Eight-time Grammy winner and Los Angeles native Herb Alpert rose to fame as a trumpeter with his band the Tijuana Brass in the 1960s and co-founded the A&M record label in 1962.
A&M, founded with his longtime partner Jerry Moss and the largest independently owned record company in the world, was sold to PolyGram in 1989 for a reported $500 million. They were reported to have picked up an additional $363 million in stock and cash when they sold a music publishing company to Seagram in 2000.
In the last two decades, Alpert has became a major contributor to the arts. By 2008, the Alpert Foundation had donated approximately $100 million to mid-career artists and college-bound students, as well as to a variety of programs across the country.
He pledged $30 million to UCLA to establish the cross-disciplinary UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music in 2007, and then gave $15 million to the School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts, which was renamed the Herb Alpert School of Music in recognition of the gift.
"Are these gifts accelerating as I'm getting older? Not really," Alpert said when the CalArts donation was announced.
"We've had a long-range plan," he said, referring to himself and his wife, singer Lani Hall Alpert, with whom he founded the philanthropic Alpert Foundation in 1988.
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