He is also very involved with the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA, now the home to the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.Ī native of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood, Alpert chortled when asked if he now felt a sense of urgency to do as much as possible. 1” - and completed a national tour wife Hall with their band. We later did a TV special, and part of it was filmed in that bullring in Tijuana.”īy the time 2017 ends, Alpert will have released three new albums this year alone - including “Music Vol. “It wasn’t a Mariachi band, it was a brass band, and I was trying to get the feeling of those afternoons that I spent there with ‘The Lonely Bull.’ Then, Jerry, my partner, came up with the band name, Tijuana Brass. “I used to go to bullfights in Tijuana for about three years, during the spring, and I liked the sound of this little band that was used to announce the different fights,” Alpert explained. “The Lonely Bull,” incidentally, was inspired by Alpert’s annual visits to Tijuana, as he recounted in a 2015 Union-Tribune interview. 1 song with “This Guy’s in Love with You.” He topped the charts again with “Rise” in 1979. between 19, including “The Lonely Bull (El Solo Torro),” “Taste of Honey” and “Tijuana Taxi.” Alpert went solo in 1968 and quickly scored his first No. He and his band scored 13 Top 40 hits in the U.S. His worldwide album sales withe the Tijuana Brass and as a solo artist now top 72 million. “I didn’t like their negative energy.”īut the first artist to put A&M on the map was Alpert himself. “I was never crazy about them, right from the get-go, so it didn’t hurt my feelings that we let them go,” Alpert said of the Sex Pistols. The fact that the band’s singer, Johnny Rotten, threatened to kill a close friend of the head of A&M’s English operations didn’t help matters. The relationship soured the day A&M signed the Pistols, whose members then went to A&M’s London offices, where they cursed at employees, destroyed a toilet and generally wreaked havoc. In ealy 1977, A&M signed budding English punk-rock provocateurs the Sex Pistols, then dropped them six days later.Īlpert has no regrets about cutting the band loose so quickly, even though A&M forfeited the advance payment it had given the band. “People in my own company said: ‘Why are you recording these kids? Their music is too soft.’ Then ‘Close to You’ came out, and bang! They are one of A&M’s biggest artists, to this day.” “When I signed the Carpenters to A&M, their first couple of records didn’t do well,” Alpert admitted. he also recalled one of his earlier signings, a brother-sister duo that faltered before clicking with radio programmers and record buyers in a very big way. Alpert and Moss sold A&M in 1989 for $500 million.Īlpert still contends that singular West Indian singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading, who signed with A&M in the 1970s, should have been a much bigger success than she was. Their independent label went on to become the home for everyone from The Carpenters, Cat Stevens and Quincy Jones to The Police, Amy Grant and Janet Jackson. The success of Cooke’s “Wonderful World” in 1960 came two years before Alpert and Jerry Moss launched A&M Records with just $200 between them. When I hear something I’ve done that makes me feel content, I stop.” When I record something and hear it played back, I’m not listening to the trumpet player, I’m listening to the overall feeling. What I learned from Sam was to listen to myself as an audience would. “That’s when I got it - it ain’t what you do, it’s the way you do it. Instead, I said: ‘What does this song sound like?’ He picked up his guitar and turned this corny song into something beautiful, with his passion and his great voice. “I thought I twas corniest thing I’d ever heard! But I didn’t tell him that. “Sam came up to me one day, and said: ‘Herbie, what do you think of this lyric?’ It went: The cokes are in the icebox, the popcorn’s on the table / Me and my baby, we’re out here on the floor. He said: ‘Herbie, people are listening to a cold pice of wax it either makes it or it don’t.’Īlpert laughed as he described watching Cooke walk around with a notebook filled with song lyrics, including the yet-to-be-recorded “Having a Party.” He came out of the gospel field and had this soulful quality that was infectious. “But when I met Sam Cooke, he was a mentor - and he didn’t know it - by example. “When I started playing trumpet, i was inspired Harry James, Louis Armstrong and Clifford Brown,” Alpert recalled. It was there that he met Cooke, the former gospel singer-turned-pop-sensation. It’s a relationship that had a major impact on the then-fledgling trumpeter, who was barely 22 when he began working as a staff songwriter at Keen Records in Los Angeles in 1957.
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