ACCOLADES FOR LYNN BAKER

"Lynn Baker is a master musician whose contributions to the world of contemporary jazz, as performer, composer and educator, will have a lasting impact. His work is distinguished by virtuosity and originality, and by a creative versatility that allows him the privilege of handling with command many musical languages and styles."
	Ricardo Iznaola
	Internationally Renowned Classical Guitarist and Pedagogue


"Lynn was a person of great intellectual curiosity, willing to take risks and operate at the liminal conditions of music, not the comfortable, known center.  The first day of his "sound exploratory ensemble" was spent listening to "silence" in various facilities--just the kind of thing to make an impressionable sophomore's head spin.  Lynn was among a handful of teachers who dared to throw out all of the paradigms, manufacture a relevant ancestry, and start over."
	Mark Applebaum
	Assistant Prof. of Music, Stanford University


"You were there at the beginning!"
	John Zorn, March 1996 
	Said to Lynn in a Knitting Factory greenroom


"'I wouldn't be the twisted person I am today without the insidious influence of Malcolm Lynn Baker during my undergraduate years...'  

Maybe the wrong track. How about something like:  

'Malcolm Lynn Baker helped open my mind to worlds of new possibilities and different ways of hearing music during the time I studied jazz and improvisation with him at Carleton College.' "
	Jon Von Seggern
	digital DJ -- producer -- bassist
	Digital Cutup Lounge
	Hong Kong


"Malcolm Lynn Baker is perhaps the finest saxophonist that I know.  His command of both the instrument and the music is rare in any genre, and he brings an intensity to his playing that is singularly compelling.  Everyone who hears him play can tell that they are hearing a master musician at work. 

That I should feel this way is, perhaps, not a surprise.  We have been friends and collaborators for some 20 years, and I have been honored by his performances of my music.  But I will also say that I know of no one who does not have the highest respect for Lynn Baker and his musicianship.  Those of us who have made music with him have always been lifted by his energy and musical abilities.
 
As a composer I can find no higher compliment to pay Baker than to say that whenever I compose music for the saxophone, it is his saxophone that I am hearing."

	James Mark Olsen
	Composer, Eugene, Oregon

"I have known Lynn Baker for fifteen years and have to say that he is about as close to the whole package as anyone will find in the Jazz industry- performing, composing, arranging, educating, innovative, perspicacious administrating, curricular design that maximizes all the new technology can offer, and the uncanny ability to break down the false stylistic barriers in music education that others of less ecumenical capacity cloak as stylistic expertise by default. 

I am one of the many fortunate who have benefited first-hand from his advocacy for fellow artist-educators to share their unique experience with his students. His ability to craft meaningful artist residencies in the face of limited funding and creative partnering of support from fellow institutions is downright impressive. In his six years at Lamont, he has helped transform this school into a first-class non-denominational conservatory which prepares its students for the real world both as musicians and people passionately connected to the arts as a perennial way of life. I have taught a number of his former students at the New School, and they all demonstrate the personal commitment, teamwork and humility that Baker demands from them as a point of departure in their work.  His infectious positive energy inspires his students to rise to their highest potential without the traditional teacher-student dialectic impeding either the development of vital expression or the transmission of core artistic values."

	Richard Boukas
	Malandro Recording Artist
	artist-faculty,
	New School Jazz & Contemporary Music Program, New York City
	IAJE Resource Chair in Brazilian Music