Stereophile Magazine
February 2007

Records to Die For
Frank Hewitt / Fresh from the Cooler

By Thomas Conrad

Frank Hewitt, piano; Ari Roland, bass; Jimmy Lovelace, drums
Smalls Records SRCD-0016; Luke Kaven, prod., engineer

Fresh from the Cooler is one of Frank Hewitt’s four posthumous releases to date on the Smalls label. The title is a brutal reality check. In his final years, Hewitt often slept in a stripped-out walk-in refrigerator in the back of Smalls, the underground Greenwich Village club for which the label is named. He died unknown in 2002, but his four Smalls recordings prove that he was a major figure, a missing link in the history of jazz piano. His dark notes, like stabs of love and pain embedded in the air, make most jazz pianists sound like Sunday-school teachers.