Herb Alpert brings ‘In the Mood’ tour to Bay Area

Herb Alpert is back on the road and back on the charts. The trumpeter’s latest album “In The Mood” cracked the Billboard 200 earlier this month, his first album to reach that high in almost three decades.

At 79, he certainly has nothing to prove. In the second half of the 1960s, Alpert and his Tijuana Brass scored five chart-topping hits and sold 16 million albums while virtually defining the era’s instrumental pop. At the same time he co-founded A&M Records, parlaying his savvy business sense and keen ear for talent into a vast fortune that he’s used to shape Southern California’s musical landscape. In other words, Alpert needn’t lose any sleep over his album sales, and any time he leaves his Bel Air digs to perform, he’s doing it for pleasure.

“My thing has always been that I just have a lot of fun playing,” says Alpert, who performs with his wife, Grammy-winning vocalist Lani Hall, Nov.7-8 at the Montalvo Arts Center.

The new album features Alpert’s lyrical trumpet on a program of beloved standards set to contemporary grooves. Most of the tracks are arranged by his longtime bandmates — pianist/keyboardist Bill Cantos, bassist Hussain Jiffry, and drummer Michael Shapiro.

“We’ve been together eight years,” Alpert says. “These guys aren’t hired guns. They’re personal friends, and strangely they’re all 51 years old. I get a lot of energy working with younger musicians. I hear their take on things, and I meld my style into whatever is around me.”

While Alpert describes himself as something of a musical chameleon, his sensibility was firmly in place even before he scored his first No. 1 hit, “A Taste of Honey,” in 1965. While he grew up idolizing trumpet masters like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, he found his own voice by putting a sunny sheen on the stripped-down lyricism of Miles Davis.

“It took me a while to find my own voice,” Alpert says. “I’m very conscious of the lyrics and melodies. Stan Getz, who was a dear friend, said if you can’t improve on the melody, don’t fool around with it.”

No one has ever accused Alpert of making cutting-edge music, but in virtually every aspect of his creative life he’s proved remarkably prescient. He founded A&M with Jerry Moss and turned it into the world’s largest indie label, signing hugely successful acts like The Carpenters, Janet Jackson, and Sergio Mendes (whose band Brasil 66 featured a young singer named Lani Hall).

He also helped channel early attention to San Francisco’s burgeoning music scene by signing the influential, but short-lived folk rock band We Five, whose 1965 hit “You Were On My Mind” reached the highest spot by a band from the Bay Area scene until Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” peaked at No. 2 in 1969.

While he and Moss continued to manage A&M for several years after its 1989 sale to PolyGram, Alpert was already looking for other ventures. He was one of the producers responsible for bringing the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” to Broadway.

“I use my instinct to guide me,” says Alpert, a dedicated sculptor and painter whose abstract Expressionist-inspired canvases are exhibited in several notable galleries. “I’ve been right a lot of the time, and wrong, too. It’s like jazz. You’re using your instinct, doing what feels right to do at that moment.”

Judging by his philanthropy, nothing feels more right to Alpert than building institutions to support and train aspiring artists. He’s provided significant financial support to CalArts in Valencia and played an essential role in bringing the Thelonious Monk Institute back to California as part of UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music (which he and Hall endowed with a $30 million donation in 1997).

In the two decades since the Monk family launched the institute, it has become a vital force in jazz via a prestigious master’s program and an annual competition, even while bouncing around from Boston to the University of Southern California to New Orleans. Alpert, an alumnus of USC, decided to go with the crosstown rival because UCLA’s music program better fit his vision. Trusting his instinct has worked out pretty well for him so far.

“I’m nuts about the mystery of arts,” Alpert says. “I can’t identify why I like Miles other than his intent was great, something that resonates in the soul. How do you identify that? What was Jackson Pollock trying to do? If you think too hard, you miss the concept.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.