"Powerful. A starkly beautiful, almost unbearably moving chamber opera."
-Paul de Barros, Seattle Times, March 2008
"High art or lowbrow, serious, entertaining—fit for a concert hall or suitable for a club? Tom Baker’s music is stepping over these archaic lines of divisive thinking."
-Amy Rubin, New Music Box (American Music Center), May 2006
"…riveting…[with] harmonic twists that took us to unexpected places in astonishing ways."
-Amy Rubin, New Music Box (American Music Center), May 2006
"...trippy, jazz-hued soundscapes..."
-Guitar Player Magazine, Feb 2006
"If Baker lived in New York instead of his native Seattle, chances are he'd be a fixture on the downtown avant-jazz scene."
-Time Out New York, 2005
"Tom Baker's music plies the shadowy territory between form, isolation, and silence."
- Christopher DeLaurenti, The Stranger, June 2003
"Tom Baker is a guitarist and skilled colorist with an impeccable ear for sonic and expressive possibilities."
- Gavin Borchert, Seattle Weekly, August 2001
Regarding the Tom Baker Quartet: "A self-titled demo...reveals a delicate, eccentric compositional sense and a tendency toward unruly improvisation."
- Time Out New York, 2005
"Jazztronauts: The Tom Baker Quartet explores the jazz cosmos..."
-Jefferson Robbins, Go! Magazine, 2006
Regarding Sounding the Curve, CD Recording for fretless guitar: "Upon hearing Tom Baker's new Fretless Classical CD, I felt a whole new wing had been added to Chateau De Fretless. It is the best blend of composer, player, and instrument I've ever heard from a fretless guitarist."
- Ned Evett, Fretlessguitar.com
"Tom's fretless technique is quite frighteningly accurate..."
- Jeff Berg, Unfretted.com
Regarding Negative Space for Guitar and Chamber Orchestra: "…the instruments of the orchestra float back and forth through a sonic void, creating uneasily, constantly shifting contexts for each other - a sense of mutual distance, not just spatial but psychological. This effect is most chilling at the work's end as the solo guitar noodles woozily along, ignoring the melodramatic orchestral screams which collapse out of exhaustion into convulsive shudders."
- Open Space Magazine, Spring 2001
"Baker couples his interest in architectural "space" with his work as a composer. The guitar and orchestra lead the listener through a series of imaginary rooms - some decorated with layers and textures reminiscent of Ligeti's Atmospheres, others with the acoustical rendition of a Jackson Pollack painting."
- Mark Petersen, Twenty-First Century Music, Spring 2001
"…wonderfully orchestrated… full of gentle swells and slow-moving textures."
- Grant Chu Covell, LaFolia, Spring 2001
"…interesting and curious."
- R.M. Campbell, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 1999
Regarding Elegy No. 3: "…exquisite…"
- Gavin Borchert, Seattle Weekly, February 2001
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