Herb Alpert was born on the 31st of March 1935 in Boyle Heights, an Eastside neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, into a family where music was the primary language. His father Louis, a tailor by trade, played the mandolin, while his mother Tillie taught violin and his siblings played drums and piano. Alpert began playing the trumpet at the age of eight, but his early musical path was interrupted by a surgical appendectomy that sidelined him from the gymnastics team in his eleventh grade year. By his senior year in 1953, he had shifted his focus entirely to the trumpet, eventually joining the USC Trojan Marching Band and serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War where he played in the 6th Army Band. His first foray into the entertainment industry was an uncredited role as a drummer on Mount Sinai in the 1956 epic film The Ten Commandments, but his true destiny lay in the recording studio where he would eventually co-found A&M Records and lead the Tijuana Brass.
The Lonely Bull and The Cream
The song that jump-started Alpert's performing career was originally titled Twinkle Star, written by Sol Lake, but Alpert was dissatisfied with his initial recordings until a trip to a bullfight in Tijuana, Mexico, changed everything. He recalled that the excitement of the crowd, the traditional mariachi music, the trumpet call heralding the start of the fight, the yelling, and the snorting of the bulls all clicked into place. He 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. The album The Lonely Bull by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass was originally recorded for Conway Records but became A&M's first album with the release number 101, and the title cut reached number 6 on the Billboard pop chart. Alpert recorded with the Wrecking Crew, a group of Los Angeles session musicians he held in high regard, and initially, the Tijuana Brass was just him overdubbing his own trumpet, slightly out of sync.
Whipped Cream and The Beat
Alpert's 1965 album Whipped Cream & Other Delights proved so popular that it was the number one album of 1966, outselling The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, and The Rolling Stones. The album's popularity was partly attributable to its notoriously racy cover, which featured model Dolores Erickson seemingly clothed only in whipped cream, though Alpert later confirmed in a 2025 chat that it was shaving cream, not whipped cream. Despite the attention on the cover, other Brass albums like Going Places and What Now My Love held the third and fifth spots on the 1966 year-end chart with far more anodyne covers. A number of Tijuana Brass songs were used as theme music for years by the ABC TV game show The Dating Game, and in 1966, a short animated film by John and Faith Hubley called A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1967. The film featured two songs by the band, Tijuana Taxi and Spanish Flea, and in 1967, the Tijuana Brass performed Burt Bacharach's title cut to the first movie version of Casino Royale.
Alpert's only number one single during the Tijuana Brass period, and the first number one hit for his A&M label, was a solo effort: This Guy's in Love with You, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, featuring a rare vocal. Alpert sang it to his first wife in a 1968 CBS Television special titled Beat of the Brass, and the sequence was filmed on the beach in Malibu. The song was not intended to be released, but after it was used in the television special, thousands of telephone calls to CBS asking about it convinced Alpert to release it as a single, two days after the show aired. Although Alpert's vocal skills and range were limited, the song's technical demands suited him, and he later told The New York Times that he did not have a great instrument as a vocalist but that a basic truth came across. After years of success, Alpert had a personal crisis in 1969, declaring the trumpet was his enemy, and he disbanded the Tijuana Brass and stopped performing in public. He eventually sought out teacher Carmine Caruso, who never played trumpet a day in his life but was a great trumpet teacher, and Alpert realized that the thing in his hands was just a piece of plumbing and the real instrument was him, the emotions, not his lip or technique.
Rise and The Disco Experiment
In 1979, five years after his last chart hit with the Tijuana Brass, Alpert attempted a disco album of rearranged Brass hits, but he later said it just sounded awful to him and he did not want any part of it. Because the musicians were already booked, 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, and it also became a hit in the UK, but in a sped-up version due to British DJs not realizing that the American 12-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 would reach number one on the Hot 100, and over the next two decades, Alpert released an album nearly every year, releasing more than a dozen records since 2006. In 2013, Alpert released Steppin' Out, which won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Album, and since that time, he has released several other albums, most recently 50, claimed to be his 50th studio album, and has said he has plans for his next two LPs, one of which will be another Christmas album, his third.
The Business of Music
On the 11th of October 1989, Philips subsidiary PolyGram announced its acquisition of A&M Records for 500 million dollars, and Alpert and co-owner business partner Jerry Moss later received an extra 200 million dollar payment for PolyGram's breach of the terms of the deal. As of 2025, Alpert's net worth is estimated at 850 million dollars, largely due to his music career and the sale of A&M Records to Interscope Records. In the late 1980s, Alpert started H. Alpert and Co., a short-lived perfume company, which sold products in high-end department stores such as Nordstrom, and Alpert compared perfume to music, with high and low notes. In 2004, in partnership with his daughter Eden, Alpert opened Vibrato, a jazz club and restaurant located in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, and in 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 & the Tijuana Brass & Other Delights, and the band members besides Alpert are Ray Brinker on drums, Kris Bergh on trumpet and percussion, Hussain Jiffry on bass, Bill Cantos on keyboards, marimba, percussion, and vocals, Ryan Dragon on trombone and percussion, and Kerry Marx on guitar.
Painting and Philanthropy
Alpert has a second career as an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor with group and solo exhibitions around the United States and Europe, and 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 totemlike sculptures, and in the 1980s, Alpert created the Herb Alpert Foundation and the Alpert Awards in the Arts with the California Institute of the Arts. The foundation supports youth and arts education as well as environmental issues, and helps fund the PBS series Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason and later Moyers & Company. Alpert and his wife donated 30 million dollars to University of California, Los Angeles in 2007 to form and endow the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music as part of the restructured UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, and he donated 24 million dollars, including 15 million dollars from April 2008, to CalArts for its music curricula, and provided funding for the culture-jamming activists the Yes Men. In 2012, the foundation granted more than 5 million dollars to the Harlem School of the Arts, which allowed the school to retire its debt, restore its endowment, and create a scholarship program for needy students, and in 2013, the school's building was renamed the Herb Alpert Center.
A Lifetime of Honors
In May 2000, Alpert was awarded an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music, and on the 27th of July 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, and in March 2006, Alpert and Moss were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as non-performer lifetime achievers for their work at A&M. Alpert was awarded the Society of Singers Lifetime Achievement Award by Society of Singers in 2009, and in 2012, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Barack and Michelle Obama on the 20th of July 2013, in the White House's East Room. He has received many accolades, including a Tony Award and eight Grammy Awards, as well as the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and 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, and he has sold an estimated 72 million records worldwide, making him 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 in 1968, and as an instrumentalist, Rise in 1979.