With a holiday album just last year, trumpeter Herb Alpert and his wife, Lani Hall will be headlining at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Thursday. They will be joined by jazz vocal ensemble The Manhattan Transfer. This is going to be one swinging Christmas.
Alpert, perhaps best known for his band The Tijuana Brass (with whom he also released a Christmas record), has had five #1 hits, has been awarded 9 Grammy Awards and has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 72 million records.
Lani Hall, who first came to prominence as a singer with Sergio Mendes’ Brasil ’66. She, too, has a couple of Grammy Awards. She and Alpert have been married since 1973. In a 2016 review of their show at the Cafe Carlyle in New York, Stephen Holden of the New York Times said it was “Happy music made by happy people.”
The album is called The Christmas Wish and finds Alpert performing with a symphony and choir. That won’t be the set-up for this concert, but this clip gives you an idea of how he’s most recently approaching this seasonal music.
The Manhattan Transfer, whose current lineup is Cheryl Bentyne, Alan Paul, Janis Siegel and Trist Curless (who came in after the death of original member Tim Hauser), know how to make any song soar.
If you’re looking for a holiday show that will, more often than not, have you dancing in your seat, look no further.
Photo of Herb Alpert/Lani Hall by Andreas Neumann
Photo of The Manhattan Transfer courtesy of Ed Keane Associates