David Baker

A three volume series that includes the scales, chords and modes necessary to play bebop music. A great introduction to a style that is most influential in today's music. The first volume includes scales, chords and modes most commonly used in bebop and other musical styles. The second volume covers the bebop language, patterns, formulas and other linking exercises necessary to play bebop music. A great introduction to a style that is most influential in today's music.

Jazz Improvisation focuses on the communicative and technical aspects of improvisation and makes an excellent resource for both pros and aspiring improvisers. Assimilate and execute chord progressions, substitutions, turn arounds and construct a melody and jazz chorus.

A Living Jazz Legend, musician and composer David Baker has made a distinctive mark on the world of music in his nearly 60-year career—as player (chiefly on trombone and cello), composer, and educator. In this richly illustrated volume, Monika Herzig explores Baker's artistic legacy, from his days as a jazz musician in Indianapolis to his long-term gig as Distinguished Professor and Chairman of the Jazz Studies department at Indiana University. Baker's credits are striking: in the 1960s he was a member of George Russell's "out there" sextet and orchestra; by the 1980s he was in the jazz educator's hall of fame. His compositions have been recorded by performers as diverse as Dexter Gordon and Janos Starker, the Beaux Arts Trio, the Composer's String Quartet and the Czech Philharmonic. Featuring enlightening interviews with Baker and a CD of unreleased recordings and Baker compositions, this book brings a jazz legend into clear view.

A much heralded jazz practice method from leading educator / performer David Baker. David condenses a wealth of experience and knowledge into practice-specific ideas and exercises for all musicians. Subjects covered include: Practice Goals * Techniques and Strategies * Hearing, Transcribing, Playing with Play-Alongs and "Actual" Recordings * Tune Memorization * Self Evaluation * and much more.

“The craft of Whale Fall defies. It asserts, for me, a definition of poetry: an unbearable gulf of feeling made indelible by form.”—Diane Seuss, Paris Review A masterful and moving new volume from a “peerless poet of the natural world” (New York Times Book Review). Acclaimed as an essential voice of the American Midwest, David Baker expands both his environment and his form in his eleventh collection. Whale Fall is about time, measured in the wingbeats of a hummingbird or the epochs of geological change, and about place, whether a backyard in Ohio or the slopes of a melting glacier. In the exquisite, musical title poem, a deft hybrid of eco-poetic alarm and intimate narrative, Baker transports us to the deep sea as a single gray whale carcass falls, decays, and is reinhabited by a cosmos of teeming lives. Among the strands of ocean health, microplastics, and related calamities of human disregard, the poet weaves in a personal story of chronic illness. The result is a stirring, confident work, astonishing in its emotional acuity and lyric range. Each poem in Whale Fall is an echolocation, emitting its music to situate itself among others in the vastness of the world. Amidst climate change and catastrophe, as amidst a blooming viburnum or a viral disease, these poems send their songs across empty spaces of a line, a page, or a continent, to see who is out there, moving in the depths of being.

A sweeping achievement from a poet whose "rhythms are as alive to the roll and tang of syllables on the tongue as they are to the circulation of blood and sap" (Rosanna Warren, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize citation). David Baker, acclaimed for his combination of “visionary scope” (Gettysburg Review) and “emotional intensity” (Georgia Review), is one of contemporary poetry’s most gifted lyric poets. In Swift, he gathers poems from eight collections, including his masterful latest, Scavenger Loop (2015); the prize-winning, intimate travelogues of Never-Ending Birds (2009); and the complications of history and home in Changeable Thunder (2001). Opening the volume are fifteen new poems that continue Baker’s growth in form and voice as he investigates the death of parents, the loss of homeland, and a widening natural history, not only of his beloved Midwest but of the tropical flora and fauna of a Caribbean island. Together, these poems showcase the evolution of Baker’s distinct eco-poetic conscience, his mastery of forms both erotic and elegiac, and his keen eye for the shifting landscapes of passion, heartbreak, and renewal. With equal curiosity and candor, Baker explores the many worlds we all inhabit—from our most intimate relationships to the wider social worlds of neighborhoods, villages, and our complex national identity, to the environmental community we all share. With his dazzling formal restlessness and lifelong devotion to landscapes both natural and human on full display, David Baker demonstrates why he has been called “the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright” (Marilyn Hacker).

"He was one of distinguished natural abilities, as all are sensible who had acquaintance with him. As a minister of the gospel, he was called to unusual services in that work; and his ministry was attended by very remarkable and unusual events ... He had a peculiar opportunity of acquaintance with the false appearances and counterfeits of religion; was the instrument of a most remarkable awakening ...In the following account, the reader will have an opportunity to see not only what were the external circumstances and remarkable incidents of the life of this person, and how he spent his time from day to day, as to his external behavior; but also what passed in his own heart." --Jonathan Edwards David Brainerd, an early missionary to the American Indians in New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania, died in 1747 at the age of twenty-nine at the home of his long-time friend and supporter, the eminent Puritan theologian and preacher Jonathan Edwards. It is thanks to Edwards' careful preservation and thoughtful editing of his friend's Diary and Journal that Brainerd has influenced Christians all over the world for over 250 years. As he labored in what was still the untamed American frontier to bring the Gospel to the Indians, Brainerd faced many challenges, including depression, loneliness, and physical illness. Yet his genuine piety and single-minded devotion to God, both in heart and in practice, form a consistent backdrop to his turbulent inner world. This compilation offers a rare glimpse into the life of a man compelled by God to share His love with others in the most difficult of circumstances.

This book comprises papers on diverse aspects of fuzzy logic, neural networks, and nature-inspired optimization meta-heuristics and their application in various areas such as intelligent control and robotics, pattern recognition, medical diagnosis, time series prediction and optimization of complex problems. The book is organized into seven main parts, each with a collection of papers on a similar subject. The first part presents new concepts and algorithms based on type-2 fuzzy logic for dynamic parameter adaptation in meta-heuristics. The second part discusses network theory and applications, and includes papers describing applications of neural networks in diverse areas, such as time series prediction and pattern recognition. The third part addresses the theory and practice of meta-heuristics in different areas of application, while the fourth part describes diverse fuzzy logic applications in the control area, which can be considered as intelligent controllers. The next two parts explore applications in areas, such as time series prediction, and pattern recognition and new optimization and evolutionary algorithms and their applications respectively. Lastly, the seventh part addresses the design and application of different hybrid intelligent systems.