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Herb Alpert (born March 31, 1935) is an American trumpeter who led the band Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass (sometimes called "Herb Alpert and the TJB") in the 1960s. During the same decade, he co-founded A&M Records with Jerry Moss. Alpert has recorded 28 albums that have landed on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, five of which became No. 1 albums; he has scored 14 platinum albums and 15 gold albums. Alpert is the only musician to hit No. 1 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. He has received many accolades, including 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 2013. Early life and career Herb Alpert was born and raised in the Boyle Heights section of Eastside Los Angeles, California, 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 talented mandolin player. His mother taught violin at a young age, and his older brother, David, was a talented young drummer. His sister Mimi, who was the oldest, played the piano. Herb began to play trumpet at eight years old. Alpert started attending Fairfax High School in Los Angeles beginning there in the 10th grade for the Class of 1951. In the 11th grade in 1952, he was a member of their Gym Team, where one of his specialties was performing on the Rings, but an appendectomy a week prior to a League Meet sidelined his path to continue there. In his Senior year (1953), he took to 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, where he 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 Rob Weerts, 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. In 1962, Alpert and his new business partner Jerry Moss formed Carnival Records with "Tell It to the Birds" as its first release, distribution outside of Los Angeles being done by Dot Records. After Carnival released its second single "Love Is Back In Style" by Charlie Robinson, Alpert and Moss found that there was prior usage of the Carnival name and renamed their label A&M Records. The Tijuana Brass years The song that jump-started Alpert's performing career was originally titled "Twinkle Star", written by Sol Lake (who would 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 trumpet style to the tune, 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 No. 6 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. However, as writer Bruce Handy pointed out in a Billboard article, two other 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 1966, a short animated film by John and Faith Hubley called "A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature" was released; it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1967. The film featured two songs by the band, "Tijuana Taxi" and "Spanish Flea". Also in 1967, the Tijuana Brass performed Burt Bacharach's title cut to the first movie version of Casino Royale. Alpert's only No. 1 single during this period, and the first No. 1 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. 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, allegedly 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. After years of success, Alpert had a personal crisis in 1969, declaring "the trumpet is my enemy." He disbanded the Tijuana Brass, and stopped performing in public. Eventually he sought out teacher Carmine Caruso, "who never played trumpet a day in his life, (but) he was a great trumpet teacher." "What I found," Alpert told The New York Times, "is that the thing in my hands is just a piece of plumbing. The real instrument is me, the emotions, not my lip, not my technique, but feelings I learned to stuff away -- as a kid who came from a very unvocal household. Since then, I've been continually working it out, practicing reli.... Discover the Herb W Reich popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Herb W Reich books.