In Search of Music From an Unheralded Jazz Saxophonist

September 23, 2022 9:47 PM

Just found out my friends "step" grandfather was jazz saxophonist Buddy Baker. There is very little music of his available. There are some channels on Spotify that are slim pickings. Are there any resources out there I can contact to find more of his recorded work?
posted by goalyeehah to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Discogs should be able to help, although it may take you a bit of time to learn how to navigate and use it.

Here's Buddy Baker's artist page. That will feature releases that list him as a main artist/performer behind a release (usually a physical release, so on vinyl, shellac, CD, etc).

Since he worked as a composer and arranger though, you'll see that hitting the credits category on the right brings up many more releases on which he's not listed as a main artist/performer, but may well have had an important role.

There's also an artist page for his orchestra, which lists releases separately Buddy Baker And His Orchestra.

As described, he worked with many other bands and also put time in with Disney, so there'll likely be much of his work that isn't accessible through a database such as Discogs, simply because releases haven't been listed on there as fully as they might have been.

Nevertheless, it's an indispensable resource to tracking down his work. Once you have an idea of what was physically released (and who the main artists were), you can go about tracking it down to listen to—Spotify and YouTube should be able to provide many of these, or you can always buy the physical recordings yourself!
posted by einekleine at 11:39 PM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Allmusic can also help with recordings he's credited on, but it probably won't be a complete list (and he probably worked on things he didn't get a credit on).

NYU has a bunch of his papers.

On preview, I notice that, while your question says Buddy Baker, your link is to a different musician, Buddy Banks. Banks is on Allmusic too, but he's probably not as high-profile as Baker.
posted by box at 4:53 AM on September 24, 2022

I was confused by your link, too

If it's Buddy Banks (1909–1991) you're looking for, Internet Archive has some sides: Internet Archive Search: creator:"B. Banks"

Similarly for Buddy Baker: Internet Archive Search: creator:"BUDDY BAKER". Though it's best to ignore the page heading where they say that Baker was a stock car racer ...
posted by scruss at 8:31 AM on September 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

If it's Buddy Baker (trombonist, not saxophonist), he wrote a very well-known and widely-used trombone method that has an excellent warmup in it. I am a classical trombonist and I do his long tones exercises as part of every warmup.

Not a recording, but (again, if it's him that you're thinking of), know that his work has reached many, many brass players!
posted by rossination at 10:22 AM on September 24, 2022

Ah, if it is the saxophonist Buddy Banks you are after, then it's a much easier task. There is a complete recordings 1945–49.

The CD liner will likely have more info on whether there were more recordings outside these dates. I would assume not, but you never know.

They appear to be all on YouTube, collected here.

Am listening now—pretty great!
posted by einekleine at 4:03 PM on September 24, 2022