HERB ALPERT
Herb Alpert (born March 31, 1935) is an American musician most associated with Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. Alpert is also a recording industry executive, the “A” of A&M Records, a recording label he and business partner, Jerry Moss, founded and eventually sold to Polygram. Alpert and wife Lani Hall are substantial philanthropists through the operation of the Herb Alpert Foundation. Alpert’s musical accomplishments include five No. 1 albums on the Billboard Album chart and nine Grammy Awards. As of 1996, Alpert had sold 72 million albums worldwide. Alpert is the only recording artist to hit No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 pop chart as both a vocalist (“This Guy’s in Love with You”, 1968) and an instrumentalist (“Rise”, 1979). (More from Wikipedia)
Though Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 was basically piggy-backing onto the success of Herb Alpert, the co-founder of his label A&M Records, the Latin-lite sounds were better than nothing for a pop-music mainstream that, for too many years, had been just a little too white-bread, at least in retrospect.
(August 2010)
* * *
Album labels are one way to help narrow down a search. If you are an R.E.M. fan, then most of the albums on their label, I.R.S. Records will probably be to your liking as well. A good punk rock label is Stiff Records; I have scarcely ever gone wrong with them. A&M Records, the king of American independent record labels, has a wide variety of offbeat acts and some major artists as well (the “A” in the name is Herb Alpert).
(November 2012)
