He has written more than 2,000 musical works, received the nation’s highest jazz honor (the National Endowment for the Arts’ Jazz Masters Fellowship) and collaborated with everyone from Lionel Hampton to Quincy Jones.
But until now, at age 75, the eminent American composer David Baker improbably never has seen one of his 500-plus jazz charts released commercially.
Though his classical, vocal and theatrical compositions turn up on more than 65 discs, and though his “Concertino for Cell Phones and Orchestra” brought him some media attention in a performance last year by the Chicago Sinfonietta, Baker has had to wait until this late date to hear his jazz-band oeuvre documented on disc — and only a tiny fraction of it, at that.
The recording proves, however, that these brilliant scores (which span 1958 to 1998) were eminently worth the wait.
“Basically Baker,” released by the Buselli/Wallarab Jazz Orchestra (on GM Recordings), not only stands as one of the best discs of the year but attests to Baker’s stature as a jazz composer. Moreover, its release in the autumn of Baker’s life points to the mercurial nature of his unorthodox career.
For Baker — who heads both the jazz department at Indiana University (IU) Jacobs School of Music and the mighty Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra — went into jazz nearly by default, thanks to the racial restrictions of the time, he says. The versatility he subsequently developed to survive in music made him one of the most prolific composers of his generation, though his jazz works were pushed out of the spotlight in the process.
“I inadvertently became a jazz musician — that was the venue that was open to a black who wanted to play music, [plus] rhythm and blues and church music,” says Baker.
By the time he began teaching at IU, his alma mater, in 1966, he had developed beyond the stylistic precincts of jazz into a multifaceted musician adept in many idioms — “a complete musician,” in the words of the definitive “International Dictionary of Black Composers.”
Across the board
Baker’s entry in that two-volume tome spans 13 pages, noting orchestral pieces such as the oft-performed “Kosbro,” plus choral works large and small, chamber pieces in practically every combination imaginable, incidental music for TV and stage and whatnot.
“What impresses me about David is his stylistic reach,” says Samuel Floyd, founder and interim executive director of the Center for Black Music Research, at Columbia College Chicago.
“His music goes from the most basic stuff to the most complicated, and it embraces almost all musical genres.”
Among all the genres Baker has traversed, however, he has worked most copiously in the realm of jazz big band, leaving his admirers to wonder how this music sounds.
That mystery has been resolved, at least to a degree, by the release of “Basically Baker,” which reveals the virtuosity and volatility of his writing.
“Screamin’ Meemies” (1958) bristles with intricately conceived counterpoint and striking quotations from Dizzy Gillespie, all powered by ferocious rhythmic energy. “April B” (1959) and “An Evening Thought” (1974) underscore Baker’s gift for sensual melody and subtle, shimmering details of orchestration. And “Some Links for Brother Ted” (1998) attest to Baker’s enduring ability to maintain the soulfulness of his sound, despite the erudition of his writing.
Every track of “Basically Baker,” in fact, represents a world of sound unto itself — complex, rigorously disciplined but dynamic music that only could have been penned by someone of Baker’s wide-ranging resume.
Born into what Baker calls a “completely segregated” Indianapolis, he attended the city’s famous black high school, Crispus Attucks, an institution that also launched such jazz luminaries as guitarist Wes Montgomery and trombonist J.J. Johnson. That’s where Baker started studying trombone, after an inglorious introduction to the tuba, which he had carried — without a case — on the bus to his lessons (“the lady driver said, ‘Don’t bring that thing on my street car anymore,'” remembers Baker).
At IU, he flourished as trombonist, and “the die was cast” for a life in music.
Life-changing injuries
But in 1953, after four years on the road as a jazz trombonist in various big bands, Baker nearly was killed in an auto accident after returning from a performance. As a passenger sleeping in the front seat of a car, he does not remember crashing through the windshield.
He awoke a week later in a hospital, his shoulder broken, his head battered, his face scarred, his jazz dislocated. The injuries eventually forced him to give up the trombone and switch to cello, in the early 1960s, though not before he had begun studying music with Gunther Schuller at a school Schuller founded with John Lewis in Lenox, Mass.
The tutelage with Schuller opened up to Baker the possibility that he didn’t have to restrict his musical interests to jazz, that classical music and its offshoots were open to him.
Yet the classical scores that Baker created after joining the faculty at IU were nothing like the academic music of the era, when university composers often conformed to the orthodoxy of Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone methods.
Baker’s work, by contrast, often conveyed the vividness of black music history in works such as “Ellingtones: A Fantasy for Saxophone and Orchestra” (commissioned by the New York Philharmonic); “Birdsong,” an orchestral piece evoking Charlie “Bird” Parker; and “Through This Vale of Tears (In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.),” a searing song cycle that quotes both scripture and contemporary poetry.
This is music “informed by black musical culture,” says Floyd, of the Center for Black Music Research.
“David is devoted to that culture and wants to hear that culture speak. That’s another thing that makes all his music so vibrant.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that Baker’s jazz scores — which point to the start of his career — are no less viscerally exciting.
Were it not for Baker’s long-running association with Schuller, however, this music still might not be available for the hearing.
“I became aware that this great stuff that David had written as far back as the ’50s had never been recorded — and I couldn’t believe it,” says Schuller.
“Here’s one of the best writers in jazz — how was it that no one recorded his works?
“Why isn’t Dave’s music known?”
Always on the go
Baker — who also heads the Steans Institute Program for Jazz at the Ravinia Festival — always was too busy with the next commission, the next class, the next classical premiere to get his jazz-band pieces recorded.
What’s more, he’s “a very modest fellow, not one of those braggadocio guys,” says Schuller, meaning that Baker never promoted these works.
But two of Baker’s former students — Brent Wallarab and Mark Buselli — had led a big-band concert of Baker’s music in Indianapolis and were determined to record this repertoire. Baker sent the subsequent tape to Schuller, who quickly decided to release it on his GM Recordings label.
As word of the CD spreads, Baker’s fans are applauding.
“I’m so glad he’s got this new recording, because I respect his music, I like his music — it’s well crafted, very creative,” says Warrick Carter, president of Columbia College Chicago and, as a former jazz drummer, a bandstand collaborator of Baker’s in the 1970s.
“David has been one of those renaissance people in the jazz field … a fighter for the cause.”
For Baker, finally “hearing this music and seeing it on the CD … it’s like a fairy tale.”
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Sample his work
Hear David Baker
* On CD:
“Basically Baker,” by the Buselli/Wallarab Jazz Orchestra, is available at amazon.com and gmrecordings.com.
* In concert:
David Baker leads the Festival Jazz Orchestra of Indiana University — including IU faculty and alumni — in a variety of repertoire, including some of his big-band music, 8 p.m. Monday in the Musical Arts Center, on Jordan Avenue between Third and Seventh Streets, Bloomington, Ind.; $15; 812-855-7433.
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hreich@tribune.com
