“We’re living in a very dark time,” says filmmaker John Scheinfeld down the line from Los Angeles. “Certainly, the virus has contributed to that, but even before the virus there was a lot of darkness sweeping across our countries, politically and socially. I really wanted to make something that was positive and uplifting and inspiring and nostalgic and fun.”

He’s certainly done that. Herb Alpert Is… is infectiously jaunty, thanks enormously to Alpert’s sexy, cosmopolitan 1960s hits like ‘The Lonely Bull’, ‘Spanish Flea’ and ‘A Taste of Honey’ (you’ve probably heard them, even if you don’t recognize their names). The latest film from a documentarian who has covered musicians such as John Coltrane, John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, Herb Alpert Is… touches on almost every corner of the trumpeter’s life, including his unlikely 1979 instrumental disco chart-topper ‘Rise’ (later sampled by Notorious BIG), and his days as an independent music mogul, partnering with Jerry Moss in A&M Records.

In copious amounts of archive footage, Alpert is pin-up handsome, endlessly quotable. The soundtrack drips with his sophisticated rhythms, and there are the requisite famous commentators, including Sting, Questlove and Billy Bob Thornton (who recalls getting horny for the Whipped Cream & Other Delights album cover). But the film’s best asset is Herb himself, alive and well, painting, sculpting, performing with his wife, Lani Hall (of Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66), and exercising his generous philanthropy.

For all his saucy musicianship and outsized success—not explored in detail here is the cultural appropriation of Mariachi-style music by a white Californian—Alpert is a “grounded, warm and sensitive” introvert, says Scheinfeld. A fascinating turning point in the film involves a never-before-seen interview with Alpert on a Malibu clifftop. Scheinfeld found the interview in a pile of two-inch reels containing unused out-takes from a 1960s television special. “It was just one of those electric moments. Here it is, nobody knew it existed, and you could absolutely see Herb struggling to find the words, the emotional distress that he is in.”

Scheinfeld adds: “One of the things that I love so much about what I do is finding footage that no one else has seen before. Treasure-hunting. Herb is a saver. He had saved everything: photos, film, video, newspaper articles. Anything we could have possibly needed to tell his story was all in his vault.”

Zappa is a beautifully assembled and superbly told story about a man in conflict with himself and the times. A highlight is Bruce Bickford’s stop-motion animation, and the few gaps not filled by rich archive material are handled by several well-chosen interviewees—one of Winter’s favorite parts of filmmaking: “I’ve always bristled about this new world we’re in right now where people are disparaging field interviews, which they call ‘talking heads’ for some reason. To me it’s so incredibly disrespectful to your subjects and to the whole idea of subject portraiture. I love shooting portraits of people. I honestly could just make docs of just one person talking to camera after another and be very happy doing that.”

To get to the heart of his subject, Scheinfled employs a cute device with his guests, one which gives his film its title. Scheinfeld asks them to complete the sentence “Herb Alpert is…”, explaining “the thing that really struck me when I started to look into Herb’s story is that it’s much deeper, richer and more interesting than simply the Tijuana Brass hits of the 1960s.

“What I really saw was a renaissance man who has achieved success on his own terms on many levels. He is many things to many different people. One can see him as a performer, as an entrepreneur, as a discoverer of talent, as a sculptor and artist, and there are probably others as well.”

Asked for their favorite music documentaries, Winter readily offers Robert Frank’s The Rolling Stones: Cocksucker Blues, of which only bootleg copies are available. “That was one of the things that made me really wanna try doing this kind of storytelling—where the filmmaker is kind of there, but not becoming an intrusive part of the storytelling, but you can’t have the storytelling without it.”

Scheinfeld, however, won’t comment on other music documentaries, “because I’m a very tough audience”. He recalls instead the documentary that got him interested in making documentaries: Point of Order (1964, directed by Emile de Antonio). “It was all about the American political landscape during the McCarthy era in the 1960s. It made a very interesting choice to just have no narrator, but to let the events from Congressional hearings in Washington play out to tell a story. It was really fascinating and made me want to look at more documentaries.”

“The power of films,” Scheinfeld adds, “is not only to entertain us and help us escape from daily life—and heaven knows with Covid-19 we all need to do that—but I think they can also inspire us to be better people, to be better artists, to do something to make the world a better place… without sounding too pretentious!”