Your influcnce on music will live on forever. R.I.P. This is so weird.

Herb Alpert is the man. He started A&M Records with Jerry Moss in 1962 (naming it that after they had found out Carnival Records was taken by another company.) A&M stands for “Alpert & Moss.” The A&M logo also pays homage to Alpert’s instrument of choice, the trumpet.

The label houses/housed musical acts such as Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, George Benson, The Brothers Johnson, Al Green, The Human League, Toby Keith, The Carpenters, Quincy Jones, Joe Cocker, Cheech & Chong, Snow Patrol, Maroon 5, Bill Withers, The Black Eyed Peas, Shanice, Nazareth, Pussycat Dolls, Iggy Pop, Payolas, Queen (to A&M Canada), Sound Garden, Styx, Sex Pistols (only for a week though, right after EMI dropped them), Ike & Tina Turner, Atlantic Starr, MxPx, Mya, The Police, Sun Ra and Janet Jackson. You know, just to drop a few names.

Herb’s and his band, The Tijuana Brass did the title music for the original Casino Royal and Alpert is also the only artist ever to have placed five albums on the Billboard Pop Album Chart at the one time.

According to his Wikipedia article, “(His) musical accomplishments include five number one hits, twenty-eight albums on the Billboard charts, eight Grammy Awards,  fourteen Platinum albums and fifteen Gold albums (and) as of 1996, (he) had sold 72 million albums worldwide.”

The song featured in the video above, Rise was from his 1979 album of the same name won a Grammy and was sampled in the Notorious B.I.G.’s 1997 song “Hypnotize.”

Read the Wikipedia article about Herb or visit his website, http://herbalplert.com appropriately titled [ Music. Art. Life. ] to  learn more about Herb, his contributions to music over the past 4 decades and what he’s been up to now-a-days. Alpert is truly a living legend.