Frank Hewitt was born October 23, 1935, in Queens, New York, and lived most of his life in Harlem. His mother was a church pianist, and he initially studied classical and gospel music before switching to jazz after hearing a Charlie Parker record; he took bop pianists Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Elmo Hope as his role models.

A fixture on the New York jazz scene from the mid-1950s, Hewitt worked through the 1950s and 1960s with Howard McGhee, Cecil Payne, John Coltrane, Dinah Washington, and Billie Holiday, among others, and in 1961 appeared in the Living Theatre's landmark production of Jack Gelber's The Connection. He also became a regular figure in the circle around pianist Barry Harris — profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com — the same Detroit-rooted bebop lineage whose New York workshops shaped a generation of players. Despite this pedigree, he remained the most under-recognized bebop pianist of his generation: during his lifetime only a single recorded track of his playing was ever released commercially, a version of the Kenny Dorham tune "Prince Albert," credited to the Frank Hewitt Sextet (with Ari Roland on bass, Jimmy Lovelace on drums, and Chris Byars, Zaid Nasser, and Joe Magnarelli on horns), on the various-artists compilation Jazz Underground: Live at Smalls (Impulse, 1998).

In the 1990s Hewitt became a central figure at New York's Smalls Jazz Club, playing there several nights a week for over eight years and leading the club's late Saturday-night jam sessions until his death; in leaner stretches he slept in the club's stripped-out walk-in refrigerator. Musicians who played beside him described a gifted but forbidding presence. Pianist Sacha Perry — himself a protégé of both Barry Harris and Hewitt — recalled that Hewitt refused to chase gigs, telling him that asking for work felt like debasing himself before people he had no respect for. Bassist Ari Roland, who worked alongside Hewitt two or three nights a week for years and later played on every one of his posthumous recordings, put the failure to record him down to a combination of factors: Hewitt's own difficult, prideful temperament and struggles with alcohol and drugs, compounded by a music industry that, in Roland's words, had little appetite for anything that authentic.

That changed only because of one listener. Luke Kaven, a philosophy graduate student doing an internship at Rutgers, became captivated by the Smalls scene in the 1990s and set out to document the pianist musicians there already treated as the room's master. Starting in 1996 Kaven began recording Hewitt intermittently — a closed studio trio session in October 1996, a live quintet set in August 1999, two more live trio dates in April and October 2000 — building an archive with no guarantee any of it would ever be released. Hewitt finally got dedicated studio time in May and June 2001, and again in April 2002, just five months before his death from cancer on September 5, 2002, at age 66; asked during one of those sessions whether he'd want to know the exact day he would die, per an old belief in eastern astrology, Hewitt said he wasn't afraid to die, but he wasn't afraid to live either — some people were. That remark gave the second posthumous release its title, Not Afraid to Live.

None of it reached listeners while he was alive. Starting in 2004, Kaven's Smalls Records label released the recordings one at a time over the following seven years: We Loved You (2004, drawn from the 2001 sessions), Not Afraid to Live (2005, his final studio date, with Louis Hayes on drums in place of his usual Jimmy Lovelace), the quintet set Four Hundred Saturdays (2005), Fresh from the Cooler (2006, actually his earliest recording, from 1996), Out of the Clear Black Sky (2007), and finally Salience (2011) — a full decade after his death, and drawn from the same May 2001 session as We Loved You. Kaven later said the irony haunted him: Hewitt's first disc had turned him into a cult favorite and, in time, a name critics called a genius, and Kaven wondered aloud why Frank couldn't have had that career while he was still living to enjoy it.

A devoted disciple of Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Elmo Hope, Hewitt's hard bop style went almost entirely undocumented during his lifetime despite decades on the scene. Reviewing Fresh from the Cooler in JazzTimes, critic Bill Shoemaker described a "blocky, chiseled sense of structure" combined with real harmonic ingenuity and the ability to stay articulate at fast tempos, calling Hewitt a stylist in the fullest sense and framing his recordings as a missing link showing the direct line running from Powell and Monk through Elmo Hope. The posthumous release of his Smalls trio and quintet sessions stands as a rare and significant late correction to the jazz record — proof, arriving only after his death, of exactly what the musicians around him had always said.