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.

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.

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.

“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.

The sense of place and connection to it as seen through the lens of environmental conscience

Death Is No Excuse is an insightful roadmap through the legal potholes of unplanned death and disability, offered by a veteran attorney who's handled the worst of these cases for over forty years. It's a plain-spoken, surprisingly entertaining guide to everything you need to know about planning for death or disability, as well as other calamities that can occur along the way, be they divorce, avoidable tax burdens or getting ripped off as you toddle into old age.

“Path-breaking . . . offers a rich, encompassing, global perspective on education . . . articulates an educationally-grounded vision of contemporary society.” —David John Frank, University of California, Irvine Only 150 years ago, the majority of the world’s population was largely illiterate. Today, not only do most people over fifteen have basic reading and writing skills, but 20 percent of the population attends some form of higher education. What are the effects of such radical, large-scale change? David Baker argues that the education revolution has transformed our world into a schooled society—that is, a society that is actively created and defined by education. Drawing on neo-institutionalism, The Schooled Society shows how mass education interjects itself and its ideologies into culture at large: from the dynamics of social mobility, to how we measure intelligence, to the values we promote. The proposition that education is a primary rather than a “reactive” institution is then tested by examining the degree to which education has influenced other large-scale social forces, such as the economy, politics, and religion. Rich, groundbreaking, and globally-oriented, The Schooled Society sheds light on how mass education has dramatically altered the face of society and human life. “One of the most important books in the sociology of education in quite some time. . . . It will solidify [Baker’s] reputation as one of today’s leading sociologists of education and comparative and international education.” —Alan R. Sadovnik, Rutgers University “David Baker explores formal education as a social-cultural force in its own right. . . . The Schooled Society offers a powerful alternative perspective on the global educational revolution.” —Maria Charles, University of California, Santa Barbara