The Beat Of The Brass

by Richard S. GinellMeant as the companion album to a Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass television special of the same name and packaged in a fancy double-fold LP jacket, The Beat of the Brass came out amid signs that Alpert's hot streak was finally beginning to run out. Not quite. Viewer requests for a new Burt Bacharach song, "This Guy's in Love with You" -- featuring an Alpert vocal -- were so strong that A&M released it as a single, which shot up to number one and took The Beat of the Brass with it to the top. Herb's vocal is touching in its strained na?veté; he sounds sincere, and that overrides the lush, overbearing Bacharach orchestral arrangement. The rest of the album generated an often nostalgic quality then and now; the tunes by John Pisano and Sol Lake are exquisite, and Alpert's arrangements of songs like "Thanks for the Memory" seem autumnal in quality, as if an era were about to close. The band still has the ability to groove; the vamp on Julius Wechter's bossa nova "Panama," with Wechter's jazzy vibes and Pisano's strong rhythm guitar, could have been stretched to half an hour. Yet Alpert's trumpet sounds a bit withered at times, and the band vocals and cloying children's chorus on "Talk to the Animals" could be done without.

　Volume 2 is the second album by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, known in this recording as "Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass". It was released in 1963 on A&M Records, and sold poorly upon initial release. After the TJB became massively popular with hits from their later albums, Volume 2 was reissued in 1966 and eventually reached #17 on the Billboard album chart. A CD version of the album was issued by A&M Records in 1990 but is now out of print. Some LP copies of the album have a spoken introduction by Herb Alpert at the beginning of "The Great Manolete (La Virgen de la Macarena)".

　　Volume 2 is available as a download from such online stores as Amazon.com and iTunes. It was made available in February 2007 at the same time as the reissues of the 1969 albums Warm and The Brass Are Comin'. No CD reissue of Volume 2 has been announced. Alpert reportedly felt that the album was of inferior technical quality.

　　As with The Lonely Bull, the album features some songs with a very Mexican flavor, but with more cover versions of pop hits than were included in that first album, "Spanish Harlem" having been a recent success for Ben E King. "Green Leaves of Summer" was the theme for the film portrayal of the famous Mexican-Texian battle in The Alamo. "Winds of Barcelona" would be reorchestrated as "El Presidente" on the Brass' next album, South of the Border. "Swinger From Seville" is a "strip-tease" tune, complete with audio of cries like "take-it-off" from a raucous audience. The song stands in contrast to the leadoff song, "La Virgen de la Macarena", the traditional title given to "Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza" (Our Lady of Hope) (or Mary, the mother of Jesus)... in Seville, Spain. The Brass' rendition of "A-me-ri-ca" inexplicably begins with a bar of "Jingle Bells" as a prelude to a jazzy version of the West Side Story entry that gives no hint of that song's outspoken lyrics