Cleveland’s Ideastream bolsters jazz programming with ‘landmark’ $1M donation from local family
Mike Crow / Ideastream
Saxophonist Chris Coles performs with a backing band of Oberlin College students at an Ideastream event in Cleveland in February 2024.
Char and Chuck Fowler, a married couple in Cleveland, credit their obsession with jazz to Northeast Ohio’s WCPN radio station. For decades, they’ve found their fix through the steadfast jazz programming on the station, which is part of Ideastream.
“It really helped provide the onset of our caring about jazz,” Char said.
Now the Fowlers are giving back to the station by providing crucial funding to revitalize and expand Ideastream’s jazz programming. Their $1 million donation announced in September will enable Ideastream to remodel and reconfigure an existing studio used by WCLV, Ideastream’s classical station, to incorporate a modern jazz studio that will “give jazz its due as a service and as an American art form,” said Ideastream CEO Kevin Martin.
“It was really quite generous of them,” Martin said. “We’re so happy that we can partner with them in the future and that they’ll have a lasting legacy of jazz in Northeast Ohio.”
Martin said Ideastream will use the studio not just to produce live, on-air jazz programming such as interviews and performances but also to create a jazz hub for Northeast Ohio “where various institutions dedicated to jazz can come, convene, perform and use it for their own purposes.”
Origins of the gift
The Fowlers’ gift supports a format that has had a dwindling presence on Ideastream’s primary FM stations in recent years. After acquiring Kent State University’s WKSU 89.7 FM in March 2022, Ideastream programmed WCPN with news and moved jazz to overnight hours on WCLV.
Martin said that even after that change, he still wanted to ensure that Ideastream continued to “serve underserved audiences” such as jazz fans, which he calls “the whole mission of public media.” In 2023, Ideastream commissioned a study to gauge its audience’s desire for jazz programming. The results revealed that the genre remained highly favored.
“What we learned is that … the majority of our audiences still want to consume jazz through your conventional FM analog frequency,” Martin said.
As a first step toward meeting that demand, Ideastream created JazzNEO in February 2024. The stream was originally accessible exclusively online and as an HD2 simulcast on WCLV. But Ideastream still aimed to bring JazzNEO to a primary FM broadcast.
It achieved that goal this month in a partnership with Cleveland State University, which replaced student-produced programming on its FM station, WCSB, with JazzNEO. The agreement has sparked a backlash from students and community members.
Since the launch of JazzNEO, hosts have prerecorded their breaks. But the goal has always been to transition to live hosting, which Martin understood would call for a studio dedicated to jazz. He knew it would require funding, and the Fowlers came to mind.
“I knew that when we wanted to make an appeal to someone, we really wanted to go to who I call … Northeast Ohio’s first family of jazz, which is Char and Chuck Fowler,” Martin said.
The Fowlers are both longtime residents of the Cleveland area. Char is a former librarian and educator, and Chuck is the founder of mining company Fairmount Minerals. They’re active in Northeast Ohio’s philanthropic community, having founded the Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation in 2003, which is dedicated to promoting equitable conditions in the region.
As decades-long fans of WCPN’s programming, Char said the couple was happy to make a personal donation to fund Ideastream’s proposed jazz studio and continue its jazz legacy.
“They needed to get money somewhere, so we were happy that they came to us, and we were able to give them the support that they needed for this time,” Char said
Becoming ‘the first family of jazz’
WCPN 90.3 FM signed on in 1984 and became a go-to station for jazz in Northeast Ohio. The early focus on jazz became an integral part of the station’s identity, Martin said.
“It’s been part of our DNA for a long time,” he said.
Four years later, the Fowlers moved from Illinois to Cleveland. Eager to learn as much as she could about Cleveland, Char said, she drove around with the radio on and stumbled upon WCPN.
“My radio had a scan thing on it, so I would scan while I was driving around, and it would always stop at 90.3,” Char said. “At that time, they were playing a lot of jazz during the day, and I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t think I like this music,’ and I would push the scan button again. … It just kept coming back there now and then, and I thought, ‘Oh! Maybe I do like this music!’”
She and Chuck became hooked. Char began volunteering to help the station raise money and became acquainted with Bill Ginn, then a station board member. Ginn informed her of a vacancy on the board, which Char eventually filled. She served on the board for around five years, and she and Chuck have since remained supporters of the station.
A few months after the launch of JazzNEO, Martin approached the couple with a proposal for the studio. Char admits that the proposal sat on her desk for a bit. But she eventually reflected on her and Chuck’s appreciation for jazz and how much she wanted “more people to have the opportunity to hear it.” After further conversations with Martin, the couple hopped on board.
Char said that especially with the loss of CPB funding for public media stations across the country, their donation is integral to supporting Ideastream when it needs it most.
“They think it’s very important, and they’re the ones that do the research on this kind of thing,” she said. “I’ve trusted their leadership, Kevin Martin and their development people, and we’ve worked with them for several years with smaller things. The ask came, I guess, at the right time.”
‘Huge breakthrough’
The Fowlers’ $1 million donation ranks among the largest gifts Ideastream has received, Martin said. The station has received several million-dollar donations, he said, but the Fowlers’ donation is the largest Ideastream has received for a jazz service.
“This will be a huge breakthrough and will really help us to be a catalyst for jazz in Northeast Ohio,” Martin said.
Ideastream has experimented with performances with an in-studio audience in its existing 250-person black box studio on an ad hoc basis, Martin said, but the new studio will allow for more consistent events.
Martin also envisions regular collaborations with The Music Settlement, a local organization that offers music-related education for people of all ages, including an early-childhood developmental curriculum, and hosts concerts and festivals. He hopes the organizations can co-host events such as jazz competitions, giving young people “some real recognition and the opportunity to be able to showcase their talent on a much broader platform.”
Ideastream aims to complete the studio by April 2026. To celebrate, it plans to invite people from all over Northeast Ohio to a commemoration ceremony the same month. The studio will be named The Char and Chuck Fowler JazzNEO Studio
“That will be kind of a lasting legacy for the Fowlers,” Martin said. “There’s no one more deserving of that in terms of their dedication and devotion to jazz than the Fowlers.”
The “lasting legacy” is one of destruction. 50 years of student voices annihilated so a fracking millionaire can have his name on a toy. Disgusting.