Stewart also shines on “Francesca,” a new album by the eminent saxophonist David Murray, out later in May. “He plays my bass lines with such conviction,” Murray said in a phone interview. “I’ve had some great bass players in my life,” he added, naming late masters such as Art Davis, Fred Hopkins and Wilber Morris, “so he’s kind of in the line of their tradition.”
Growing up, Stewart said, a connection with any jazz tradition felt remote. Raised in Ocean Springs, a small city on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, he played saxophone early on and later picked up the bass after a high-school friend invited him to join a hardcore punk band. A record-shopping trip with his mother, when he happened to pick up the disparate Miles Davis touchstones “Kind of Blue” and “Bitches Brew,” sent him down a sonic rabbit hole.
“I remember feeling, like, my brain unlocking,” he said. Jazz electrified him, dovetailing with his budding immersion in Black history, encouraged by his mother and grandfather, but he recalled feeling like “nobody for miles and miles and miles even knows this.”
He finally caught up with jazz in Washington, D.C., where he moved in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, transferring from the University of Mississippi to American University. “All of the dots connected,” he said, “seeing a living, breathing community of improvised music” intertwined with “a strong and proud Black community.”
He soaked up live music in the city’s historic U Street clubs but also plugged into a circle of record collectors and D.J.s — including Tom Porter, Bobby Hill and Jamaal Muhammad, all fixtures at the jazz-oriented community radio station WPFW, where Stewart began working. Spending time in their company suggested to Stewart that “just being good, or even great, at your instrument isn’t enough”; the kind of engagement he was looking for, he said, “also takes a stellar knowledge of the music, which is the tradition, which is the sound, the aesthetic.”