And there was an obvious affection for Latin instruments and a South-of-the-border feel. “The Tijuana Brass” was the name chosen for Alpert’s studio group on “Lonely Bull” (though a consistent, performing TJB lineup did not exist until the success of “Whipped Cream” in 1966), while “Ameriachi” was the term coined for this hugely successful approach that cast new (“Spanish Flea”, “Tijuana Taxi”) and popular melodies (“Zorba the Greek,” “If I Were A Rich Man.”)

It turns out Alpert was less focused on creating a Latin musical sensation than it would appear. He’s the first to admit that other Iberian sonorities were floating around at the same time, and proving popular: every major label was releasing recordings of leading flamenco guitarists, and Davis’s ground-breaking Sketches of Spain album had been released in 1961. “Everyone I knew had bullfight posters on their wall . . . and went through a phase of heavy listening to flamenco music,” historian Dan Wakefield writes of that period. “One of our bibles was Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon . . .”

It was the right exoticism for the day, yet Alpert maintains he was not conscious of that when it came to launching “The Lonely Bull” and the TJB. “I’m pretty unconscious when it comes to making music to begin with. I think all that stuff washed over everyone so I kind of picked and chose what’s working at the time. I was really just affected by a particular bullfight that I saw in Tijuana, Mexico, and Ted Keeps, an engineer at Liberty Records, just happened to have this tape of 30,000 people yelling ‘Ole!’”

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