KGNU’s Sanford Baran interviews Curtis Stewart, a four-time Grammy-nominated violinist and composer from New York. Curtis discusses his background, influenced by his jazz tuba-playing father and classical violinist mother, and his journey through various roles. Curtis explains his approach to integrating different musical genres and shares insights on his latest album, of Love, which is deeply personal and reflects his experiences during the pandemic and as a caretaker for his mother.
Sanford Baran: I’m speaking with four-time Grammy nominated violinist and composer Curtis Stewart, who realizes a vision to find personal and powerful connections between styles, cultures, and music. As artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra, professor at the Juilliard School, and member of award winning ensembles Public Quartet and the Mighty Third Rail, Curtis connects diverse musical styles and cultures, captivating audiences worldwide with his innovative performances. He’s going to be performing this Thursday night at the Savoy Denver sponsored by the Music Appreciation Society of Denver.
Let’s start by having you give us a little background. Your journey as a violinist, soloist, ensemble player, concerto player, composer, educator, you do it all.
Curtis Stewart: Yes, I do it all. I’m very happy to be here and I’m excited to come to Denver because I’m assuming up in the mountains it’s gonna be much cooler than it is here in New York. It’s blazing hot. I am so excited to be over there. I also have some family that lives in Denver around that area in Colorado.
I teach at Juilliard. I actually used to teach at the LaGuardia Performing Arts High School in New York. It’s the “fame school”. I went there, my dad taught there, so my life really started in music education in that way. My mom was a violinist. My dad is a jazz tuba player. He used to tour with people like Dizzy Gillespie and played with Sonny Rollins and Chick Corea, people like that. So he was deep in the jazz world. And he’s actually going to be celebrating his 80th birthday party next year in New York with all the amazing musicians that have been through his life. Anyway, all those influences come into my music. My mom is Greek in ethnicity, but grew up in Poland. Her mom was an opera singer in the Polish National Opera. My mom used to run out and sneak away from her classical gigs and hang out with what were called “the gypsies” outside of town in Warsaw back in the day.
All these kinds of things, between the blues and jazz and Greek folk music and operatic, deeply classical music, all kind of swirl in the music that I’ll be playing this week.
Sanford Baran: You’re known for blending various genres in your performances. How do you approach integrating these different musical styles? How does it come together?
Curtis Stewart: I watched my mom do it. She has this one song called “Mangas”, which is a traditional Greek folk song. But she would change the meter, the rhythmic meter, and add a reggae backbeat to it and use these various instruments to change things. And so I watched her do that for her whole career.
My dad made a life playing jazz tuba. He found ownership of the tuba in present day jazz settings by being able to play bass lines and creating spaces using virtuosity and musical energy to make it feel like this has belonged here the whole time. I’ve just learned from them, honestly, and I don’t think of it as integrating two separate musics.
For me, it’s more like just making the music that I hear. This is just the music I’m hearing. And it’s stemming immediately. It’s my traditional music, and so I try to frame it in a way for various audiences. If I’m in a classical setting, it will feel more like a recital. And instead of a piano, there’s electronics, there are words, there’s poetry, there’s layers of violin. My mom’s voice actually makes its way into the performance. It’s just the music that I’m feeling. It’s not contrived in that way.
Sanford Baran: I wanted to jump in and talk about your latest intriguing album entitled of Love. It was released last summer, I think.
Curtis Stewart: June last year, about a year ago.
Sanford Baran: Oh, okay, good. It obviously is a deeply personal album, and I was wondering if you could share more about the inspiration behind creating this, and really what it’s about.
Curtis Stewart: Yeah. My very first album was called Of Colors, and it’s pretty much a jazz album, in that it’s violin, percussion, and keyboard, and we’re improvising through material like a jazz group might. My second album is Of Power. It was the first thing I ever recorded on my own in my living room. And that ended up getting nominated for my first Grammy in the solo classical category. There was massive pushback against its categorization in the classical category just because of the sounds that were on there, the use of electronics, what sounds like improvisation, even though I’m actually playing something that’s pretty much the same every single time. There’s actually very little improvisation on that album, but it sounds like there is.
of Love was basically a set of journal entries. During the pandemic I was also my mom’s caretaker for four years and as the caretakers out there know, sometimes you have these sleepless nights, you’re worried about, is the Medicaid gonna come through, are we gonna get this insurance thing, what do we do if the doctors say we have to stop the chemotherapy? There’s all these thoughts that are swirling around.
The only way I knew how to deal with those thoughts and feelings was through writing words, really, and music and just getting lost in my music making. of Love is a direct expression of that time and that even though grief is hard and loss is hard, it’s a reminder that we’re all of love, that we come from love, and we feel love.
So that whole album is dedicated to my mom. Luckily my mom created an audio biography of herself that includes video. And so we’ll see little snippets of video and audio from her talking about what music meant to her, and her travels from Poland to Finland to America, and what she carried with her music, as well as what she values along the way. I’ll also get the audience to sing along with me and join me in hearing my mom. And so it becomes a kind of, hopefully, uplifting and communal experience.
Sanford Baran: So I’m looking at the track list here on the album, and some of these cuts you’re actually incorporating are very classical. There’s Henry Purcell. There’s Brahms, also there’s Duke Ellington. This mashup here is very interesting, and I haven’t really had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet, but I will be playing a few cuts on the show.
