Jazzed Collector

Columbus lawyer's rare historical videos displayed in Kansas City museum.
For more than four decades, John Baker quietly toiled on an obsession.

Day after day, the Columbus lawyer would arrive home, retreat to his den and devote the remaining hours to playing, trading and gathering films of jazz musicians. One phone call or letter at a time, he systematically amassed what is now regarded as one of the world's foremost collections of jazz video -- more than 1 million feet of footage. Baker died in 1998, largely forgotten (The Dispatch wrote no obituary) as his collection gathered dust in a warehouse. But now, his peerless contribution to American music history is being recognized.

On Friday, a month before what would have been Baker's 100th birthday, the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Mo., will open the "John H. Baker Jazz Film Collection," a permanent exhibit showcasing his treasures. "He was the godfather of jazz film," said Bob DeFlores, a jazz-film collector in Minnesota who helped Baker restore his collection in the late 1970s. "He was a pioneer. Thank goodness he started when he did." Baker was familiar to fellow collectors and to jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong. His passion, though, was an eccentric one -- a devotion that extracted a heavy price on his career, family and finances.
"That was all he was interested in," recalled the youngest of Baker's four sons, Robert, a mental-health therapist in Columbus. "That was a bone of contention in the family. Mom felt he was so attentive to the music but not so attentive to the rest of the family." The central question about Baker remains largely unanswered: How did a white lawyer in Columbus, who never played a note and was hard of hearing, become haunted by films of African- American jazz musicians?

In a 1984 interview with the jazz newsletter The Mississippi Rag, Baker said his first exposure to the music dated from 1920, when he heard Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues at a friend's house. Baker took his love affair with jazz to Otterbein College and then Ohio State University, where he earned a law degree. By the time he left OSU in 1943 to join the Navy, he had assembled a formidable collection of jazz 78s. While Baker was stationed in New York, his infatuation with jazz took a notable turn after he came upon a store selling "soundies" for 19 cents apiece. A sort of primitive music video, a soundie was a three-minute film of a jazz artist or dancer that could be played on a device called a Panoram -- popular during the 1940s in bars, hotels and bus stations. The short films formed the start of Baker's collection (he would go on to collect almost all of the 2,000 soundies made). By the time he returned to Columbus after World War II, he had become consumed with collecting jazz films. As perhaps the first serious collector of such material, Baker had the advantage of limited competition. But he was also searching for truffles in a forest. He benefited from no collector clubs, swap meets or publications. He searched item by item, using the phone and the mail.

"No one knows who John Baker is now," DeFlores said. "He's just a guy in Ohio who collected jazz. They don't know what he had to do to get what he did. He had to go overseas, go to labs, call producers, ship stuff all over the world." Little by little, his collection grew, housed in the den of the family's home on Weber Road in the Clintonville neighborhood. By the mid-'50s, he had grown enthusiastic enough about his gems that he would host parties for jazz buffs and visiting artists, including Armstrong, Eubie Blake and Jack Teagarden. "When I was 6, I sat on Louis Armstrong's lap -- so that would have been 1955," said Baker's son Jonathan, a teacher who lives in Columbus. "He gave my dad his drum set. We had it, but we destroyed it." Baker's single-minded attention to his collection was revealed when the family moved to German Village in the early 1960s. "My dad walked into the house and went straight to the basement and said: 'This will be my jazz room,' " Jonathan said. "He didn't care about the rest of the house." His sons recall little about the collection except the way it consumed their father's life and came between their parents. I remember many, many times him coming home from work with film under his arm and saying, 'Where's mother?' " Robert said. "And he'd sneak it down into the basement so she wouldn't see it."

"He was a lawyer who didn't make a lot of money, and everything was the deal," Jonathan added. "It was all about the deal." To help finance his film pursuits, Baker sold his 10,000 jazz records in 1972. (He had already sold his collection of jazz piano rolls.) He devoted his attention exclusively to jazz film and increasingly took his footage on the road. Pearl Bowser, an authority on African-American films, attended a Baker showing in San Francisco. "He was holding forth on the clips he was showing," recalled Bowser, who helped prepare the Kansas City exhibit. "I was so impressed by the sheer volume of his knowledge. . . . He was so thorough and so detailed; he could tell you the names of everyone on a clip, what instrument they were playing, the song, and where else those artists could be found." By the 1970s, jazz-film collecting had become a small industry, with collectors wheeling and dealing material worldwide -- many of them starting with copies of Baker's films. "That's how I built my collection," DeFlores said. "We were like kids trading postage stamps." But Baker also began to be overshadowed by younger, more media-savvy collectors. DeFlores doesn't think Baker has received the credit he deserves. His clips are the prime source for many images seen on TV documentaries, such as Ken Burns' Jazz; because they had been traded so many times by then, though, Baker isn't identified. "That's the sad part," DeFlores said. "There's no mention of John Baker on these documentaries, but they're using his footage."

By the late 1970s, as he looked to retire, Baker sought a buyer for his collection. He settled on the University of Kansas, which in 1984 paid $200,000 for the films and Baker's notes. "The notes were prodigious," Bowser said. "They became a tome, a treasure-trove to exploring the films in his collection." Baker used the money to retire to Bonita, Fla., with his wife, Virginia, who died in 2007. "He collected a few videotapes after that, but it didn't last," son Robert said. "And he stopped listening to music altogether." He died in September 1998 as his collection sat in an underground warehouse in Kansas City. Early this decade, the jazz museum received a grant to begin restoring and digitizing the films in anticipation of a display, said Gregory Carroll, the museum's chief executive officer. A $312,000 federal grant allowed the museum to set up the exhibit, which is divided into soundies, movie clips and television video. "There are so many great clips," Carroll said. "There are several great films on Duke Ellington, Count Basie, . . . Lionel Hampton, Lena Horne, Anita O'Day, Ella Fitzgerald. It's just unbelievable. "You can put a price on the shape and condition of the films," he said, "but you can't put a price on the overall collection." As Carroll noted, the exhibit isn't the end of Baker's legacy.
About 10,000 feet of film have been restored -- about 1 percent of Baker's efforts.
By Jim Weiker

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/life/stories/2009/09/17/1_BAKER.ART_ART_09-17-09_D1_2RF3AL7.html