Traveling Full Circle ~ Frank Stewart's Visual Music PDF

Frank Stewart was born in Nashville, Tennessee.
His father, Frank Stewart, Sr., was a salesman of hi-fidelity recording equipment. His
mother, Dorothy Johnson, was an artist, designer, and model. Both parents immersed
Frank and his two sisters in a world where music and visual art mattered. When he
was five, the family moved to Memphis. When he was eight, his mother married the
jazz piano prodigy, Phineas Newborn, Jr. He moved again, this time to New York
City.
When Count Basie invited Newborn, without question one of the best jazz pianists
of his generation, to serve as his opening act at Birdland, Newborn brought his young
stepson onto the New York City jazz scene with him. Together, they went up and
down 52nd Street, and then to other magically named New York City jazz clubs of
the late 1950s: The FiveSpot, The Village Gate, The Village Vanguard. “I got to know
all the cats in Count Basie’s band,” Stewart recalls. “Al Gray, Snooky Young, Count
himself. I also met Miles and Monk, Paul Chambers and Roy Haynes, all of them… I
came from a gospel and R&B background at home. But I got up here and there was
a whole ‘nother musical world. Listening to jazz when I was eight years old, it was like
the avant-garde of today. It was a whole language of improvisation that just escaped
me. But I thought I was cool, you know. I was hip. I was on the scene. I had my little
Blue Car on the Malecon, Havana, 2009
ties on, my vines on. And I was hanging out with him.”
When Newborn declared artistic independence from the networks that controlled
the U.S. music scene, he was barred from recording or performing in this country.
Newborn left the family to work in Europe, and young Stewart was taken back to
Memphis, and then to Chicago, where he lived with his natural father.
It was in Chicago that Stewart took his first art lessons. Like most of his Chicago
buddies, Stewart was a good runner and ball player; but his grandmother, Cora Taylor
Stewart, also signed him up for Saturday drawing classes at the Art Institute of
Chicago. “You’re doing what?!” his friends would say, “You’re going downtown to
draw! Are you crazy?” “I thought I was doing something my mother might like,” Stewart
recalls. “And then I started liking it.” On Saturdays he was among those drawing
the preserved animals at the Field Museum, or trying to capture Grant Park’s shining
Buckingham Fountain with paint on paper. At age thirteen, Stewart traveled
to the March on Washington, where he took some of his first photographs with his
new Brownie box camera—a gift from his mother. “I was turning the camera to make
the pictures look diamond-shaped and what not,” Stewart said. “I couldn’t get close