Herb Alpert, Tijuana Brass and Other Delights, BBC Four

I used to have a childhood fascination with the music of Herb Alpert, because I liked the tunes and always felt there was a hint of melancholy behind Herb’s breezy, nonchalant exterior. Everybody else found Alpert laughably cheesy, but happily, this excellent documentary proved that I was right all along by building a watertight case for regarding him as something of a neglected legend.

Not neglected by the record-buying public, of course, because Alpert’s string of Tijuana Brass albums in the 1960s made him the top-earning act in the USA for a three-year period. In 1966, four of Alpert’s albums sold a total of 13 million copies, outstripping the Beatles that year. Such were Herb’s earnings from the Brass that he and his business partner Jerry Moss were able to build their record label, A&M, into one of the most successful independent outfits in the music industry.

'The Tijuana Brass made no-brainer pop hits for an era yet to be deluged in acid rock'

There was no mistaking the brazen commerciality of the Tijuana Brass, with their bright, perky tunes like "Spanish Flea" or "Tijuana Taxi" and imagery of larking about in the California sunshine, but the film highlighted the craftsmanship which Alpert methodically applied behind the scenes. When he cut his first few albums there was no such entity as the Tijuana Brass, because the discs were masterminded by Alpert in the studio, where he devised the arrangements, laid down the overdubs and constructed the entire sound picture from scratch. Nobody said he was a control freak – in fact nobody said anything remotely critical about him at all, which may prove the point - but you can draw your own conclusions (21st Century Herb, pictured below).

Quite how the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants born in Fairfax, California, and originally trained in classical trumpet became steeped in music from south of the border wasn’t fully explained, beyond Alpert’s admission that he used to attend bullfights in Tijuana and was swept up in the atmosphere and the noise, but he evidently had a discerning ear and a feel for a latin groove (he later signed Sergio Mendes to A&M, and shifted shedloads of units). He had also fallen under the laid-back influence of the West Coast’s cool jazz movement, personified by Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan, and hints of their lissome, airy playing infused Alpert’s work.

Despite his movie-star looks and stylish dress sense, Alpert was a shy, reserved character (“I’m not a people person,” he admits now) reluctant to make extravagant claims for his own musicianship, but it wasn’t too fanciful to detect something of the shrewdness and unflashiness of one of his idols, Miles Davis, in his trumpet playing. The Tijuana Brass was designed to make no-brainer pop hits for an era yet to be deluged in acid rock or heavy metal, but sampling a few tracks now, they’re refreshingly free of frills and schmaltz.They may even have given Ennio Morricone a few tips for his spaghetti western soundtracks.

Alpert’s musical pedigree proved an asset when he moved into his Record Mogul phase, and Sting (who signed to A&M with The Police) described how having a successful artist who was prepared to pop into the recording studio to have a chat about your work-in-progress was a vast improvement over hooking up with some cloth-eared corporation who couldn’t remember signing you in the first place. Others evidently agreed, and as well as cleaning up with The Police, A&M racked up a swathe of hits from the likes of Peter Frampton, Supertramp, The Carpenters and Janet Jackson. Alpert demonstrated that he hadn’t abandoned his own artistic ambitions with his 1979 album Rise, an amazingly assured and successful foray into synthesized dance music.

And that wasn’t all. Outside music, Alpert has pursued an unobtrusively impressive career as a painter and sculptor, and the film climaxed with scenes from his Black Totems sculpture exhibition in Los Angeles. Who should pop out of the celeb-dripping crowd but the omnipresent Stephen Fry, declaring himself a long-term fan of Herb and extolling his “extraordinary third act as an artist… He has quietly proven himself one of the most extraordinary men of his age.” And he knows Stephen Fry too! The 75-year-old Alpert truly has nothing left to achieve.  Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass play The Lonely Bull