Curtis Stewart: Beyond Genre

Four-time Grammy-nominated Violinist Curtis Stewart is a rare musician who comfortably inhabits classical, jazz, and pop spaces all at once. The son of a Greek jazz violinist and an African-American jazz tuba player, Stewart also embraces multiple cultural identities that profoundly inform his work as a composer and performer.

His ground-breaking 2020 album, Of Power, explores the Black experience, reworking material from Stevie Wonder to John Coltrane and Childish Gambino. In his hands, “Isn’t She Lovely” becomes a showpiece rivaling the likes of Bach partitas and Paganini caprices in technical difficulty, while remaining firmly rooted in the blues. Stewart’s superb control of his instrument shines through here: there is no passage too complex to execute, and not one note that isn’t sung from the depths of his soul. In “#HerName” Stewart confronts the tragedy of Breonna Taylor’s death at the hands of police from the perspective of her partner Kenneth Walker, who was there when she was killed in March 2020.

Of Love, a solo album dedicated to his mother, Elektra Kurtis-Stewart, was released in 2023. Kurtis-Stewart, a Greek jazz violinist, passed away in 2021 after a courageous battle with brain cancer. Stewart’s use of spoken word on “Drift to Wake” is a moving exploration of grief, of what it means to wake up in the place your mother lived and have to “say hello to that feeling” every day and somehow learn to survive with grace.

For Stewart, his art is deeply tied to his identity as a person of color. In an interview with The Quintessential Gentleman, he commented: “As a person of color, being half Greek and half Black, there aren’t many of us…We create beautiful, complicated, intricate things, and we can look many ways, and sound many ways…There are many colors and sizes of being Black and being a genius.”

Stewart makes his virtuosity across multiple styles of music look effortless, but how does one forge this type of path for oneself in classical music, a genre that hasn’t always been kind to people who want to make this kind of art? Stewart’s answer is to make his own space. Perhaps Stewart himself put it best in a recent lecture he gave at Juilliard entitled “A Place for the Blues in Classical Music”: “When you don’t find your voice in the music that’s out there, then create it.”