Curtis Stewart: Yeah. The Purcell usually starts and ends those shows, because it’s the song “Remember Me”, except I’ve twisted it to “remember them”. I was just thinking about coming out of the pandemic. I know we all don’t want to think about the pandemic anymore. We’re death tired. But I think it’s important to remember the people we may have lost or remember the times we may have lost. So much has changed.
It’s important to see where we are now and celebrate where we are by remembering what has changed and what is no longer. And yeah, so there’s that Purcell on there. There’s the Brahms, which is from the first violin sonata, the G major sonata. The slow movement from that sonata, I had my friend come over and input the piano part on a MIDI keyboard and then I manipulated that with electronics. I sent it to the drum set part, sent it over to varying electronic keyboard sounds. So it really feels like you’re inside of the piano. It feels like my voice replaces some of the piano parts. I actually did that one maybe a month or two after my mom passed and I had just started cleaning out her apartment that I was about to inherit.
I don’t know why that struck me as the first piece that I wanted to use to envelop myself in sound and feel held by the Brahms. Actually, the second one that I did is a traditional Greek folk song that is called “My Little Sea” by Thalassaki Mou. It’s about the sea taking sailors away from their families. I was going through my mom’s stuff as I was here in her house. And I found this book of Greek folk songs and figured I would start playing through them.
I wanted to find something to do on the violin and suddenly I came to one that it felt like it was playing me more than I was playing it because I just, I knew it, but I didn’t know that I knew it. It was so deeply in my ear. So that’s a solo violin piece that you’ll hear as well.
Sanford Baran: The other intriguing piece is the fact that you recorded it in the flat that you grew up in and where your mom lived?
Curtis Stewart: Yeah, it’s the apartment I grew up in. It’s the apartment that I was taking care of my mom in. There’s a room that was her bedroom and then there was my old high school bedroom that became the caretaker’s room. So we would have some of the home health aids in here. We had all the medications in here and stuff, and while she was sleeping and I couldn’t sleep, I would write and record in that room. And then once I had to start moving everything out, I started moving studio equipment in and it just felt so weird. And so some of the music is a literal expression of that.
There’s some artists who throw paint against the wall or they hit a statue and you see that mark on the material and that is the emotion of that moment. And so some of the music that you’re hearing is literally the emotion of that moment. It’s framed and beautified through the art form.
So it’s extremely personal. Normally, I think a lot of people become afraid of that feeling. But I’d like to think that it feels like it’s speaking to something bigger than just my loss, but speaking to the nature of loss and how we can use that to value what we have, and just feel the moment a little more richly.
Sanford Baran: Any song in particular that is one of your favorites?
Curtis Stewart: I really like “Embrace” because that is a piece that I wrote, that was one of my first commissions by the American Composers Orchestra. That was before I was the artistic director at that orchestra. My mom’s voice is on there. There’s some virtuosic violin playing. There’s call and response, which I had to record my own responses to my own calls. I also really love “Krishna”, which is based on Alice Coltrane’s kind of meditations. Alice Coltrane was John Coltrane’s wife. But she’s also an amazing pianist, harpist, composer. Those are some of my two favorites.
“Drift Awake” is probably the most emotional one, because you hear me getting emotional in the actual track. And then “City Sun” is the most fiery and empowered because I’m talking about – now that you know the stuff about where I’m coming from with my mom, you hopefully know that I am not a jazz violinist, I’m not a classical violinist, I’m not a black violinist, I’m not any of those names that you might call me.
I am myself. I belong to no one. If anything, I belong to my city. New York City. I am my mother’s son. I am my father’s son. I am my city’s son. And so that’s probably the most empowered track on the album.
Sanford Baran: One more question about the album. How has the audience and listeners responded to the album?
Curtis Stewart: Oh yeah. This one also got nominated for a Grammy in the same category that they told me I shouldn’t be in, so that’s a good sign. Solo classical. The number of people asking me to write music for them has just skyrocketed. I’m knocking on wood that continues because that’s the most fun thing I can do. I love being in this room and imagining music and sounds and exploring different ways instruments can work. It’s my happy place. And I’ve just been working and coming out to Denver and coming out to all around the country to do the album. I’ve done it all over the place. But in the actual performances, it feels like a gathering. It feels like we’re all joining a circle that the music provides a house for. So the feeling before and after the show, at least for me, is very different. People have come up to me crying.
I don’t take that responsibility lightly. In fact, sometimes I don’t even know how to react. I don’t know what to do. I just sit there, stand and listen. They heard me do all this expression for an hour. So I want to hear them. I want to hear that resonance back at me. It feels like I get to actually connect with people as opposed to – as a violinist, you step on stage, you play the most difficult things you made, play the most beautiful stuff, you play the most culturally relevant stuff, and then you get off stage and everyone’s like, “Oh, bravo”. This feels like a very different performance where I am much more connected, and the audience becomes a little more connected too after the performance.
Sanford Baran: This has just been a great conversation and boy, if you have a chance to go to this show Thursday night at the Savoy Denver, go to see Curtis Stewart, four-time Grammy nominated violinist and composer. Thank you so much again. And wonderful in terms of what’s opening up for you.
Curtis Stewart: Yes, knock on wood, all the fingers and toes are crossed that I can keep it up.
