The Essential Herb Alpert, a two-disc set featuring ‘Anything Goes - Herb Alpert & Lani Hall Live‘ and ‘Definitive Hits’, will be released on September 13th 2010.

For more than fifty years, Herb Alpert has come to mean many things to many people. To generations of music fans, Alpert is the dark-haired, trumpet-playing songmaker whose name instantly brings to mind memorable songs like The Lonely Bull, A Taste of Honey, This Guy’s in Love with You and Rise. These are but a few of the tunes Alpert recorded either as leader of the legendary Tijuana Brass or as an artist in his own right, yielding five #1 popular hits, 8 Grammy awards, 14 Platinum and 15 gold albums - plus a staggering 72 million albums sold worldwide.

To a global circle of musicians, Alpert’s name implies an immediately recognizable group sound as well as a distinctly relaxed, economically-spoken instrumental style. Trumpeters especially are hip to his musical signature: “You hear three notes and you know it’s Herb Alpert” said Miles Davis in 1989; “He gets right to the point of what he’s playing,” remarked Wynton Marsalis more recently, “very melodic and nothing extraneous.” To the entire music business, Alpert remains the “A” in A&M Records, one of the most visionary record labels of the last half century.

 Yet all these high profile achievements only begin to define the generous extent of Herb Alpert’s creative spirit. Today, the litany of Alpert’s public and lesser-known accomplishments also include his work as a widely acclaimed painter and sculptor, his success as a Broadway producer with a talent for sniffing out prize-winning theatre, and his philanthropic work which has seen his foundation donate in excess of $100 million to worthy causes.

 Biography:

He was born Herbert Alpert on March 31, 1935 in Los Angeles, the youngest of three children born to a tailor who had emigrated from Russia, and his California-born wife. He attended Melrose Elementary School where, at the age of eight, he was drawn to the trumpet in a music appreciation class. “They had a room with a bunch of different instruments on a table and I picked up the trumpet,” recalls Alpert. “It took a long time before I made any sense out of it. I was very fortunate that I stuck with it.”

Alpert’s aptitude on his chosen instrument soon blossomed and began to perform on a regular basis, but was yet to be sold on the idea of music as a career. “I was playing weekends and making a moderate sum of money but I still wasn’t sure where it was going to lead,” he says. In 1962 however, Alpert found his sound and struck paydirt. With a new partner, Jerry Moss, a music promotion man from New York City, Alpert released the single on a fledgling record label they established together. The Lonely Bull by “The Tijuana Brass featuring Herb Alpert” - single #703 on A&M Records - shot into the Top Ten before the year ended.

The following chapters in Alpert’s life are musical history. The sound of the Tijuana Brass proved as ubiquitous - and profitable - as that of the best known music makers of the era, on a par with the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. Hit singles and albums seemed to pour out effortlessly on the A&M label, as Alpert continued to craft the Tijuana Brass sound.