Herb Alpert, Music's Big Giver

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Apr 12th 2008 at 9:02AM

Eight-time Grammy winner musician Herb Alpert is giving back to the music community in a big way. Alpert, a famed trumpeter with the band the Tijuana Brass, and one of the co-founders of the A&M record label in 1962, established the philanthropic Alpert Foundation in 1988. Last November he pledged $30 million to UCLA to create the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and the LA TImes reports that he has just given $15 million to the School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts. The school will be renamed the Herb Alpert School of Music. The gift will endow faculty chairs and provide money for scholarships and music programs.

Over the past 16 years the Alpert Foundation has given grants to CalArts in order to support the Dizzy Gillespie chair in music, the Dizzy Gillespie Recording Studio, music programs, scholarships and community education programs for children. WIth the $15 million, Alpert has now given nearly $24 million to the school. The foundation has also donated $100 million to musicians, students and other programs around the country.

How does a trumpeter have so much money? Alpert and Jerry Moss sold A&M records to PolyGram in 1989 for a reported $500 million and are also said to have picked up an additional $363 million in stock and cash when they sold a music publishing company to Seagram in 2000.

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