Education Quote by David Baker

Baker’s line is a quiet demolition of the fantasy that artistry can be “taught” in the way technique can. Coming from a composer steeped in craft and pedagogy, the analogy to scales and the alphabet is pointed: training is real, necessary, and fundamentally limited. A method book can hand you syntax; it can’t hand you Joyce.

The specific intent is almost corrective, aimed at students (and institutions) who confuse fluency with voice. Scales make your hands and ears literate; grammar makes your sentences legible. Those are baseline competencies, the price of admission. But “Ulysses” stands in for the leap that refuses standardization: the risk, the private obsession, the aesthetic nerve. Baker’s subtext is that creative greatness is not an output you can guarantee by inputting enough exercises. You can build a toolbox, but you can’t manufacture the thing that chooses which tool to misuse.

Context matters: Baker came up in an era when conservatory rigor and jazz’s vernacular intelligence were often framed as opposites. His formulation bridges them. It honors disciplined study while defending the irreducible strangeness of a masterwork. The sting is aimed less at books than at the marketplace of instruction, which sells “how to write” as if genius were a syllabus. Baker isn’t being anti-teaching; he’s insisting that teaching stops at the threshold where ambition becomes invention. The rest is temperament, time, and the willingness to fail in public until the work becomes singular.