UCSB Arts & Lectures presents the Santa Barbara debut of music icon and legendary trumpet player Herb Alpert and his wife, internationally renowned singer and Grammy award-winner Lani Hall, at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 19, in UCSB’s Campbell Hall. The dazzling duo will perform a swinging evening of Brazilian jazz fusion and American popular songbook standards, including Irving Berlin’s “Night And Day” and Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
Alpert, the “A” in A&M Records, is best known as the founder and leader of the wildly popular Latin act Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. Together, these consummate artists will display their passion for the music, and for each other, in a soulful and elegant performance. Alpert also is a seven-time Grammy winner, and Hall first gained international fame as lead singer for Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66.
Tickets cost $40 for the general public and $10 for UCSB students. For tickets and more information, call 805.893.3535, or visit www.artsandlectures.ucsb.edu.
Alpert and Hall’s soon-to-be-released album, entitled “Anything Goes” (May 26; Concord Records), is a live collection of beautifully reinterpreted standards that marks the first complete project that they have recorded together. Not resting on their deep recorded history, Alpert and Hall have crafted an evening from a wide treasury of jazz, both American and Brazilian, as well as American popular standards. “My love for jazz is rooted in its spontaneity,” Alpert explained, “and it’s never ending search for personal truth and creative freedom. It is with that freedom that we’re doing this tour, playing original arrangements of classic American standards with the color of Brazilian music scattered throughout, creating an exciting and unique musical blend without ever closing the space for spontaneity.”
One of this generation’s true Renaissance men, Alpert has sold more than 72 million albums worldwide as a musician and bandleader of the groundbreaking Tijuana Brass, propelling Latino music into the pop music limelight.
In 1962, Alpert and Jerry Moss founded A&M Records, which became one of the world’s leading independently owned record labels and home to such renowned artists as The Police, The Carpenters, Carole King and Janet Jackson among others.
Hall’s own Grammy award-winning career as a songstress stretches from the 1960s where she amassed hits as lead singer with Mendes and Brasil ’66, leading into a string of solo albums in English, Portuguese and Spanish that began with 1972’s “Sun Down Lady.’’ All of Hall’s musical endeavors have highlighted her expertise as a powerful jazz/pop song stylist, as well as a masterful interpreter.
— Noozhawk staff writer Laurie Jervis can be reached at ljervis@noozhawk.com.