His photos graced the covers of several Coltrane albums in fact, he first met Coltrane in the late 1940s, before either man was famous. His subjects included Count Basie and Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, Ray Charles and James Brown. He shot recordings, on stage and in his studio. A few years later, he took over the studio after Leonard moved to Paris, and "Herman's boy," as he put it, became Chuck Stewart.Īll the while, he was building relationships with musicians, especially jazz artists. Army, where he served as a photographer - "Dizzy Gillespie didn't look like the atomic bomb," he joked - Stewart returned to New York. It goes without saying that you shouldn't reproduce these photos, but Chuck Stewart's family asked us to gently remind you not to.)Ĭhester Higgins, Jr./Courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American HistoryĪfter a stint in the U.S. (We're featuring three of the pictures here. The announcement was made during the launch of Jazz Appreciation Month, the annual initiative driven by the American History museum, and Stewart was on hand to sign over the collection. On Wednesday, Stewart donated 25 images of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, including some of the newly unearthed shots. Coltrane was documenting a four-part, spiritually grounded suite with his quartet, a work that would soon be hailed as a masterpiece and a landmark of 20th-century music: the album A Love Supreme. They portrayed saxophonist John Coltrane at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., across the Hudson River from New York City and not far from Stewart's own home. Recently, his son David was browsing through his archives when he found six undeveloped rolls of film from December 1964, 50 years ago. The NPR 100 The Story Of 'A Love Supreme'
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