Herb Alpert Returns to Hollywood Bowl After 59 Years
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- Herb Alpert, age 91, headlined the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday for the Tijuana Brass's first appearance there in 59 years, delivering a nearly all-1960s set built around trumpet-driven instrumentals including "The Lonely Bull," "Spanish Flea," "Bittersweet Samba," "Mexican Shuffle," and "Tijuana Taxi."
- Paul Williams, the ASCAP president and one-time Alpert protégé, opened with a lengthy introduction recounting how Alpert and Jerry Moss founded A&M Records in a garage on a handshake, before pivoting into a 2026 commentary urging that artists be paid and able to refuse AI training on their work.
- The Tijuana Brass tour launched in 2025 after Alpert's family and business partners convinced him to revive a brand dormant for roughly 40 years; the theater run sold out entirely and climaxed in two Dolby Theatre shows last November before expanding to the Bowl.
- Alpert's 1979 Billboard No. 1 "Rise" stretched to a nine-minute, jazz-flavored rendition anchored by an extended piano solo from Bill Cantos, marking one of only two post-1960s selections alongside 1982's "Route 101."
- Alpert performed seated alongside just two horn players — trumpeter Kris Bergh and trombonist Ryan Dragon — with drummer Ray Brinker, bassist Hussain Jiffry, guitarist Kerry Marx, and Cantos rounding out an unusually minimal ensemble for music that sounded orchestra-sized on record.
- Alpert noted that "Ladyfingers" has accumulated hundreds of millions of streams as a contemporary hit, though he did not name the obvious driver: the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize," which sampled the track.
- Alpert reminisced about the Tijuana Brass's last Bowl appearance in 1968, when Marlon Brando recruited them to open a Martin Luther King Christian Leadership Conference fundraiser alongside Barbra Streisand and Harry Belafonte.
Why it matters: The Tijuana Brass had not performed under that name in roughly 40 years before this 2025-launched tour sold out its entire theater run and graduated to the 17,500-seat Bowl, demonstrating that a nonagenarian's catalog of 1960s trumpet instrumentals can still command arena-scale demand. Alpert's quiet mention that "Ladyfingers" has racked up hundreds of millions of streams — driven by a Notorious B.I.G. sample he conspicuously did not name — also shows the catalog keeps generating revenue through hip-hop adjacency even as Alpert himself performs the originals.
