A true jazz renaissance man, David Baker was active in the jazz community as musician, composer, educator, conductor, and author. Of all the NEA Jazz Masters, he was one of the most active as a college and university educator.

Baker's music career began on the trombone in the early 1950s as he worked with local groups, as well as Lionel Hampton, while working on his doctorate at Indiana University. He lived in California in 1956-57, playing in the bands of Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson, and returned to Indiana in 1958, leading his own big band for two years. He then attended the School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1959- 60, joining a stellar class of musicians that included members of the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Shortly thereafter he worked with the George Russell band, playing on some of his influential early albums. In Russell's band, Baker's trombone playing displayed exceptional technique, utilizing avant-garde effects to enhance the songs.

An accident to his jaw eventually forced Baker to abandon his promising career as a trombonist. He switched to the cello in 1962. As a composer he contributed a broad range of works, from small ensemble to orchestral, often straddling the fence between jazz and chamber music. He also worked on purely chamber and orchestral works. By the early 1970s, he returned to the trombone—playing on Bill Evans' 1972 album Living Time, with George Russell arranging—while continuing to play the cello as well. Although a strong player on both instruments, he was most renowned for his compositions.

Baker became a distinguished professor of music at Indiana University and chairman of the Jazz Department in 1966. He published in numerous scholarly journals and wrote several musical treatises as well as having more than 2,000 compositions, 500 commissions, 65 recordings, and 70 books on jazz and African-American music to his credit. Baker was the artistic and musical director of the acclaimed Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra from 1990 to 2012.

He received numerous awards and citations, including being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his composition Levels, a concerto for bass, jazz band, woodwinds, and strings; and receiving an Emmy Award for his musical score of the PBS documentary For Gold and Glory. He served as a member of the NEA's National Council on the Arts, was founding president of the National Jazz Service Organization, and was former president of the International Association for Jazz Education.