As we enter the chapel, we find David Ake at the keyboard of a Steinway baby grand. 

“This beautiful tone, especially up high. To have an instrument like this in a room like this is a joy for a pianist.”

We’re in Harkness Chapel on the Case Western Reserve University campus, where most of its music happens. 

“This is where we have chamber ensembles, where our early music groups perform, where a number of choral concerts happen. It has beautiful acoustics for those sort of performances in here. Plus, it’s a beautiful room.” 

Light streaming through Tiffany windows fills the antique wood-paneled neo-Gothic concert hall.

Cleveland weather’s cold and that’s not cool
Ake’s comfortable at his keyboard on this cool summer day, but a chilling memory lingers.

“These last two winters were, I think even for Clevelanders, folks would admit that they’ve been a couple of rough winters.”

Not that they were toasty in his native Chicago.

“Northwest suburbs, Cubs fan.” 

But before taking the job in Cleveland in 2013, Ake had gotten used to 300 days of sunshine in Reno as director of arts at the University of Nevada.

So it was a tough adjustment. 

That won’t be a problem in his next job: heading the musicology department at his alma mater, the University of Miami. 

“A great jazz tradition there, it’s a great jazz school. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. So I’m very, very excited about that. But it has been a remarkable experience here.”  

Working with his former mentors
The reputation of the CWRU music faculty is what drew him to Cleveland. 

“Susan McClary and Robert Walser, my mentors at UCLA when I was getting my Ph.D., amazingly they’re now my colleagues here at Case Western Reserve University. They are two of the most renowned musicologists in the world, and to be now a colleague of my former teachers was one of the great thrills, really of my life.”

He says jazz flourishes these days in university settings.

“There is this sort of myth of jazz as a street music, and we don’t want to hear about schools because it doesn’t seem authentic. But the truth is schools play a huge role in how jazz is performed, composed, who hears it, who’s playing it. And it’s just as valid.”  

Lake Effect
Ake composed some of the music for his latest CD during his tenure at the university, mostly at his Shaker Heights home while watching snowflakes fall.

“With a room out front where I have my piano, it’s just windows. I could watch that weather happening.”  

He titled it “Lake Effect,” and dedicated the album and one song in particular to his mentor, double bass player and composer Charlie Haden, who died last summer.

“The song ‘Lone Pine’ was written for Charlie, sort of a tribute to Charlie’s influence on me and sort of a gift back to him.” 

Haden, an originator of the free-flowing style that became known as the West Coast sound, was an inspirational teacher for David Ake and fellow students at the California Institute of the Arts. 

“And they included a number of great musicians: Ravi Coltrane and Scott Colley, Ralph Alesci and Jim Carney, Peter Epstein.” 

The West Coast Sound
Epstein plays sax on Ake’s “Lake Effect.” Created on the North Coast it’s still West Coast Jazz.

“The way one approaches time, groove, anyone can go in any direction at any one time, that sense of freedom that we got from being around Charlie Haden and through Ornette Coleman, that sort of school of jazz.”  

Preparing to leave his current school, David Ake is proud of the quality and variety of music at CWRU.

“Chamber groups all the way up to an orchestra, a jazz ensemble, a renowned historical performance practice program, early music here, one of the finest in the country. In addition we have one of the largest and finest musicology programs anywhere in the world.” 

He'll miss Cleveland, but not lake effect, "Yeah, lake effect I could do without."