Rate My Professor David Ake

David Ake is Professor and Chair of the Department of Musicology at the University of Miami's Frost School of Music, where he has served since 2015. He earned a B.M. from the University of Miami in 1983, an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1987, an M.A. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1996, and a Ph.D. in musicology from UCLA in 2001. Prior to joining the Frost School, Ake was Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Case Western Reserve University from 2007 to 2015. He previously held faculty positions at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas from 2001 to 2007, the University of California, Irvine from 1999 to 2001, and served as director of the School of the Arts at the University of Nevada, Reno. In addition to administrative leadership, Ake is an award-winning scholar and educator whose work emphasizes music's cultural and historical contexts.

Ake's research specializations center on jazz and popular music. He authored the books Jazz Cultures (University of California Press, 2002) and Jazz Matters: Sound, Place, and Time since Bebop (University of California Press, 2010). He co-edited Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries with Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Daniel Goldmark (University of California Press, 2012), Analytical Approaches to World Music with Martin Clayton and Norbert Furlong (Routledge, 2013), and (Ir)Responsible Cyborgs: Essays on Musical Mediations with Tammy L. Kernodle (Routledge, 2023). His articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, American Music, and Jazz Perspectives, with chapters in volumes such as the Cambridge Companion to Jazz. Ake has presented papers at conferences including the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, and International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and delivered lectures at universities across the United States. In 2024, he received the Phillip Frost Award for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship. As a performer, Ake is an active jazz pianist and composer, with recordings including Bridges (Posi-Tone, 2017), Flux (Posi-Tone, 2014), and Purpose (Posi-Tone, 2010); he has performed and recorded with artists such as Charlie Haden, Ravi Coltrane, and Ralph Alessi.