David Baker (composer)

Early life and education

David Nathaniel Baker Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 21, 1931,
to Patress Lasley Baker and David N. Baker Sr., a postal carrier. His siblings
included two sisters, Shirley and Clela, and a brother, Archie.[1][2]

Baker attended Indianapolis Public Schools and graduated from Crispus Attucks High
School, a segregated public school for African American students.[3] He continued
his education at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he earned a
bachelor's degree in music education in 1953 and a master's degree in music
education in 1954. Baker also studied with J. J. Johnson, János Starker, and George
Russell[4] and attended the Lenox School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts from 1959–
60 on a scholarship.[5]

Marriage and family

Baker eloped from Missouri, where he began working as a university professor in
1955, to Chicago, Illinois, to marry Eugenia ("Jeanne") Marie Jones.[6] Baker and
his first wife, Jeanne, were the parents of a daughter, April. The marriage ended
in divorce.[7] Baker had a granddaughter, Kirsten, and a great-grandson, Dylan.[8]
Baker's second marriage was to flautist Lida Belt.[7]

Career
Trained as a music educator and trombonist, Baker spent the early part of his
career in the 1940s and 1950s as a jazz musician, performing and recording in the
United States and in Europe. A facial injury suffered in an automobile accident in
1953 ended his career as a trombonist, but Baker switched to cello and turned his
attention to teaching and musical composition. In 1966 he joined the music faculty
at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he established the school's jazz
studies program. He was later named an IU distinguished professor and chair of the
university's Jazz Studies department in the Jacobs School of Music. In addition, he
became one of the co-musical directors of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks
Orchestra in 1991. He composed music, mostly on commission, and wrote hundreds of
scholarly works related to music. He was active in numerous musical arts
organizations.[2][4]

Early years
After earning his master's degree from Indiana in 1954, he began teaching at
Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1955.[1] Lincoln, a historically
black institution, had recently begun to admit white students to diversify its
student body; however, Baker had to resign from his teaching position after he
married Eugenia ("Jeanne") Marie Jones, a white opera singer, due to Missouri's
anti-miscegenation laws.[6] One of his students at Lincoln was the composer John
Elwood Price.[9] Baker returned to Indiana and taught private music lessons in
Indianapolis and performed in local bands. He did not resume his academic teaching
career until 1966.[2]

Musical performer
Baker began performing as a trombonist in Indianapolis during high school and
college. He played in clubs along Indiana Avenue, the heart of the city's jazz
scene of the late 1940s and early 1950s, with Jimmy Coe, Slide Hampton, J. J.
Johnson, and Wes Montgomery. He mentored Freddie Hubbard and Larry Ridley.[1] He
later credited the Hampton family, especially noted jazz trombonist Slide Hampton,
for mentoring him in his early years. The Hamptons let him and other local
musicians rehearse with their family's jazz band at their Indianapolis home.[10]

During the 1950s Baker played in several big bands, including Lionel Hampton's
orchestra. After moving to California in 1956, he played with the West Coast jazz
orchestras of Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson before returning to Indianapolis to
lead his jazz band for two years. He performed in clubs across the United States,
including the Five Spot Café in New York City with George Russell in the late
1950s.[10][11] In 1960 he toured Europe as a member of Quincy Jones's band.[5] He
also performed in Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand during his more than
sixty-year career.[8]

Baker abandoned the trombone after a car accident in 1953 injured his jaw, but he
began learning to play the cello in the early 1960s. Although he played trombone on
the George Russell Sextet's album Ezz-thetics (1961), after sustaining the injury,
Baker switched to cello for Charles Tyler's album, Eastern Man Alone (1967).[8][12]
[13] Baker was also able to play trombone with Russell's orchestra on Living Time
(1972), a collaboration with Bill Evans, before the jaw injury finally caused him
to give up the trombone and focus on teaching and composition.[14]

Baker is credited on sixty-five recordings, including performances on two of

Russell's albums, Stratusphunk (1960) and The Stratus Seekers (1962).[11][13]
Beginning in the 1990s he performed with his second wife, Lida Belt Baker, a
classically-trained flautist.[3]

