s had the power to use other photographers and perhaps sometimes did so on the basis of race. "But most of my connections came through the musicians who asked for me." These musicians included Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Duke Ellington--Stewart's photographs appear on their album covers. Regarding the relative scarcity of album cover art by African Americans, Stewart says, "when I was doing covers, I didn't think of it as an African American contribution. I thought of it as making a living, and fortunately I was successful. I had three kids, a wife and a mother-in-law. It never occurred to me that what I was doing was sociologically significant." Friendships developed from Stewart's professional association with jazz musicians and that close relation is documented in his JAZZ FILES volume of photographs originally published by Little Brown (1985) and then by DeCapo. The answer to our question about the dearth of record cover art by blacks seems so obvious to writer Amiri Baraka that raising it seemed fatuous. "Why aren't we free?," he asked impatiently in response. "What ever we lack in representation, it's because of lack of money, lack of education, lack of opportunity. The reason is not because we're evil, stupid niggers." During his Greenwich Village period of the 1950s and early '60s, Baraka wrote jazz criticism (including liner notes) and was friendly with jazz musicians as well as with visual artists. Close relations between jazz musicians and visual artists also existed among the folks who visited, hung, played and/or stayed at Ornette Coleman's Artists' House in SoHo and in the Weusi artists collective that was active in Harlem in the 1960s. Painter Joe Overstreet says that Coleman's Artists' House was one of the first loft coops on Prince Street. Moving there in the late 1960s, Coleman lived over a gallery and space where musicians could play. At the time Joe Overstreet was living over ...
