There is a moment in every Herb Alpert performance where the room goes completely still. It usually happens during a ballad — maybe “A Taste of Honey,” maybe something newer — when that trumpet tone, warm and buttery and unmistakable, floats out over the audience with the kind of purity that recording technology has never quite been able to capture. You hear it and you understand, immediately, why this man has millions of albums sold.
Alpert brings The Tijuana Brass to Rochester’s Kodak Center on May 12, and if you care at all about the craft of popular music, this is an evening you need to mark.
The Sound That Built an Empire
What always strikes me about Alpert’s playing is the restraint. In a world of technical showmanship, where jazz trumpet often means velocity and range, Alpert chose melody. He chose tone. Listen to “Rise” — a number-one pop hit built on a trumpet line so smooth it practically pours out of the speakers — and you hear a musician who understood that what you leave out matters as much as what you put in. That sensibility carried through everything he touched, including A&M Records, the label he co-founded with Jerry Moss that became home to the Carpenters, Cat Stevens, the Police, and Janet Jackson. The man didn’t just make music. He heard things other people missed and built an empire around that ear.
The Tijuana Brass ensemble is the ideal vehicle for Alpert’s artistry. These are world-class players who deliver those iconic arrangements — the Latin-tinged rhythms, the layered horn lines, the effortless swing between jazz sophistication and pop accessibility — with a precision that never feels clinical. There is a looseness to the best Tijuana Brass performances, a sense that the musicians are genuinely enjoying the interplay, and that energy is infectious in a live setting.
Still Playing, Still Vital
Alpert is 91. Let that sink in. He continues to tour and record with a commitment to his craft that would be impressive from someone three decades younger. His recent albums have shown an artist still exploring, still curious about what his instrument can do within new contexts and textures. But the live show is where it all comes together — the classics woven alongside newer material, delivered with an easy charm that fills the room without ever overselling itself.
The Kodak Center is the right room for this. Rochester’s premier theater provides the kind of warm, enveloping acoustic environment where Alpert’s tone can breathe, where the dynamic range of the Tijuana Brass arrangements — from the quietest muted passage to a full ensemble swell — lands exactly the way it should.
What You Are Really Hearing
For Finger Lakes music lovers, this is not nostalgia. Or rather, it is not only nostalgia. Yes, “Spanish Flea” will make you smile. Yes, the hits will transport you. But underneath the familiar melodies, what you are hearing is one of the most naturally gifted melodicists in American popular music history, still doing what he was put on this earth to do. The tone is still there. The phrasing is still impeccable. And the arrangements still reveal new details on the hundredth listen.
Musicians like Herb Alpert do not come along very often. When they are still performing at this level, you go.