Music educator and author

Although he began as a performer on trombone and cello, Baker is better known for
his fifty-year career as a professor of jazz music and for his published works and
musical compositions. Because his facial injury in 1953 largely ended the
performing aspect of his career, he returned to his home state of Indiana and began
a period of increased interest in musical composition and pedagogy.[5][13]

In 1966 he began teaching each at the Jacobs School of Music of Indiana University,
where he established a jazz studies program. He was the music school's second
African American faculty member and its sole jazz studies instructor for his first
ten years at the school.[10][7] The jazz studies curriculum was approved as a
degree program in 1968, a time when only about a dozen American universities taught
jazz as an academic discipline.[3]

Baker eventually became an IU Distinguished Professor of Music, serving as chair of

the Jazz Studies department from 1968 to 2013 and as an adjunct professor in the
African American and African Diaspora Studies department.[4] His work as an
educator helped make IU a highly-regarded school for students of jazz. His students
included Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker, Peter Erskine, Jim Beard, Chris Botti,
Shawn Pelton, Jeff Hamilton, and Jamey Aebersold.[3]

Baker was among the first to codify the largely aural tradition of jazz. He is
credited with writing 70 books, including several on jazz, such as Jazz Styles &
Analysis –Trombone: A History of the Jazz Trombone Via Recorded Solos (1973), Jazz
Improvisation ( 1988), and David Baker's Jazz Pedagogy (1989).[7][15] He is also
credited with writing 400 articles.[11]

Composer
Baker's compositions are often cited as examples of Third Stream Jazz, although
they included traditional jazz, chamber music, sonatas, film scores, and symphonic
works. He is credited with writing more than 2,000 compositions, including his
concerto "Levels" (1973) which received a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and the
musical score for the PBS documentary film For Gold and Glory (2003), which won him
an Emmy Award.[1][16]

Baker's best-known composition, which also received significant media attention,

was "Concertino for Cell Phones and Orchestra," a commission from Chicago
Sinfonetta.[7] It premiered in Chicago, Illinois, in October 2006, with a European
premiere in Dvorak Hall, Prague, Czech Republic.[citation needed] Baker's other
compositions include a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, a violin concerto
for Josef Gingold, a flute concerto for James Pellerite, as well as "Cello
Concerto" (1975), which he dedicated to cellist János Starker, and "Ode to Starker"
(1999).[2]

He received over 500 commissions from individuals and ensembles, including

compositions that he wrote for Gingold, Starker, Ruggerio Ricci, Harvey Phillips,
trumpeter David Coleman, the New York Philharmonic, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra,
the Beaux Arts Trio, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the Audubon String Quartet, in
addition to the Louisville Symphony, Ohio Chamber Orchestra, and the International
Horn Society.[2] Other musical groups have recorded his compositions. The Buselli–
Wallarab Jazz Orchestra's album Basically Baker (2005) includes interpretations of
his compositions, many of them written for big bands and ensembles.[16]

Later years
In 1991, in addition to his work at IU, Baker and Gunther Schuller became the
artistic and musical directors of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, which
was founded in 1990.[7] Five years later Baker became its sole artistic and musical
director. He concluded his time with the orchestra in 2012 as maestro emeritus.
Among the orchestra's notable performances under Baker's leadership was a concert
in Egypt in 2008 when it played at the Cairo Opera House, the Alexandra Opera
House, and at the Pyramids.[17]

Death and legacy

Baker died on March 26, 2016, at the age of eighty-four in Bloomington from
complications due to Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementia.[8][3]

In the 1960s he introduced jazz studies as academic discipline at Indiana

University. It was accepted as an academic degree program in 1968, making it one of
the earliest to be established in an American university. In addition to chairing
IU's Jazz Studies department from 1968 to 2013, he served as musical and artistic
director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra from 1991 to 2012. In these
roles he became a leader and mentor to the next generation of jazz musicians.[14]
[17] His range of interests is reflected in the dozens of books and hundreds of
articles he wrote, as well as the hundreds of musical compositions, including many
that George Russell called "21st-century soul music."[18]