Jim Baker - More Questions Than Answers

Delmark 560

Trepidation isn’t a desirable emotion when it comes to appraising a debut disc by a musician. Yet that’s precisely the feeling I wrestled with when sitting down with this album for the first time. Baker’s own self-deprecating and dryly scripted liners recount a recording process fraught with delays and detours. Their downcast demeanor and circumlocutory gist suggest that the project was more of a chore than good fortune. The cover shot inspires little confidence either, featuring a close-up of Baker perched at piano, head hung down, fingers pressed to forehead like he’s nursing a migraine. Not exactly the portrait of man ready to boldly capitalize on the opportunity and faith afforded him.

In truth More Questions Than Answers isn’t exactly Baker’s debut, though the disc is the first to carry his name in the skipper slot. His contributions grace a number of discs, mostly under the leadership of various Chicago colleagues. It’s some of these past projects that initially gave me pause. For instance, by my reckoning Baker’s piano serves as fly in the proverbial bisque on the quartet parts of Fred Anderson’s Birdhouse, his stiff block chords stifling the leader’s normally loose-limbed tenor.

The one time I caught Baker in performance, at a concert at Bob Marsh’s loft space with Bhob Rainey and the cellist, his analog synthesizer, looking like a jumbled box of light bulbs and switchboard plugs, seemed more for show than music-making. Then came the ‘insight’ gleaned from an audience member, one who, with hindsight, probably had an axe to grind, of his day gig as an accountant and the accompanying financial security that suggested improv was more hobby than passion. The ludicrous notion that if you’re not scuffling and busking that somehow you’re not legit. These assumptions and experiences conspired into an umbrella prejudice toward Baker as more dilettante than dedicated artist; one soundly in place long before disc cued in tray and the music spilled from speakers.

I wish I could concede that the disc’s thirteen tracks splintered my ill-founded preconceptions completely to pieces. At the very least they pocked several deep grooves of doubt into the stanchions holding my animus aloft. Baker takes pains to note that all the pieces were extemporaneously improvised, but their later selection from a far larger pool of possibles along with their programming was premeditated. “Watching the Interstate” uncrumples in a string of tightly-fisted clusters that incorporate the length of the keyboard. Notes are closely packed and patterned in repetitive parcels, but remain melodically-conscious for much of the duration.

The sprawling “Post-Industrial Societies and Their Precursors” is even more prolix at twenty-plus minutes and can’t help but meander. Pedal-dampened left hand anchors tether right hand rolling motifs in an improvisation that unfurls gradually with deliberate intention and a strong undercarriage of dramatic structure. Despite a predilection for traveling the same improvisatory troughs on certain pieces, much of this music is downright lyrical and well-versed in clever constructions. Baker unveils his analogue synth only sparingly. Its aged diodes and switches crop up on just three tunes and occupying a total of only eight or so minutes with an array of rhythmic whirs, piercing squeaks, flittering whistles and static-laced hums. “Mourning Doves” tempers its sterile sound surfaces in the service of a surprisingly warm and affecting tone poem that would make Sun Ra beam with pleasure.

I may not be ready to lick the envelope enclosing my double sawbuck for the yearly membership dues to the Jim Baker Fan Club just yet. But I am happy to have my earlier jaundiced eye called out in an erroneous lie. Listeners who appreciate solo piano rendered by nimble fingers and a sagacious mind will likely find much of worth to explore here. The big question remains, what does Baker have planned next?

~ Derek Taylor