Buddy Baker

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Composer and arranger of music at Disney Parks

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Chord System

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Seems to be something to do with each chord having its own scale. Apparenlty enabled polychordal writing.

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Fales Library

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It appears that his papers are saved at the Fales Library at NYU

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My first assignment with Buddy Baker – he gave me the full score of Daphnis and Chloé by Maurice Ravel. He said, “Here. Take it. Next month I want you to learn the whole thing.” I said, “I beg your pardon?” But I got into it.

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Brown: That’s a masterpiece of orchestration. For me, that is incredible. He started you on the best there is.

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Norman came to me after that and said, “You’ve been with me a long time. I’ve never given you a bonus. What do you want to do for a recording. I don’t care if you want to hire a symphony orchestra. I don’t care what you want to do. What do you want to do?” I said, “My teacher Buddy Baker and I wrote 26 arrangements. Twelve of them are all woodwinds. 26 written arrangements. The other 12 are all strings. Mood music. All love. Journey into love.” He said, “That’s what you want to do? Okay.” There’s a record out now called Journey into Love. Beautiful. All compositions, original. I helped Buddy do the scoring. A lot of people can’t believe that’s me, because all my other albums are swing, bebop, straight-ahead.

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When I met Buddy the first thing he told me was: “If you want to write about strings, you’ve got to remember one thing: strings don’t swing.”…

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They just don’t swing. So I learned to give them half notes, quarter notes, whole notes, especially on ballads and things. But when they have to play a series of eighth notes, they’re going to play them exactly the way it’s written, whereas swing players interpret it with a bounce feel. So I was very cautious. In other words, if I had to play something like [Bellson sings the melody of Undecided], I give that to the saxophones or trumpets. But the strings, they would play it [Bellson sings Undecided with a straight rhythm rather than a swing rhythm] …

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But writing for strings, you’ve go to be very careful, especially if you’re using strings in a context with a big band, like Artie Shaw had a big band with strings for a while. He made sure that the strings – the writing for the strings – would not conflict with that side of the band. Give them some things that they can play. So I learned fast. I learned that from Buddy Baker.

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