{"id":14122,"date":"2019-10-26T18:43:59","date_gmt":"2019-10-26T22:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=14122"},"modified":"2019-10-27T01:44:22","modified_gmt":"2019-10-27T05:44:22","slug":"frank-stewart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2019\/10\/26\/frank-stewart\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer Frank Stewart’s Life In Jazz"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou didn\u2019t get a whole lot of history lessons about African-American culture in school,\u201d Frank Stewart told The New York Times <\/a>in 2017. \u201cMy work is culturally motivated. I wanted to know where these polyrhythms, the roots of the foods and this rich cultural history came from.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the results of his searching is \u201cThe Sound of My Soul: Frank Stewart’s Life in Jazz,” an exhibition of his photographs on view at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University\u2019s Hutchins Center<\/a>, 102 Mount Auburn St., Cambridge, from Sept. 16 to Dec. 13, 2019.<\/p>\n

\"Frank<\/a>
Frank Stewart, \u201cBlood on the Fields,\u201d 2014. Stewart has said: \u201cProcession after a concert. It\u2019s a prize-winning oratorio about a husband and wife moving from slavery to freedom.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Touted as \u201cfirst museum exhibition of Stewart\u2019s jazz photographs,\u201d curated by Ruth Fine, it features some 80 photographs he\u2019s made since 1973. The pictures include jazz legends Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Lionel Hampton, Wynton Marsalis. The photos show musicians performing at funerals, Second Line marches, practice sessions, jazz clubs and concert halls.<\/p>\n

Stewart\u2019s life has taken him from Nashville, Memphis, Chicago and New York, places where he grew up, to New Orleans, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Havana, Liberia, Nigeria, Mali, Ivory Coast, Ghana.<\/p>\n

In 1963, he traveled with his mother, the model and dancer Dorothy \u201cDotty\u201d Jean Lewis Stewart, to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He borrowed her Kodak Brownie camera to take his first photographs. \u201cThere was a lot of black and white people down there showing solidarity. So that\u2019s what I took pictures of,\u201d Stewart told the Jazz and Lincoln Center blog<\/a> in 2015. He continued photographing with a camera borrowed from a friend\u2019s dad.<\/p>\n

\"Frank<\/a>
Frank Stewart (left) with curator Ruth Fine at the opening reception for \u201cThe Sound of My Soul: Frank Stewart’s Life in Jazz\u201d at Harvard University’s Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Sept. 16, 2019. (Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Stewart (born 1949) learned photography from Robert Sengstacke, a Chicago friend whose family owns Chicago Defender; from Roy DeCarava (\u201cI had never seen the black form depicted in such a manner\u2014with dignity, pride, and humanity,\u201d Stewart has said) and Garry Winogrand. He worked with the artist Romare Bearden from 1975 until his death in 1988.<\/p>\n

Stewart has photographed the Ku Klux Klan in Jacksonville, Mississippi; the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics; the devastation of New Orleans\u2019 Lower Ninth Ward by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; environmental damage along the Louisiana Coast from global warming and oil drilling; forest fire damage in Colorado and California.<\/p>\n

\"Frank<\/a>
Frank Stewart, \u201cAhmad Jamal,\u201d 2013.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He connected with jazz musicians early on, through his stepfather, the renowned jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Junior (1931-1987), who brought him to concerts at New York clubs on 52nd Street and in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s.<\/p>\n

Stewart began photographing jazz musicians when he drove equipment and photographed concerts for pianist and band leader Ahmad Jamal and his group from 1975 to \u201980. Subsequently, he photographed in clubs and at jazz events in New York and Chicago.<\/p>\n

\u201cJazz photography was different; it was a way to document cats that never got documented,\u201d Stewart told the Jazz and Lincoln Center blog in 2015. \u201cYou know, the cats that were on the periphery that you never see but needed to be documented because they were on the scene too. Some of them would be on the scene then all of a sudden they\u2019d go back home because they couldn\u2019t make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stewart met trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis in 1988, then traveled with his Septet from 1989 to \u201992. Since 1993, Stewart has been the road manager and senior staff photographer for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, where Marsalis is managing and artistic director.<\/p>\n

\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Frank<\/a>
Frank Stewart, \u201cCoopty,\u201d 2019. Stewart has said: \u201cWycliffe Gordon in Savannah.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\u201cThe<\/a>
\u201cThe Sound of My Soul: Frank Stewart’s Life in Jazz\u201d at Harvard University’s Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Sept. 16, 2019. (Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Frank<\/a>
Frank Stewart, \u201cAmadeo Roldan Conservatory, Havana,\u201d 2010.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\u201cThe<\/a>
\u201cThe Sound of My Soul: Frank Stewart’s Life in Jazz\u201d at Harvard University’s Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Sept. 16, 2019. (Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou didn\u2019t get a whole lot of history lessons about African-American culture in school,\u201d Frank Stewart told The New York Times in 2017. \u201cMy work is culturally motivated. I wanted to know where these polyrhythms, the roots of the foods and this rich cultural history came from.\u201d One of the results of his searching is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14130,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[483,68,176],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14122"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14137,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14122\/revisions\/14137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}