David Baker (composer)

David Baker
David Baker (far left) leads the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra during the NEA Jazz Masters awards ceremony and concert in 2008.
Background information
Birth name	David Nathaniel Baker Jr.
Born	(1931-12-21)December 21, 1931 Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.
Died	March 26, 2016(2016-03-26) (aged 84) Bloomington, Indiana
Genres	Jazz, classical
Occupation(s)	Musician, composer, educator, author
Instruments	Trombone, cello
Years active	1950s–2016

David Nathaniel Baker Jr. (December 21, 1931 – March 26, 2016) was an American symphonic jazz composer at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington. He has more than 65 recordings, 70 books, and 400 articles to his credit.

Baker was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and attended Crispus Attucks High School. He was educated at Indiana University, earning the Bachelor of Music degree in 1953 and the Master of Music in 1954. Baker studied with J. J. Johnson, János Starker, and George Russell.

His first teaching position was at Lincoln University in Jefferson, Missouri in 1955. Lincoln is a historic black institution, but it had recently begun to admit a broad diversity of students. Baker had to resign his position under threats of violence after he had eloped to Chicago to marry white opera singer Eugenia ("Jeannie") Marie Jones. Missouri still had anti-miscegenation laws. One of Baker's students at Lincoln University was the composer John Elwood Price.

Baker thrived in the Indianapolis jazz scene of the time, serving as a mentor of sorts to Indianapolis-born trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Originally a trombonist, he was forced to abandon that instrument after a jaw injury left him unable to play (although he played on the George Russell Sextet album Ezz-thetics after sustaining the injury). Following the injury, he learned to play cello.

Baker's shift to cello largely ended his career as a performer and marked a period of increased interest in composition and pedagogy. Among the first and most important people to begin to codify the then largely aural tradition of jazz he wrote several seminal books on jazz, including Jazz Improvisation in 1988.