Curtis Stewart - of Love

of Love

Curtis Stewart

On June 2, 2023, GRAMMY-nominated violinist and composer Curtis Stewart releases of Love., an album dedicated to his mother, Elektra Kurtis-Stewart, who died of brain cancer on Sept. 7, 2021, at age 66. “He is a giant … combining omnivory and brilliance” (The New York Times), “a gem of a string player” (The Strad), “whose über passionate and virtuosic outpourings … grapple with reconciling the classical and jazz camps” (Downbeat Magazine). On of Love., a through-composed collection of 20 works, Curtis Stewart celebrates the perseverance of Kurtis-Stewart, a violinist and composer herself. Recorded in his late mother’s Upper West Side, Manhattan, apartment — the apartment where Stewart was raised, the apartment where he cared for his mom during her dying days — of Love. is a requiem to cherish life, time, and lifetimes.

“Since we first learned about Julius Eastman in 2010, we’ve had an increasing affinity for the way that he set out to make music,” says Chris Rountree, artistic director for Wild Up. “Eastman’s process and approach feel like an ever-present teacher, embedded in the works. The composer has been an inspiration, larger than life, changing the way we want to work, how we want to make, what we want to make, and what we want it to mean.”
Accompanying the album announcement, Wild Up share Joy Boy album closer “Stay On It,” which constructs foreboding timbres around an insistent and joyful motif.
Eastman was young, gay, and Black at a time when it was even more difficult to be young, gay, and Black. He swerved through academia, discos, Europe, Carnegie Hall, and the downtown experimental music scene as he built an exhilarating and thoroughly original body of work. And in 1990, at age 49, Eastman died in Buffalo, New York, less than a decade after the New York City Sheriff’s Department threw most of his scores, belongings, and ephemera into the East Village snow.
Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy delves deep into Eastman’s oeuvre, as Wild Up explores his inimitable compositions and idiosyncratic ways of communicating musical ideas. Eastman’s ideas about notation were notoriously loose and, as such, Wild Up’s performances are informed both by knowledge passed down from Eastman’s colleagues and collaborators as well as an adventurous, constantly seeking spirit.
More than anything, Joy Boy finds Wild Up reveling in the freedom afforded by Eastman’s work. Whether it’s Wild Up guitarist Jiji veering from placid minimalism to metallic drone across two radically different versions of Eastman’s “Touch Him When” or the Wild Up ensemble’s ebulliently discordant performance of “Joy Boy,” there’s a palpable sense of possibility throughout Volume 2. Says Rountree: “We want listeners to find themselves in these pieces. And in their multiple iterations. We want this work to be quintessentially queer. Every moment full of choice.”
On June 19, 2022, Wild Up will be celebrating the release of Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy with a special dawn-until-dusk performance of “Buddha,” Eastman’s egg-shaped open-score epic, at 2220 Art & Archives. Full details on that performance here.
Wild Up’s Eastman anthology represents a departure for New Amsterdam Records, which, until this series, had exclusively released new music by active, living composers. But Eastman is a special case, a composer whose work shines like a beacon to today’s musicians. Any term used to characterize the modern musical landscape —“genre-fluid” or the like — was anticipated by Eastman decades before; yet, he was punished for being ahead of his time, both in the treatment of his music and, tragically, his person. Eastman’s music flowed freely from, and through, his myriad influences and was terribly served by the musical infrastructure of his day. It makes sense, then, for the anthology to arrive on New Amsterdam Records — a sort of loving backward embrace of a musical forefather to 21st-century composers.
“Wild Up feels changed when we play this music,” says Chris Rountree. “We’ve found that Eastman’s pieces are an ideal way to create the space we see for classical music going forward. We want listeners to find something joyous and raucous, something everchanging, and yet somehow also repeated over and over. To us, Eastman’s music feels like a perfect mirror in the search for self.”

Album Credits
Violin, Composition, Arrangements, Lyrics, Vocals, Recorded, Edited, Mixed, Mastered by Curtis Stewart
Additional Mastering: Derek Linzy (Prince’s engineer)
Additional Production: Dave Veslocki
Photo: Marilena Arvelo
Album Art: Meg Pickarski
Dedicated to my mother, Elektra Kurtis Stewart – 1955-2021
Track Listing
i. Remember
ii. Gone — The Happy Blues
iii. Present Tense
iv. Thalasakki Mou
v. low
vi. krishna (improvisations on Alice Coltrane’s krishna krishna)
vii. Adagio from Johannes Brahms Violin Sonata No 1 Op 78 (We are going to be OK)
viii. Body and Soul
ix. Gone…
x. She Goes Away
xi. Here
xii. Embrace
xiii. Gone.
xiv. dream it.
xv. She Goes Away.
xvi. Pisces
xvii. City’s Son (improvisations on Duke Ellington’s Take the A-Train)
xviii. GONE
xvix. Drift to Wake
xx. Remember them