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NY Times, Mar. 30 2016
David Baker, Who Helped Bring Jazz Studies Into the Academy, Dies at 84
By MARGALIT FOX
David Baker, a performer, composer and educator who helped bring jazz
studies into the academy at a time when the ivory tower considered the
field infra dig, died on Saturday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He
was 84.
His death was announced by the Indiana University Jacobs School of
Music, where he was a distinguished professor emeritus.
A trombonist and later a cellist, Mr. Baker founded Indiana’s jazz
studies program — one of the first of its kind at an American university
— in 1968. It remains one of the most respected among the dozens of
academic jazz programs now flourishing in the United States.
As a performer, Mr. Baker played in the ensembles of Quincy Jones and
George Russell. With Gunther Schuller, he founded the Smithsonian Jazz
Masterworks Orchestra in 1990, serving for many years as its artistic
and musical director.
As a composer, he wrote hundreds of pieces, including jazz works and
jazz-inflected concert music, for instrumentalists and ensembles
including the violinists Josef Gingold and Ruggiero Ricci, the cellist
Janos Starker, the Beaux Arts Trio, the Audubon String Quartet, the New
York Philharmonic and the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
For his work, Mr. Baker was named a Jazz Master by the National
Endowment for the Arts in 2000 and a Living Jazz Legend by the John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2007.
Mr. Baker’s laurels are all the more noteworthy in that he had been
forced to reinvent his musical career three times: first when he was
barred from making his way as a classical trombonist because of his
race; second when, as a jazzman, he had to forsake the trombone after a
devastating jaw injury; and third when he was driven from a teaching job
because he had married a white woman.
David Nathaniel Baker Jr. was born in Indianapolis on Dec. 21, 1931. A
gifted classical and jazz trombonist as a youth, he graduated from
Crispus Attucks High School, then a segregated institution for blacks in
Indianapolis.
As a teenager — “From the time I was able to draw a mustache on with an
eyebrow pencil and pray it didn’t rain,” as he later said — he haunted
the city’s thriving jazz clubs.
After studying at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music in
Indianapolis, he received a bachelor’s degree in music education from
Indiana University in 1953. He earned a master’s in the field there the
next year.
Afterward, he hoped to make a career as a symphony musician. But as he
discovered when he auditioned for the Indianapolis Symphony in the
1950s, few orchestras were open to him.
“He was told, ‘You’re probably the best one we’ve heard, but we can’t
employ you because of your color,’” Monika Herzig, a jazz pianist and
the author of “David Baker: A Legacy in Music” (2011), said in a
telephone interview on Monday.
He continued his jazz career, over time playing with Mr. Russell’s
sextet and Mr. Jones’s big band.
But in 1953, as Mr. Baker was returning from a gig in northern Indiana,
the car in which he was riding was struck head-on by another. Asleep in
the front passenger seat, he was thrown through the windshield and
suffered severe injuries, including a broken shoulder.
It was some time, Ms. Herzig recounted on Monday, before Mr. Baker’s
companions could find a hospital that would admit a black patient. And
even when they did, the hospital failed to take note of a crucial injury.
“They didn’t diagnose that his jaw was broken,” she said. “So he kept
playing on this barely grown-back-together bone.”
Mr. Baker was able to continue playing until the early 1960s. But soon
afterward, a chronic facial tremor resulting from the injury put an end
to his life as a trombonist.
He switched to the cello, on which he became skilled enough to perform
with his own group, David Baker’s 21st Century Bebop Band.
Mr. Baker had joined the faculty of Lincoln University in Jefferson
City, Mo., in the mid-1950s. A historically black institution, the
university had begun to admit white students in the wake of the Supreme
Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark
desegregation case of 1954.
But in 1957, he was fired after he married Eugenia Jones, a white opera
singer, in Chicago: Anti-miscegenation laws were then in force in Missouri.
Mr. Baker taught privately before joining Indiana — where he was the
only African-American faculty member in the music department — in 1966.
There, he was asked to inaugurate a program in jazz, a taboo subject in
universities at the time.
“It was not the thing to do,” Ms. Herzig said. “When he went to school —
at any of the colleges — they were not allowed to practice jazz in the
practice rooms: You could get expelled.”
Little by little, Mr. Baker won his colleagues over, and today, jazz
studies at Indiana encompasses the history, composition and performance
of the genre. He was the program’s chairman from 1968 to 2013.
Mr. Baker’s first marriage ended in divorce. His survivors include a
daughter from that marriage, April Ayers; his second wife, Lida Belt
Baker, a flutist; and a granddaughter.
Widely recorded as a composer and performer, he was the author of many
books, including “Jazz Styles & Analysis — Trombone: A History of the
Jazz Trombone via Recorded Solos” (1973) and “David Baker’s Jazz
Pedagogy” (1989).
His compositions include “Jazz Suite for Clarinet and Symphony
Orchestra: Three Ethnic Dances”; “Le Chat Qui Pêche,” a work for
orchestra, soprano and jazz quartet; a concerto for saxophone and
chamber orchestra; and a sonata for tuba and string quartet.
What was very likely his best-known composition originated as a kind of
postmodern commentary. Accepting a highly specific commission from the
Chicago Sinfonietta, Mr. Baker wrote his Concertino for Cellular Phones
and Orchestra.
The work depends vitally on audience members setting off their ringtones
— a concert-hall phenomenon normally met with murderous stares and
hissed invective — at specified moments in the score.
Writing about the world premiere of the piece in The New York Times in
2006, Daniel J. Wakin said, “It was like an aviary gone mad.”
He added, in what is almost certainly the only known use in this context
of adjectives of approbation:
“The orchestra onstage was unfazed. The composer was delighted.”
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