About

Here’s a principle that has guided many of Stew’s career choices: when he sees a challenge that others might shy away from, he runs headlong into it. This is an embrace of confrontation not for its own sake, but for the potential riches that might come from digging in and asking what’s at stake. It’s a perspective that informs all of his creative activities: songwriting, singing, leading a band, writing plays, and, at UW-Madison, teaching and curating a performance series.

Stew grew up in an LA household that fell outside of the available1960s stereotypes. His family was well-educated and solidly middle-class. His father came from a conservative background, but instilled in him a sense of acceptance about others’ life choices. His mother sent him to church every week, where he developed both a sense of alienation from one of the pillars of black culture and, paradoxically, an attachment to the sometimes ecstatic feelings associated with the music there. As a young adult, Stew was a black kid in the basement with his guitar and his records of white rock and rollers. He felt like an outsider in the world around him, but he had a glimpse into the powerful world of music, and the sense that it might offer up experiences that felt right and true even amidst all sorts of complications.

For nearly twenty years, the through-line of Stew’s career has been his band The Negro Problem. The name comes out of pairing that confrontational streak with a sense of humor. As he tells it, “We made a list of names, the way every band does.  The Negro Problem was on the list, and when we got to that name the band cracked up. We couldn’t even finish the list because we were laughing so hard at the idea that this might be our name.  After laughing, I thought ‘Well, look at what this name is doing to us. There’s something here.’” Of course, they chose the name because it had actual resonance: “It felt like the truth, like the kind of ironic joke that epitomized our attitude… It pointed out that race was an issue with this band [because of] having a black man as a lead singer and playing guitar.” It’s a name that up-ends expectations in more than one way. Just as it calls attention to an unconventional personnel configuration (and forces a reminder of what aligned in political and musical history to make it unconventional), so does it occasionally raise the hackles of civil rights groups that see the name without knowing the band and assume a parody of a different sort.

Stew’s music, too, raises sticky issues in sly ways. His titles and subject matter frequently reference race, as with the albums Welcome Black and Post Minstrel Syndrome and songs like “Mind the Noose and Fare Thee Well” and “Black Men Ski.” It would be reductionist, though, to suggest that his work is always and only about race. Some songs cover the core stuff of rock: sex, drugs, social isolation. Some, like “L.A. Arteest Café,” poke at the absurdities of artistic pretentions. Still others are tender, as in “The Instrument of Pain,” with its lyric “Love is not the enemy of life. Love can give more freedom than it takes if you like.”

While Stew self-identifies as a rocker, the sounds of his music calls up a host of references. Like a good Tin Pan Alley lyricist, he’s got biting wit in spades. He performs variously with solo acoustic guitar, a rock band, or a full-blown backing band complete with horn section and backup singers. With each configuration he can shift adeptly between a range of musical styles—Broadway to reggae, gospel to the avant-garde. Perhaps most poignantly, Stew’s own singing is often quiet and intimate, with a delivery that calls up a knowing cabaret performer. Which is not to say he doesn’t belt if that’s what is called for.

In recent years Stew’s career has branched out to include bigger theatrical forms. Working with longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, in 2004 Stew began performing early versions of what would eventually become the rock musical Passing Strange. The work has its universal facets—it is a journey of self-knowledge for a young man seeking truth and emotional intensity through travel and artistic experimentation. But it is also the particular story of a young African-American man trying on different versions of blackness, Americanness, class, and musical identity, and playing them out before different audiences of friends and fellow artists. If that seems to have resonance with Stew’s own life, it is a general emotional arc that rings true; the events themselves are fictional.

With a commission from the Public Theater and time spent at the Sundance Screenwriter’s lab, Stew developed Passing Strange into a full-length piece that premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in 2006, went to New York in 2007, and reached Broadway in 2008. Filmmaker Spike Lee made a documentary of the last few performances, and premiered that film in 2009.

Following Passing Strange, Stew continues to work on projects in diverse forms. Stew and Rodewald premiered Making It in 2010, a performance that resides somewhere between a concert and a full-fledged multi-media theater piece. That same year, he and Rodewald received a commission from the Brooklyn Academy of Music that resulted in Brooklyn Omnibus, a song cycle homage to the city they both call home. His current project is a play that explores the mid-century cross-currents of exchange between black American and white British pop, rock, and blues musicians, and considers experiences of masculinity and sexuality that unfolded in that context. January 2012 will see the release of the music from Making It.

