'Slick, suave and a little sexy': Herb Alpert - the unlikely kitsch 1960s act that dominated the US charts

In the middle of the 1960s rock revolution, a jazz trumpeter smashed chart records and briefly became bigger than the Beatles. Now aged 91, Herb Alpert talks to the BBC.

In April 1966, the US was in the middle of a rock revolution. The Beatles, halfway through a run of 20 Billboard number one singles, had just released Rubber Soul, their gateway to a more experimental, album-oriented sound. Fellow British invaders the Rolling Stones were about to score their third chart-topper with the sitar-driven Paint It Black. Over in California, the Byrds had two recent number ones and were entering their own psychedelic era.

But the biggest act in the US exactly 60 years ago wasn't a bunch of hip young guitar-slinging longhairs with mind-expanding intentions. It was a 31-year-old jazz trumpeter and record executive who made smooth, vaguely Latin-flavoured instrumentals that sold by the absolute bucketload.

On 2 April 1966, Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass held the number two spot in the US with their latest album Going Places. Alpert's previous record, Whipped Cream & Other Delights, was number three in the charts. His third and first albums, South of the Border and The Lonely Bull, were number nine and 10 respectively.

The only entry in Herb Alpert's discography not to feature in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 that week, 1963's Volume 2, made the top 20. It was a display of chart dominance that went unmatched for decades. By the end of 1966, those four top-10 records from April were the year's first, third, 11th and 14th best-selling albums. What Now My Love, the new Tijuana Brass album released in May, was fifth. 

Alpert's April 1966 chart record was only equalled by another living artist in July 2023, when Taylor Swift issued Speak Now (Taylor's Version), and it shared the top 10 with Midnights, Lover and Folklore. "I didn't think much about it but I was happy for her," Herb Alpert tells the BBC. "She's smart, she's talented, she writes a good song. She absolutely knows her audience. And she plays right into them."

Herb Alpert grew up in a musical household. His father played the mandolin and his mother the violin. All three Alpert children took up instruments, and Herb honed his trumpet skills through high school, college and a spell in the military. After discharge, Alpert took a multi-pronged approach to breaking into the music industry. He formed a songwriting duo with Lou Adler, co-composing Sam Cooke's Wonderful World and doing production for surf duo Jan and Dean and others. He was briefly signed to RCA Victor as a vocalist. In 1962 he made what would be his most lucrative move, more so even than his creation of The Tijuana Brass a few months later, forming A&M records as the "A" to Jerry Moss's "M".

"I had a bad experience with [RCA Victor]," Alpert, now aged 91, tells the BBC. "They treated me like a number. I didn't even have a name in the studio. It was, '78452, take one.' So I said, 'Man, if I ever had my own record company, it would revolve around the artist.' And that was the concept of A&M. It was all about the artists." A&M went on to become one of America's biggest independent record labels, the home of the Carpenters, Carole King, Peter Frampton and more, but its initial success was fuelled by Alpert himself.

Capturing the mid-1960s zeitgeist

Despite the name, The Tijuana Brass weren't Mexican. They weren't even a "they". For the first three albums, "The Tijuana Brass" was just Herb Alpert's trumpet, multitracked and overdubbed, and backed by session players, before........

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