Herb Alpert’s 50th Album Is Here. What’s Kept Him Going Places?

For years, Herb Alpert talked by phone with Burt Bacharach once or twice a week. One day, two years before Bacharach’s death in 2023, he called Alpert with concerning news. “He told me he had to go to the hospital to have some fluid drained from his lungs,” Alpert said. “At the time, he was working with a musician who arranged a string part for him that he really liked. So he had the guy send him the part to bring with him to the hospital, so between shots and draining, he could study it.”

“Man, he was 92 then and still studying!” Alpert exclaimed. “That’s a quality I really admire.”

It’s also one he seems to share. This week, Alpert, 89, will release his 50th album, under the title “50” even though, he pointed out, he hadn’t realized he’d reached that milestone until he finished recording. His oversight shouldn’t be surprising given his schedule. Besides the new release, Alpert has been working on two other albums, in between playing dates on a tour that lasts through the end of the year. He’s also been enjoying his second career as a sculptor, having just completed a 14-foot-tall piece for the New Orleans Jazz Museum that depicts a man playing Alpert’s instrument, the trumpet.

“People will look at it and say, ‘Is that you playing? Is it Miles Davis?’” Alpert said. “It’s nobody. I was just trying to capture the feeling of playing.”

Communicating that feeling remains his primary concern whenever he performs or writes. “There are lots of artists who try to impress other musicians with their playing,” he said. “They’ll play these dizzying things, and you say, ‘Wow that’s fabulous!’ But is it touching anyone?”

Over the years, Alpert’s music has touched multitudes. Since his debut album with the Tijuana Brass, “The Lonely Bull” in 1962, his sets have topped the Billboard album chart five times, generating No. 1 singles in three consecutive decades. To this day, he’s the only artist to crown the charts fronting both an instrumental track (“Rise” in 1979) and a vocal piece (“This Guy’s in Love With You,” penned by Bacharach and Hal David in 1968). In the same time frame, he and Jerry Moss co-founded and ran one of the mightiest and most respected indie labels in music history, A&M Records, which they sold in 1989 for a reported $500 million.