Daily Inspiration Quote by David Baker

Baker’s line is a composer’s mic drop aimed at the academic instinct to treat music like a lab report. In a field where “theory” often gets framed as a rulebook, he flips the hierarchy: the lived act of making sound comes first, and explanation trails behind like exhaust. The absolutism (“without exception,” “theory is wrong”) is doing rhetorical work. He’s not offering a nuanced methodology; he’s defending a creative ecology where imagination and ear-training aren’t subordinate to credentialed analysis.

The subtext reads like a long memory of classrooms and conservatories that police style through terminology. Jazz education, in particular, has spent decades translating improvisational practices into textbooks, chord-scale diagrams, and harmonic “systems.” Baker doesn’t reject analysis; he rejects theory that forgets its job description. “We make theories for what people have done” is a warning against theories that become prescriptive myths: if your model can’t account for what musicians actually play, the model isn’t “challenged” - it’s simply inadequate.

There’s also a cultural argument tucked in: practice is communal and historical, theory is often institutional and gatekeeping. By insisting that theory must bow to practice, Baker sides with the messy archive of performances, recordings, and vernacular innovations over the tidy authority of formalized rules. It’s an ethic of humility: the map doesn’t get to scold the terrain, especially when the terrain keeps inventing new roads.