$40.1 million and a trumpet: Herb Alpert and Lani Hall’s gifts keep lifting young musicians—their philanthropy now tops $250 million
At an age when most people have long since put away their instruments, Herb Alpert is booking dates at the Royal Albert Hall.
Recently the 91-year-old trumpeter announced his first tour of the United Kingdom with the Tijuana Brass in more than half a century.
Six concerts next May will take him from Gateshead and Glasgow through Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham, ending in London at the Royal Albert Hall.
The British dates follow more than 70 sold-out shows across North America since he revived the band.
They include his first appearance at the Hollywood Bowl in 59 years. “I don’t know if you know what’s happening,” Alpert said this summer, “but I’m in the heyday of my career right now.”
He has spent this season playing to packed halls.
Back in Los Angeles, the classrooms his money built have kept doing their own work. On the same day the tour was announced, the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music said its Berry Gordy Music Industry Center would expand for the coming academic year.
Under new director Dr. Tiffany Naiman, the center plans a speaker series with Sony Music Publishing chief Jon Platt and an Earth Day gathering on the environmental impact of touring. It is also building stronger career paths for students who hope to work in the business Alpert helped shape.
In a way, the timing sums up Alpert’s double life.
One part of it is onstage, where the music still fills theaters.
The other part is in practice rooms and lecture halls, where he and his wife of more than five decades, the singer Lani Hall, have spent years making sure the next generation gets the chance he had.
Together, through the Herb Alpert Foundation, they have given $40.1 million to two Los Angeles institutions: $30 million to establish the UCLA school that bears his name and $10.1 million to make Los Angeles City College tuition-free for music majors.
Those gifts sit within a much larger body of giving.
Over four decades the foundation has given out more than $250 million.
It all goes back to a classroom at Melrose Elementary School. Alpert was eight, a shy boy in a music appreciation class, when he picked a trumpet out of a pile of instruments and found a way to say what he couldn’t put into words.
Music was already in the family.
His father had come to America from a village outside Kyiv at 16 with a mandolin and played it for his son at home.
“When his nostrils flared, I knew he was into it,” Alpert recalled.
“That kind of got me.”
The trumpet led to the Tijuana Brass and to “The Lonely Bull” and “Spanish Flea.” It also led to A&M Records, the label he and Jerry Moss started on a handshake and built into one of the most successful independent labels in music history.
Along the way came nine Grammy Awards and more than 72 million records sold. For a stretch of the 1960s he outsold the Beatles. Still, Alpert has never treated fame as the point.
“Ever since discovering the trumpet in my elementary school music appreciation class,” he has said, “I have understood the transformational power of music in education and the importance of music to the fabric of society.”
That belief became the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
The Alperts’ $30 million gift, announced in 2007, brought the university’s music departments together into one school.
The university later formally established that school as UCLA’s 12th professional school.
It has grown far beyond its original form. It now includes a Global Jazz Studies major, a bachelor’s degree in the music industry, the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance, and more than 40 ensembles that play music from around the world.
The couple kept giving after the founding gift.
A $3 million gift renovated the school’s theater, which was renamed Lani Hall in her honor.
Another $5 million went to rebuilding all 46 practice rooms with better acoustics, modern lighting, and wired internet.
Those small rooms, where most students spend their days, will be called Imagination Hall. Altogether, the Alperts’ support has produced more than $10 million in scholarships, more than 43 percent of all the scholarships the school has awarded, and has helped 793 students enroll.At
At Los Angeles City College, the Alperts reached students who might never get near a university’s admissions office.
“Maybe we can help open the door to students who are financially challenged,” Alpert said at the time, “and don’t have an opportunity to go to UCLA.” The $10.1 million endowment covers tuition, private lessons, and extra financial aid for every music major.
It was reported as the largest gift ever made to a single community college in Southern California.
It was also designed to help the program grow from about 175 music majors to about 250, and it benefits the roughly 4,000 students who take music classes there each year.
“I love that LACC has helped so many low-income students who have financial challenges but have a strong commitment to education and to self-improvement,” Alpert said.
The two gifts were built to work together.
Music majors at the college’s Herb Alpert Music Center have a clear path to the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, supported by a foundation-funded scholarship for students transferring from LACC. Once that process was streamlined, the number of enrolled transfer students rose 46 percent.
Graduates of the center also receive priority consideration at the foundation-endowed Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.
A student can begin at a tuition-free community college on Vermont Avenue and finish with a degree from one of the country’s leading music schools without the cost that keeps many talented young people out.
Naiman, the new director at UCLA, knows that route from experience. She began her undergraduate studies at 35 as a transfer student from Santa Monica College and went on to earn four degrees from UCLA.
“Education transformed my own life,” she said this week. She wants the center to be “a place where the music industry comes to think.”
The Alperts are still finding new ways to give.
This year their foundation created the Herb Alpert Honor, a new annual $1 million unrestricted grant for people who use music to change young lives.
The first award went to conductor Gustavo Dudamel and his Dudamel Foundation, which grew out of El Sistema’s tradition of free music instruction.
The couple’s giving also reaches the Harlem School of the Arts, whose renovated Herb Alpert Center they paid for entirely. It continues through the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, which has supported risk-taking artists for more than three decades.
Alpert says the reason he still gets on stage is simple.
“The music is touching people,” he said before the Hollywood Bowl show.
“The times we’re living in, there’s a lot of doubt with what’s going on, and I think people are getting some positive energy from it.”
When the curtain rises at the Royal Albert Hall next spring, the audience will hear “A Taste of Honey,” “This Guy’s in Love With You,” and “Rise.”
In Los Angeles that night, students will be practicing in rooms built by the man holding the trumpet.
Some will be paying no tuition, and some will be on their way from a community college to a UCLA degree.
The boy from Melrose Elementary is still making music, and the doors he opened for young musicians remain open.
Photo: Herb Alpert and Lani Hall