Sunday, 21 October 2018

Herb Alpert - Music Volume 3 Herb Alpert Reimagines The Tijuana Brass, album review

No Assassinations

This is a lightly fun Sunday listening morning, the new Herb Albert a ‘modernising’ of the songs of my boyhood, the Tijuana Brass pretty much a radio stalwart of my growing up in 60s America.

Hugely familiar songs like Spanish Flea, Work Song, Green Peppers, A Taste of Honey and Spanish Harlem are repackaged with funky beats, some loops, vocal/voice inserts and other modestly applied effects, never losing their innocent sweet melodies and all of the inherent hopefulness of their time and that young boy’s assimilation of it all.

It isn’t all change and never radical. Just enough to occupy before breakfast and reading the papers; memories of home and how some alterations aren’t so bad in a world where you can get away with anything really, not that Herb has taken any appalling liberties with this music: A Taste of Honey playing as I write that, sweeping strings wafting across a slowed but pronounced beat, echo on the horn, some buzzing sounds, some staccato ‘heys’, and still as if it was nearly yesterday.


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