Taste Of Honey

A Taste Of Honey — Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass

Herb Alpert's recording of "A Taste of Honey" with the Tijuana Brass in 1965 is among the most decorated instrumental performances in the history of American popular music. The song itself had a long pedigree before Alpert touched it: composed by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow, it had been used as the theme for a 1960 Broadway production and had been recorded vocally by several artists, most notably Lenny Welch. But it was Alpert's brassy, warmly Latin-inflected instrumental version that transformed the song into a commercial and critical phenomenon, winning him some of the most prestigious awards the recording industry could offer.

Alpert had founded A&M Records with Jerry Moss in 1962, operating out of Alpert's garage before the label grew into one of the most successful independent operations in American music history. The Tijuana Brass sound he developed was a deliberate hybrid, blending the energy of Mexican mariachi music with American jazz phrasing, pop sensibility, and a relaxed, almost conversational quality that distinguished the ensemble from the more formal brass ensembles of the previous decade. The formula proved commercially potent, and by the mid-1960s the Tijuana Brass was one of the most successful recording acts in the country, competing regularly with the Beatles for album sales and chart position.

"A Taste of Honey" appeared on the album of the same name, released on A&M in 1965. Alpert's trumpet work on the track is characteristically warm and unhurried, drawing out the melody's sweetness without overplaying or adding unnecessary ornamentation. The rhythm section provides a gentle forward motion while the rest of the brass ensemble fills the spaces around the melody with the easy confidence that was the Tijuana Brass's signature. The production, like most of Alpert's work from this period, was clean and immediate, designed for high-fidelity playback on the home stereo systems that were becoming increasingly common in American middle-class households.

The critical and commercial response to the recording was remarkable. At the Grammy Awards ceremony in 1966, "A Taste of Honey" won the Grammy for Record of the Year, one of the most prestigious prizes in the industry and one typically associated with vocal performances. An instrumental winning this award was unusual and reflected the genuine regard in which Alpert's performance was held by the Recording Academy's membership. The song also won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement and the Grammy for Best Instrumental Performance (Non-Jazz). Alpert additionally won Best Male Pop Vocal Performance that year for a different track, making him one of the rare artists to win multiple Grammy categories in a single evening across both instrumental and vocal work.

On the Billboard Hot 100, the Tijuana Brass maintained a commercial presence throughout the mid-1960s that was extraordinary for an instrumental act. Albums consistently outsold those of most vocal artists, and the group's appeal crossed demographic lines in ways that few pop acts managed. Older listeners who might have been skeptical of rock and roll embraced the Tijuana Brass's good-humored, melodically accessible approach, while younger audiences responded to the rhythmic vitality and the novelty of the ensemble's hybrid sound. Radio programmers valued the recordings because they provided a musical palate cleanser between more intense or controversial material.

The success of "A Taste of Honey" also had significant implications for A&M Records as a business. The label's ability to produce major commercially successful recordings gave it the financial stability and industry credibility to sign other artists whose work might not have had an obvious commercial profile. Over the following decade, A&M would sign acts ranging from Carpenters to Cat Stevens to the Police, building a roster that was remarkably diverse in genre and audience while maintaining consistent commercial success. The foundation for that institutional ambition was laid in large part by the early Tijuana Brass recordings.

The cultural footprint of "A Taste of Honey" extended into film and television, where the song's gentle instrumental quality made it useful as an underscore for scenes requiring a particular quality of warmth or nostalgia. Alpert's trumpet tone, immediately recognizable and associated in the public mind with relaxed sophistication, became a kind of sonic shorthand for a specific mid-1960s American mood, optimistic and prosperous and pleasantly untroubled by the decade's deepening conflicts. That the recording captured this mood in purely instrumental terms, without the mediation of words, made its emotional communication all the more direct and its datedness, when it came, all the more specific.

Herb Alpert continued recording and performing well into subsequent decades, and his trumpet work remained a consistent presence in American popular music. But the period from roughly 1965 through 1968 represented the peak of the Tijuana Brass's commercial dominance, and "A Taste of Honey" remains the recording that best exemplifies what the ensemble accomplished at its best: a synthesis of influences that felt genuinely new, delivered with technical assurance and genuine warmth, and rewarded by the kind of recognition that popular music rarely bestows on purely instrumental work.