Random play: A revival of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass?

GRAHAM REID ponders the suave trumpeter with the classy cover art.

There was always something appealingly kitsch about Herb Alpert albums. Those early-60s covers adorned with unintentionally pre-psychedelic lettering, the youthful Herb looking part wine waiter-part matador, the women with a carefree laugh or who looked languid in the company of this suave trumpeter.

Then there was the Whipped Cream and Other Delights album, on which all the songs had food-related titles. The best bit was the sleeve where the edible Dolores Ericson posed, covered in the white stuff and sucking her finger seductively. It was shaving cream actually, but you got the point.

Herb's music was appealing in a safari-suit way, too. When I first heard Lonely Bull I thought it sounded like surf music. You could play it back-to-back with the Theme from The Endless Summer and they became seamless beach music. Surf's up, ole!

Herb's music was mostly for mums and dads back in the 60s - which means it's probably highly fashionable among those in their late-20s today - but it wasn't that bad.

It was distinctive, lively and good-humoured. Why else would anyone record tunes as naggingly catchy as Spanish Flea or Tijuana Taxi (with that farting horn sound) if not out of a sense of pure fun?

Spanish Flea, incidentally, had the working title Spanish Fly and was on the album Going Places, which had Herb on the cover in a biplane with a leggy stewardess lounging on the wing and handing him a cocktail. Now that was class.

The man could also arrange and play - no wonder Burt Bacharach ended up on Herb's label A&M - and he was also a generous and supportive label boss with his partner, Jerry Moss.

The breadth of his taste perhaps explains why Herb had an ongoing and expanding career when his instrumental contemporaries like James Last jogged on the spot for a couple of decades.

Herb's friends were Burt Bacharach and Hal David (who wrote his vocal hit This Guy's in Love With You), numerous jazz musicians, Spanish and Mexican composers and, much later, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Janet Jackson guested on his 87 album Keep Your Eye on Me. She didn't do that for James Last.

Alpert was a canny picker of material, too. He applied his lonesome- sounding trumpet to the Gene Pitney hit Town Without Pity, reconfigured What Now My Love as a Latin shuffle, and always kept a little of the Spanish/Mexican there as ersatz roots music which became known as "Ameriachi music." There's surely a place for 60s Alpert on the next Austin Powers soundtrack.

Of course, as the 70s rolled around he was becoming as passe as Brazil 66 (who later desperately recorded an album The New Brazil '77) and he spent more time behind the production desk and in the office.

But it certainly wasn't over for the man who wrote the Sam Cooke hit Wonderful World with Lou Adler. The funky Rise in 79 won a Grammy and there were always a few interesting things scattered around his intermittent albums in the 90s. But check amazon.com for the punters' opinions on those. They want Herb to do Lonely Bull again. And again.

Well, he is in a way. There's a new Alpert retrospective collection - with the Tijuana Brass and his solo hits - and understandably the Definitive Hits (in a disappointingly un-Herb cover) weigh heavily in favour of the 60s hits.

No matter. For those who know of him, Herb Alpert is probably like a butterfly pinned under glass from that time of bolero jackets, big pieces of vinyl and Dolores covered in whipped cream.