin’s studio from the silent movie era for A&M. The property, at 1416 N La Brea Ave., is now the home of the Jim Henson Company and boasts a statue of Kermit the Frog dressed as Chaplin’s Little Tramp character at its entrance.
“We started out with 35 people in a big, huge lot. And it seemed like we overextended the amount of people we needed in the amount of space,” Alpert said. “But little by little we outgrew it and we had to start building facilities on that property. And we kept finding little tidbits of information, old shoes and newspapers stuck in the walls and little bits of Charlie Chaplin stuff. It’s a very creative place.”
Alpert and Moss sold A&M Records to Polygram Records in 1989. Alpert said he doesn’t miss that aspect of his career.
“It started with the two of us in my garage. And then there was three and five and 12 and 102. When we sold the company there were 500 people around the world. So I kind of lost my fastball when it came to knowing the people in the company and being really involved on that level. So it was not hard for me to leave that facility.”
Alpert found other ways to keep his hand ins show business. He put money into Broadway plays in the 1990s, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angels in America.” He funded the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music with a naming gift of $30 million in 2008. And he recently donated $1 million to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s throwback music instrument repair operation, known for the Oscar-winning 2023 documentary “The Last Repair Shop.”
He owns Vibrato Grill Jazz, a supper club about 4 miles north of UCLA. It has live music several nights a week. Upcoming artists include Debby Boone and Seth MacFarlane.
“I wanted to have a little jazz club with good food, a place where local musicians could have a good time,” he said.
It’s also a place where you can see Herb Alpert’s work as a painter.
“The first painting that you see as you walk in the door is a painting I did for the great Stan Getz, who was a dear friend of mine, and that painting was hanging over his fireplace.”
Alpert has been painting and sculpting for almost as long as his musical career. He does it for his own satisfaction, he says, but his work has been on exhibit over the years, including towering black bronze sculptures called Spirit Totems.
Hundreds of Alpert’s works are on display in a Palm Springs gallery at 1105 N. Gene Autry Trail. It’s open to the public on Fridays and Saturdays by appointment only.
“I’m not thinking of myself am I as good as Picasso or any of the great artists. It’s not important to me, because I’m a musician. This art reflects me as a musician. That’s about it. If you like it, great. If you don’t, that’s OK. I’m still doing it.”
The gallery was designed by architect Harry Newman with a mysterious curved entrance painted bright red. Alpert calls it, “Behind the red door…”
In front of the entrance is a 15-foot sculpture of a trumpet player.
“I wanted to capture, not me, not Miles Davis,” said Alpert. “I wanted to capture the feeling, what it feels like to play jazz.”
Information: herbalpert.com, herbalpertart.com, vibratogrilljazz.com