Frost School of Music professor and chair of the Department of Musicology David Ake has been awarded the prestigious Phillip Frost Award for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship.
A selection committee of his peers recognized Ake as an exemplary faculty member for his outstanding contributions as an educator and scholar in his field.
“To get this award from my colleagues means the world to me,” says Ake. “It shows they recognize how important it is to understand music’s cultural and historical impact, and what it means for music to come out of and speak for cultural communities.”
Ake, who joined the Frost School in 2015, previously chaired the Department of Music at Case Western Reserve University and was director of the School of the Arts at the University of Nevada, Reno. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology and an M.A. in ethnomusicology from UCLA and is a 1983 graduate of the Frost School.
He authored the books Jazz Cultures; Jazz Matters: Sound, Place; and Time since Bebop; and has contributed numerous chapters and articles to the Cambridge Companion to Jazz, American Music, Jazz Perspectives, and other publications. He has delivered papers to the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and lectured at universities across the US.
Professor Ake has recorded multiple albums as a jazz pianist and composer and performed or recorded with renowned musicians, including Charlie Haden, Ravi Coltrane, and Ralph Alessi.
