Time & Perspective Quote by David Baker

He’s not describing a place so much as a pressure system. Invoking Paris at the moment of Le Sacre du Printemps is shorthand for a city where art didn’t merely premiere; it detonated. Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet is remembered less for its melodies than for the social combustion around it: the riot myth, the scandal, the sense that audiences were being dragged into the future against their will. When David Baker reaches for that comparison, he’s reaching for a cultural temperature - the feeling that a scene is so charged it becomes historical while you’re still standing in it.

The intent is quietly self-locating. Baker, a composer who helped legitimize jazz inside American conservatories, is hinting at an environment where boundaries were actively being rewritten, where “serious” music and vernacular music could collide and leave dents. Paris functions as an emblem of cosmopolitan intensity: patrons, critics, composers, dancers - a whole ecosystem of taste-making compressed into a few rooms. He’s saying: I’ve lived through a moment when new work didn’t ask permission.

The subtext is also defensive, in a smart way. Comparing your era to 1913 borrows the aura of inevitability: if it felt chaotic, that’s because it was necessary. It reframes friction as proof of importance. Baker isn’t claiming to be Stravinsky; he’s claiming to recognize what creative rupture feels like from the inside - confusing, noisy, and, in retrospect, clarifying.