All of this has added up to a career filled with awards and recognition. In 2000, the album Guest Host won Entertainment Weekly’s recognition as “Album of the Year,” an award also given two years later for The Naked Dutch Painter. Passing Strange won the 2008 Tony for “Best Book of a Musical” as well as two Obies for “Best New Theater Piece” “Best Ensemble.” In August of 2011, Stew served as a Sundance Fellow and creative advisor for the Sundance Institute Theater Program on Manda Island, off the coast of Kenya.

MADISON
While in Madison, Stew has been teaching a course and curating a lecture-performance series. Together, these programs are addressing subjects of joint interest to scholarly inquiry and Stew’s own body of work: the intertwining of identity, music, cultural history, and creative expression.

The course, “Stew’s Song Factory,” is taking a two-pronged approach, mingling the study of existing music with the creative practice of song writing. The class composition, too, reflects an unconventional mix: students come from the School of Music, theater, the visual arts, First Wave, and other areas; experienced songwriters commingle with those entirely new to the practice. It’s a mixture Stew sought because he believes it reflects the mixing and boundary crossing that characterizes contemporary art itself.

As an historical study, Stew will introduce popular music examples from Stephen Foster to the present, considering them in their historical contexts, as examples of cultural work, and as expressions of individual musicians’ personal circumstances. At times they will engage in a kind of creative listening that will bring together seemingly disparate musical examples with the question of how they might illuminate broader musical-cultural themes. What, for example, can we learn about musical sub-cultures by listening to Allen Ginsburg and the Lumpen (a musical group affiliated with the Black Panthers) on the same day? Why are musicians as different as Nina Simone and The Doors so drawn to the musical theater songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht?

Alongside this, Stew will work with students on their own song writing projects. As a songwriter well versed in traditional forms and styles, he wants to offer these tools to younger artists while honoring their own musical practices. Rather than, say, trying to replace a hip-hop poet’s style with his own, he wants to expand the available palette, presenting his methods as one tool among many.

Embedded in both aspects of the course are questions about music’s place in society. How do modern technologies enable song-making even for those without training? Do programs like GarageBand equip people to make a new kind of folk music? What is music’s role in individuals’ personal chronology? How can the history of popular music help us to understand the complex connections and interweavings that are part of our national and international history? Though Stew is clearly the class leader, he expects to learn from his students—their expertise about different genres of music, their understanding of contemporary music’s meaning, and things he may learn that he’ll bring to his own creative process. “I always walk away from an encounter with people younger than me by learning something. There’s never been a time where I didn’t… It’s part of staying creative and alert.”

Stew’s other campus project is curating series of performances and talks, bookended by at the beginning by a screening of Passing Strange and at the end with a performance by The Negro Problem. In between, the roster features multi-talented artists whose work speaks to issues of gender, sexuality, race, and social justice through music, theater, film, and academic scholarship. In choosing these artists, Stew sought out the same diversity that he did in inviting students from around campus to his class: “I could have easily just invited musicians, I could have easily invited just people from the New York theater community and just had it be monolithic… [but] I want to invited guests that are going to make something happen.”

There’s a utopian vision informing the choice of these artists, but it sits right next to that gentle but still confrontational challenge. When Stew talks about his relationship with an audience, it’s not just by way of hoping that he makes people happy. Instead, it’s about respecting an audience that can accept difficult things: “When an artist makes a challenging piece of work, they’re respecting the audience. They’re being nice to the audience. They’re saying ‘here’s me, I’m going out on a limb with this crazy thing, and I’m hoping that you like it. They want you to like their crazy play, even though it’s weird and avant-garde. It’s the human thing to do.”

In that spirit, while these performances reflect each artist’s work, Stew hopes that the series will open up the possibility of boundary-crossing, of self-finding, for the audiences, too. He hopes that some students will see work that speaks to parts of their identities that may be difficult to talk about. That some will walk out of performances with a greater sense of sympathy for and curiosity about that which is different from their own experience. And that these things might do both personal and artistic work.

Stew’s impulse toward truth-telling, toward naming difficulties, comes from a deeply humane worldview: “We’re incomplete if we don’t understand everybody that’s out there, especially artists.” It’s a hope that art can be smart, sentimental, funny. And that it can change us.

-Jessica M. Courtier, PhD, September 2011