Baker was born in Yale, Oklahoma in 1929. He came of age during the bebop era and, after settling into the West Coast scene, played with the genre's most famous practitioner Charlie Parker, in '52. Soon after, he joined what was to be one of the most popular jazz groups of the early '50s, the Gerry Mulligan Quartet ('52-'53). Piano-less, with Mulligan's baritone sax and Baker's trumpet parsing the changes over a steady though unemphatic bass and drums, the group gave off a sexy intellectual vibe. Baker spent the post-Mulligan '50s mainly leading a quartet (with piano) and doing some sporadic singing--his voice, untamed and hesitantly expressive, was a nice little-boy-lost compliment to his movie-star good looks.