Herb Alpert / Tijuana Brass The Lonely Bull CD

There is a dreamy-eyed wonder about Herb Alpert's debut album. Within its Latin-esque affectations, the album is a moodily romantic concoction of easy listening and progressive sounds. "El Lobo" is a portrait of love's sorrow, tenderly painted with trumpets, guitars, and ghostly vocal choruses. "The Lonely Bull" is cinematic, with imagery of bullfights vividly implied by the opening sound effects of a roaring crowd. The deep electric guitar sounds like the Ventures, a popular 1960s instrumental rock group.

Even at the outset, Alpert's style has the elements that he carried with him over the succeeding years. There's a preference for solid and dominant percussion and tempos, making all his work specifically geared for the dancing set. The Mexican melodies lend a cross-cultural vitality that was to persist in the trumpeter's work.

The colossus that is A&M Records starts right here with the first album by the 1960s instrumental juggernaut known as the Tijuana Brass. True, there was no "Tijuana Brass" per se at this time; just Herb Alpert and a coterie of Los Angeles sessionmen, with Alpert overdubbing himself on trumpet to get that bullring effect. Also, Alpert was just getting the TJB concept underway; the textures are leaner, the productions less polished, and the accent is more consciously on a Mexican mariachi ambience -- the relatively square rhythms, the mandolins, the mournful, wistful siesta feeling -- than the records down the road. The hit title track (originally a tune called "Twinkle Star"!) is a cleverly structured, exciting and haunting piece of record-making -- and its composer, Sol Lake, becomes the charter member of Alpert's team of TJB tunesmiths with several more ethnic-flavored numbers. In accordance with the newly emerging bossa nova movement, Alpert does a nice, straightforward, authentic cover of "Desafinado," even departing a bit from the tune with some spare jazz-inspired licks, and "Crawfish" pleasingly adapts the mariachi horn sound to a bossa beat. [In 2005, Shout! Factory reissued The Lonely Bull as part of their Herb Alpert Signature Series, featuring remastered sound, a deluxe digipack, and new liner notes from Josh Kun.] ~ Richard S. Ginell

Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass: Herb Alpert (trumpet).

Recorded at Conway Recorders, Hollywood, California.

Audio Remasterer: Ted Jensen.

Liner Note Authors: Herb Alpert; Josh Kun.

Recording information: Conway Recorders, Hollywood, CA.

Photographer: Herb Alpert.Mojo (Publisher) (p.114) - 3 stars out of 5 - "It's a guilty pleasure...but an easy one once you stop resisting."