Herb Alpert

Herbert Alpert (born March 31, 1935) is an American musician who led the band Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass (sometimes called Herb Alpert and the TJB or Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass) in the 1960s. During the same decade, he co-founded A&M Records with Jerry Moss.

Alpert has recorded 28 albums that have appeared on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, five of which reached No. 1; he has been awarded 14 platinum albums and 15 gold albums. Alpert is the only musician to have reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 as both a vocalist ("This Guy's in Love with You", 1968) and an instrumentalist ("Rise", 1979).

Alpert has sold an estimated 72 million records worldwide. His awards have included a Tony Award and eight Grammy Awards, as well as the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2006, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Alpert was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Barack Obama in 2012.

Herbert Alpert was born on March 31, 1935, and raised in Boyle Heights, an Eastside neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was the youngest of three children (a daughter and two sons) born to Tillie (née Goldberg) and Louis Leib (or Louis Bentsion-Leib) Alpert. His parents were Jewish immigrants to the U.S. from Radomyshl in present-day Ukraine and Romania.

Alpert was born into a family of musicians. His father, although a tailor by trade, was also a mandolin player. His mother taught violin at a young age, and his older brother, David, was a drummer. His sister Mimi, who was the oldest, played the piano. Alpert began to play trumpet at eight years old.

Alpert started attending Fairfax High School beginning in 10th grade. In 11th grade (1952), he was a member of their gymnastics team. One of his specialties was performing on the rings, but an appendectomy a week before a league meet sidelined him. In his senior year (1953), he began focusing on his trumpet.

While attending the University of Southern California in the 1950s, he was a member of the USC Trojan Marching Band for two years. Alpert served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and played in the 6th Army Band. In 1956, he appeared in an uncredited role as "Drummer on Mt. Sinai" in The Ten Commandments.

In 1957, Alpert teamed up with Lou Adler, another burgeoning lyricist, as a songwriter for Keen Records. A number of songs written or co-written by Alpert during the following two years became top-20 hits, including "Baby Talk" by Jan and Dean and "Wonderful World" by Sam Cooke. In 1960, he began his recording career as a vocalist at RCA Records under the name of Dore Alpert.

The song that jump-started Alpert's performing career was originally titled "Twinkle Star", written by Sol Lake (who was to write many Tijuana Brass songs over the next decade). Alpert was dissatisfied with his first efforts to record the song, then took a break to visit a bullfight in Tijuana, Mexico. As Alpert later recounted, "That's when it hit me! Something in the excitement of the crowd, the traditional mariachi music, the trumpet call heralding the start of the fight, the yelling, the snorting of the bulls, it all clicked." Alpert adapted the tune to the trumpet style, mixed in crowd cheers and other noises for ambience, and renamed the song "The Lonely Bull".

He personally funded the production of the record as a single, and it spread through radio DJs until it caught on and became a top-10 hit in the fall of 1962. He followed up quickly with his debut album, The Lonely Bull by "Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass". Originally, the Tijuana Brass was just Alpert overdubbing his own trumpet, slightly out of sync.

It was A&M's first album (with the original release number being 101), although it was recorded for Conway Records. The title cut reached number six on the Billboard pop chart. For this album and subsequent releases, Alpert recorded with the group of Los Angeles session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, whom he holds in high regard.

Alpert's 1965 album Whipped Cream & Other Delights proved so popular — it was the number-one album of 1966, outselling The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, and the Rolling Stones — that Alpert had to turn the Tijuana Brass into an actual touring ensemble rather than a studio band. Some of that popularity might be attributable to the album's notoriously racy cover, which featured model Dolores Erickson seemingly clothed only in whipped cream. In a chat with the audience during his concert in Milwaukee on 6 October 2025, Mr. Alpert confirmed "it was shaving cream, not whipped cream".

As writer Bruce Handy wrote in a Billboard article, though, two other Tijuana Brass albums, Going Places (1965) and What Now My Love (1966), "held the third and fifth spots on the 1966 year-end chart despite pleasant yet far more anodyne covers." Another measure of the band's popularity is that a number of Tijuana Brass songs were used as theme music for years by the ABC TV game show The Dating Game.

In 1979, five years after his last chart hit with the Tijuana Brass, Alpert attempted a disco album of rearranged Tijuana Brass hits. "It just sounded awful to me," Alpert was quoted later. "I didn't want any part of it." Because the musicians were already booked, though, Alpert recorded other material, including the instrumental "Rise", with the initial version created by Alpert's nephew, Randy "Badazz" Alpert and his close friend, musician Andy Armer.

The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 after it was used repeatedly on the soap opera General Hospital. The song also became a hit in the UK, but in a speeded-up version, due to British DJs not realizing that the American twelve-inch single was recorded at 33 rpm instead of 45 rpm. Its bass line was later in The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize”, which itself reached number one on the Hot 100.

Over the next two decades, Alpert released an album nearly every year. He has released more than a dozen records since 2006.

In 2013, Alpert released Steppin' Out, which won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Album. Since that time, he has released several other albums, most recently 50 (claimed to be his 50th studio album) and his third Christmas album, titled Christmas Time Is Here and has said he has plans for his next LP in mind.

In late 2024, Alpert formed a new Tijuana Brass group, which went on tour in 2025, to celebrate the landmark Whipped Cream and Other Delights album. The tour is titled "Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and Other Delights." The band members (besides Alpert) are: Ray Brinker (drums), Kris Bergh (trumpet, percussion), Hussain Jiffry (bass), Bill Cantos (keyboards, marimba, percussion, vocals), Ryan Dragon (trombone, percussion), and Kerry Marx (guitar). Lani Hall joined the group for the first year of the tour, performing a medley songs she recorded with Sergio Mendes. According to posts by "Herb's Social Media Team" on his official Facebook page, the group has had 64 sold-out concerts as of September 15, 2026.

On October 11, 1989, Philips subsidiary PolyGram announced its acquisition of A&M Records for $500 million. Alpert and co-owner/business partner Jerry Moss later received an extra $200 million payment for PolyGram's breach of the terms of the deal.

Alpert has a second career as an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor, with group and solo exhibitions around the United States and Europe. The 2010 sculpture exhibition "Herb Alpert: Black Totems" in Beverly Hills brought media attention to his visual work. His 2013 exhibition in Santa Monica included both abstract paintings and large totem-like sculptures.

In May 2000, Alpert was awarded an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music.

In 1977, for his contribution to the recording industry, Alpert was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6929 Hollywood Boulevard.

At the 1997 Billboard Latin Music Awards Alpert received the El Premio Billboard award for his contributions to Latin music.

In March 2006, Alpert and Moss were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as nonperformer lifetime achievers for their work at A&M.

Alpert was awarded the Society of Singers Lifetime Achievement Award by Society of Singers in 2009.