The performer, composer and educator David Baker. He founded Indiana University’s jazz studies program in 1968. Credit Hugh Talman/National Museum of American History
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.
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. He and Gunther Schuller were the original artistic directors of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, established in 1990.
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.
read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/arts/music/david-baker-who-helped-bring-jazz-studies-into-the-academy-dies-at-84.html?_r=1
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