5 July 2026, Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA

I wish my Dad were still alive, visiting me in Los Angeles, sitting with me last Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl to watch the magnificent, joyous, historic event that was Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. Dad has been gone for more than 22 years so it would have been more than a miracle, but I was thinking about him a lot during the lovely evening.

It was something of a miracle that even I was there, a last-minute opportunity that took me to the one show at the Hollywood Bowl this summer I thought I might die if I missed. It’s been a long ten months since I was last there. Life has been happening and it’s been tough personally, and tough for many people in the city and country I am living in. And tough around the world, too. So an evening in a lovely box seat in the most special live venue in my concert-going world, my happiest place on earth, was tonic for my soul, exhilarating and intoxicating. Of all the amazing performers I could have seen, Herb Alpert was exactly the one I needed to see.

Herb Alpert is 91 years old but the non-stop film footage projected on the big screen behind his 2026 version of The Tijuana Brass was an unabashed reminder of how drop-dead gorgeous he was, the ultra debonair trumpeting pop star of the 1960s and ‘70s, the smooth television personality, the keenly astute record company chief with some of the greatest A&R instinct that ever was, the crooner who could make women and men alike swoon, a maestro who could turn a horn band into groovy rock stars – before Chicago and Blood Sweat & Tears – and who made instrumentals so damn sexy. “Rise” might be the sexiest pop instrumental ever recorded, and I could happily listen to “Rise”, along with Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good”, on constant rotation until… well, forever. These Alpert and Mangione tunes that are nearly fifty years old, they sparkle and seduce even more joyfully than when I was that teenager hearing them on Top 40 radio. I loved the songs then and love them more deeply now. If Stephen Colbert gave me his questionnaire and asked me about that one song I was allowed to listen to for the rest of my life, it could be “Rise”.

I took two videos of “Rise” being performed on Sunday night, one on my camera, one on my phone, and I have watched each of them many times in the last couple of days, and each time I am uplifted.

The Tijuana Brass songs, all of them short and sweet, salty and punchy, very much of their time from sixty years ago, and yet timeless and exuberant right now, were played in quick procession with graphics and archival footage to make sure the audience knew exactly what they were listening to. No bull. Sweet as honey. Whipping us into a creamy state of delight. Throw the puns out there, Herb would probably like them. Gloriously singable horns. No wonder I fell into my love of the band Chicago so eagerly in my teenage years; my father had been playing Tijuana Brass on his reel-to-reel tape deck, along with Sérgio Mendes & Brasil ’66. My Dad was cool; he loved to dance. He taught me to love melody and rhythm even though he had no musical talents at all, just the talent of loving good music.

I wonder if my parents went to see Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass in April 1967 when they played three shows at the Sydney Stadium. It’s possible. I was only five then so I wasn’t being taken to concerts yet, just staying home with the babysitter. I remember Dad and Mum heading off to see shows in the Silver Spade Room at the Chevron Hotel. Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Jose Feliciano, Dusty Springfield et al. Listening to Herb Alpert reminds me of all that. My music historian persona has focused so much on the Brit rock and pop and American Laurel Canyon/San Francisco psychedelic music of the 1960s but there was this whole other piece that Herb Alpert was so central to. One great thing about getting older is unapologetically embracing music from long ago because it takes me back to being so young, being influenced, even unknowingly, by what my parents were listening to. I love that and I miss my Dad so much.

Watching the aged Herb Alpert, who performed most of the show from a swivel chair, masterfully playing his trumpet, punching the air with one arm now and then, or turning to his band members to conduct and instruct on solos, was captivating. Observing his hands and fingers, manicured and elegant, his lithe figure when he was on his feet, oozing charm. And those on-screen images of him in his twenties, thirties and forties, so gorgeous… So much so that a buoyant fellow my age that I met on the shuttle after the show said, “I’m a straight man, but yeah, I would have f***ed him!”

My favourite of all the archival film clips of the songs up on the screen was indeed “Rise”, with Herb and his wife, former Brasil ’66 singer Lani Hall, and a group of people including bikini-clad girls dancing on a Malibu beach. It was 1979, I was studying for final high school exams in Sydney, Australia, while Herb and Lani and their family and friends were frolicking on a Southern California beach to that song. Sigh. Watch it here.

Speaking of Lani, she did not make an appearance on stage at the Bowl on Sunday night. She had appeared with Herb at his show last year in LA at the Dolby Theatre that I unfortunately didn’t get to see, but this time she was just represented on screen, especially when Herb sang – with a little help from the audience – “This Guy’s In Love With You”. So much love on that screen.

I met Herb and Lani in December 2019 at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music at the opening event for the aptly named Lani Hall, the new concert hall that Herb dedicated to his great love. There was so much palpable adoration between them just standing there as they made polite conversation with me and my friend. Their energy stayed with me for a long time. Then I was at an event for Sérgio Mendes at the Grammy Museum in March 2020, the night before Los Angeles shut down and became a ghost town. I was so inspired by meeting Sérgio and telling him how much my Dad had loved his music, and thinking about how instrumental – no pun intended, not really – Herb Alpert was in getting Sérgio’s Brasil ’66 music out to a global audience, that I immediately ordered Brasil ’66 and Tijuana Brass CDs and played them in those early months of the pandemic to lift my spirits. “Mas que Nada” has been my iPhone ringtone for the past six years.

Herb’s monumental contribution to the careers of other artists – via his and Jerry Moss’s A&M Records – was also on show, and when it came time for Herb to play “Smile” along to visual tributes to the dearest friends he has outlived, there were his shining A&M lights – Karen Carpenter, Sérgio Mendes, Burt Bacharach, Jerry Moss. At 91, Herb might be wistful but he doesn’t look like he is going anywhere, he is just ageing on with grace and wisdom, enduring classiness, and the balance of humility and chutzpah that enables him to get on stage, tell his stories, show off what a dreamboat he was, and keep blowing the sexiest trumpet sounds of our era. His band members are much younger but they play like it’s 1965, with verve and respect for the legacy, with heart and joy.

I would go to see this show every night for the rest of his performing life if I could.

Meanwhile it is time to revisit the John Scheinfeld documentary, Herb Alpert Is…

I heartily agree with Chris Willman, who always turns a good phrase, writing in his Variety review that “surely anyone hearing these tunes and these arrangements for the first time would recognize the spark of joy. No one since the end of the T.B. era appears to have thought to use the sound of three trumpets playing in unison (or, alternately, two trumpets and a trombone), unaccompanied by vocals, as the basis of smash-hit pop music. But, hearing that sprightly style revived now, it sure sounds like it could heal the world.”

Read the full Variety review here:
Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass Whip It Good at the Hollywood Bowl

Here is a really great read:
LA Times interview with Herb Alpert by Mikael Wood

Here is a clip of one of my “Rise” videos from the Hollywood Bowl:
Herb Alpert – Legend!

And here are my somewhat grainy photos from the little camera that still would, especially at such a meaningful concert. Of course the photos can never be as sharp as the subject of them.