Baker teaches love of jazz

For Professor David Baker, teaching and music are two things that go hand in hand. He can’t do one without the other. Well-dressed in a casual suit with a blue dress shirt and tie, he was ready to talk about the blues to his class last Friday morning. Baker moseyed over to the piano, as he passionately talked about the pentatonic scale. \n“Easy to remember, easy to play,” he said as he effortlessly began traipsing his fingers over the ivory keys to demonstrate the scale. “I can walk in any club and say blues and we’re ready to play,” Baker said to his M393 History of Jazz class. There is a commonality to the music that Baker wants to teach his students to appreciate.\nBorn in Indianapolis in 1931, Baker said he’s not sure what got him started with jazz, although he said the options for what he could play in the 1930s and 1940s were severely limited. Although no one in his family played music, the radio provided Baker with a variety of jazz music after school, such as Nat King Cole and Louis Jordan.\n“I suspect I would have chosen jazz anyway, simply because it’s what I heard on the radio,” Baker said.\nHe received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education from IU and while studying here in the 1950s, he improved his skills as a trombone player. As a student, he also played in the orchestra and concert band because ther ewas no jazz band at the time. Since then many of his recordings were as a trombone player. \nOver the course of his career, he has toured with the likes of Quincy Jones, George Russell, Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson. Currently Baker only plays the cello and the piano.\nIn 1966 he returned to IU as a professor and is currently the chairman of the Jazz Studies Department at the Jacobs School of Music. While music will always be Baker’s passion, teaching is something that just seemed natural to him. Everything else in his life “spins off of that,” he said.\n“I remember the stories of Madame Boulanger, the great composer in France, who taught Aaron Copland, she taught Quincy Jones, she taught George Gershwin, and she used to ask the people who came to study with her, ‘why do you want to be a composer?’ and the only answer acceptable was ‘I don’t want to be a composer, I have to be a composer.’ I have to be a teacher,” Baker said.\nBaker’s students couldn’t agree more. \n“I think that he’s so interesting. I love how hands on it is,” said sophomore Deeanna Bisesi. \n“He has a very informal and friendly style of teaching, but still manages to get the important points across,” said junior Matt Lawrence, “he teaches as if he is telling a story.”\nAlong with teaching students about music, Baker still composes and conducts, and is the conductor of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, which he co-founded with Gunther Schuller, in order to promote the works of composer and jazz artist Duke Ellington. He received the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ “Living Jazz Legend Award” for lifetime achievement last March. He has received numerous other awards, including the Jazz Education Hall of Fame Award and has been honored as an Indiana Living Legend. This February, Baker will perform in Egypt with his orchestra.\nThough he traveled a lot in his earlier days, Baker said of all the places he has performed, he loves Bloomington the best. \n“My family, all of them just about are here, and then all the teachers that I studied with and the ones who are still alive are here,” he said. “And then, this is where my students are.”