Herb Alpert on the question in his head and the sadness in his horn

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Set us as preferred Herb Alpert walks up a long driveway at his rambling Malibu estate, wincing slightly after having woken up around 3 a.m.with a cramp in his left calf.

“It’s still kind of seizing,” the trumpeter says as he leads me past a garden lush with moist-looking tropical plants.This, Alpert accepts, is the reality of life at 91.

Yet the only reason he’s out here racking up steps by the hundreds on a recent morning is because he was tooling around in his sculpture studio before I arrived.And the only reason the sculpture studio is so far from his music studio — there’s also a studio devoted to his painting — is because of his huge success over the last 60 or so years.

“So I can’t really complain,” he says.A Los Angeles native who got his start writing songs like Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World,” Alpert has lived here in Malibu since 1972, a decade after he released “The Lonely Bull,” his debut album with the Tijuana Brass.The LP’s title track, inspired by a bullfight Alpert caught in Mexico, went to No.

6 on Billboard’s Hot 100; more than a dozen finger-snapping Top 40 hits followed, including “A Taste of Honey,” “Spanish Flea” (also heard as a theme song on TV’s “The Dating Game”) and “This Guy’s in Love With You,” which took a rare Alpert vocal turn all the way to No.1.What’s more, these inescapable tunes came out on Alpert’s own label, A&M Records, which he “formed on a handshake,” as he puts it, in 1962 with his business partner Jerry Moss.

The label quickly became one of the biggest independent record companies in music, with acts such as Carole King, the Carpenters, the Police, Peter Frampton and Janet Jackson, as well as a beloved recording studio complex on La Brea Avenue.(Moss, who with Alpert sold A&M in 1989 for a reported $500 million,...