Herb Alpert reflects on eight decades in music, new album 'Wish Upon A Star'

Herb Alpert had done just about everything a titan of the music industry could do to cement his place as an essential architect, regardless of genre, of popular music. That is, apart from playing Nashville's Grand Ole Opry.

The Grammy and Tony award-winning Rock & Roll Hall of Famer checked that box in mid-August. At 88, Alpert is still moving people with his music. He released a Billboard chart-topping jazz album four years ago and has over a half-dozen top-10 albums in the past decade.

Last month, Alpert's "Wish Upon A Star" marked his 44th studio album in a career that has also seen him, for a quarter century, pair with Jerry Moss as the co-founder of A&M Records. There, Alpert released 19 top 10 singles on 12 consecutive gold albums as a trumpeter and leader of the orchestral act the Tijuana Brass. In 1966, four of those albums -- "Going Places," "Whipped Cream & Other Delights," "South of the Border" and "The Lonely Bull" -- were top-10 sellers.

As a record executive, among many notable achievements, A&M's broad reach melded adult contemporary and easy listening sensibilities with crossover mainstream ears. Burt Bacharach, The Carpenters, Quincy Jones and Sérgio Mendes were all signed to the label. Also, if looking for where jazzy soul sounds and radio-ready 80s pop simultaneously thrived, A&M's 80s roster included Atlantic Starr, Janet Jackson and Jeffrey Osborne, as well as Bryan Adams, The Go-Gos, Human League, The Police, and Suzanne Vega, among many.

Couple Alpert's solo artistic revival via his instantaneously recognizable track "Rise" to the mix and the you have the rare artist and executive who sold as many records as he marketed.

The Opry is a place that Alpert never expected to play. However, in addition to re-recording Jerry Reed's "Eastbound and Down" for his latest album, country music has long been a part of Alpert's lineage.

A&M signed Waylon Jennings as the label's first country artist in 1963. A dozen tracks Alpert and the then 26-year-old artist worked on included a mix of A&M's well-performing folk material with a few country sides,. he told The Tennessean. Hearing country artists like Bobby Bare performing folk cuts like Ian and Sylvia's "Four Strong Winds" made Alpert want to capitalize on that success.

However, when RCA Records' Chet Atkins heard Jennings' cut -- and Atkins was friendly with Jennings' compatriot Willie Nelson, and had been making hits with Connie Smith, Bare, Don Gibson and Jim Reeves -- Jennings decided to sign with RCA.

Alpert cited the countrypolitan "feel" of the records that Atkins, Owen Bradley and others created in the late 1960s and early 1970s as defining an "unidentifiable and personal" impulse that led to massive commercial appeal.

He described a track of his own from the same era -- 1962's pop-crossover top-10 single "The Lonely Bull" as similarly reflective of him chasing his desires instead of financial gain.

"Making music that made sense to me also made sense to the charts -- but that wasn't always the intention," continued the artist-executive.

Alpert is finally at a place where decades of songs that make sense to him appear to fall free from his mind.

For the past decade, he's released albums at the same clip as in the 1960s.

Songs on "Wish Upon A Star" include Jerry Reed's 1977 classic.

"I couldn't get this song out of my mind after seeing Smokey and the Bandit many moons ago...thought it would make a great instrumental," he said.

The album also contains bossa nova interpretations of Great American Songbook standards including Dean Martin's "On the Street Where You Live," Beatles classics ("And I Love Her") and takes on tracks he released as an executive, including The Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun."

"For me, it's still all about expressing great lyrics and melodies," Alpert said.

As a trumpeter with 80 years of experience, he noted that returning to the instrument post-COVID marked the first time he'd had a break from regularly playing his trumpet in five decades.

He chuckled when recalling a lesson he learned from Carmine Caruso -- a saxophonist and violinist whose physical-first, calisthenics-based approach to playing the saxophone dramatically altered the brass-playing industry -- that brought him back to work:

"The instrument comes from within the person making the music. The trumpet is merely a megaphone or piece of plumbing amplifying the artist."

Rediscovering the artist within him allowed him to continue his voluminous output since pairing with his wife, acclaimed vocalist Lani Hall, for 2011's "I Feel You."

Alpert is the rare music industry veteran who can appreciate watching Carrie Underwood wow a crowd at the Grand Ole Opry and connect it to the first time he saw artists he signed like The Carpenters or Cat Stevens "express songs with overwhelming depth."

Ask Alpert about any of the multitudes of artists with whom he's worked over his seven-decade-long career, and he can instantly recall their creative strengths -- and how he aided them -- at length.

For instance, when queried about his 1987 work with Janet Jackson on "Diamonds" and "Making Love In The Rain" (a pair of R&B chart top-10 hits), he offers that blending the "spontaneity" of his jazz stylings with Jackson's "excitement" to work with him over funk and soul tracks produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis created "magical" moments.

When asked to dive deeper to link the chapters of his career and existence to describe his legacy in a sentence, he pauses and then offers his most telling statement.

"I'm naturally an introvert, so having access to using the trumpet to replace words with music to make statements to the world truly changed my life."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Herb Alpert reflects on eight decades in music, new album 'Wish Upon A Star'