Daily Inspiration Quote by David Baker

Innovation, Baker suggests, is less a gift than a bottleneck. His three-step ladder - imitation, assimilation, innovation - sounds like a reassuring creative syllabus, the kind you could post on a conservatory wall. Then he undercuts it with the blunt admission that he "can't name you 20 people" who make it to the top rung. The move is doing two jobs at once: demystifying originality (it has prerequisites, it is built) while making it feel brutally scarce (almost no one clears the final gate).

As a composer speaking from inside an apprenticeship-heavy tradition, Baker is also quietly indicting the institutions that promise innovation as an outcome. Classical and jazz training are designed to produce fluent inheritors: you learn the language by copying it, you internalize its rules, you earn your belonging. Assimilation is where most careers live: competent, expressive, even moving, but still legible within existing styles. Baker's line implies that our culture confuses that fluency for invention, rewarding polish, commissions, and repertoire placement as if they're evidence of newness.

The subtext is part warning, part liberation. If you're an artist, it tells you not to mistake the middle for the end: mastery can become a comfortable cul-de-sac. If you're an audience or gatekeeper, it challenges the lazy hunger for "the next new thing" while funding systems that punish risk. Innovation, in Baker's framing, isn't a personality trait; it's the rare moment when a musician stops sounding like their influences and starts forcing everyone else to adjust their ears.