Sometimes perusing the Internet can be a positive thing! It is just shy of 1 PM on the East Coast and for my Noon Hour Music Interlude, I am pleased to present to you Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass with a great Instrumental song "A Taste of Honey"!!! I loved this back in the day and I love it now... Great beat, solid music... I hope you enjoy it!!!
Background:
Herb Alpert (born March 31, 1935) is an American trumpeter who led Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass in the 1960s. During the same decade, he co-founded A&M Records with Jerry Moss. He is an artist who paints and sculpts abstract expressionist works and is a philanthropist with his wife, Lani Hall, through the Herb Alpert Foundation. His career as a musician includes recording five No. 1 albums and 28 albums on the Billboard magazine album chart, fourteen platinum albums, fifteen gold albums, and nine Grammy Awards. He has sold 72 million records worldwide. Alpert is the only musician 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).
Herb Alpert was born and raised in the Boyle Heights section of Eastside Los Angeles, California, the son of Tillie (née Goldberg) and Louis 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. Herb began trumpet lessons at the age of eight and played at dances as a teenager. Acquiring an early wire recorder in high school, he experimented on this crude equipment. After graduating from Fairfax High School in 1952, he joined the United States Army and frequently performed at military ceremonies. After his service in the Army, Alpert tried his hand at acting, but eventually settled on pursuing a career in music.[citation needed]
While attending the University of Southern California in the 1950s, he was a member of the USC Trojan Marching Band for two years. In 1956, he appeared in the 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 Dot Records under the name of Dore Alpert. "Tell It to the Birds" was recorded as the first release on the Alpert & Moss label Carnival Records. When Alpert and Moss found that there was prior usage of the Carnival name, they renamed the label A&M Records.