Search - Herb Alpert, Tijuana Brass :: Christmas Album

Herp Albert & the Tijuana Brass have an Ameriachi Christmas

Lawrance M. Bernabo | The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota | 11/23/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"After "Whipped Cream & Other Delights" the "Christmas Album" is actually one of the better albums put out by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. One of the most successful instrumental performers in music history, Albert shared arrangement duties on this 1968 album with Shorty Rogers, the "cool jazz" trumpeter, with Albert setting up the brass and Rogers the strings. The result is ten tracks of mostly familiar Christmas songs done in the Tijuana Brass' Ameriachi style works for the most part. "My Favorite Things" and "Sleigh Ride" have their problems, but most of these songs work, especially if you are partial to the Tijuana Brass sound. Rogers does the cool introductions to several of the songs, and we discover that for some reason the Tijuana Brass liked to do a lot of jingle songs, which explains why you have not only "Jingle Bells," "The Bell That Couldn't Jingle," and "Jingle Bell Rock." This "Christmas Album" ends on a note of class with Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." This album came out at the end of Herb Alpert's best year, when he had his only #1 single with Burt Bacharach's "This Guy's in Love With You." This "Christmas Album" was the group's fifth album to hit #1 on the Billboard pop charts (and the last except for their "The Best of the Brass" hit collection)."