Houston, Texas, born and ghetto raised, Frank is the sixth child of a family of twelve children. His father, a teacher, played guitar with Russell Jacquet, Eddie Cleanhead Vinson, Johnny Fontenett and Arnett Cobb. His mother is a gospel vocalist.
At the age of 8, young Frank took up piano lessons and began to play the trumpet soon after. While in junior high school, he began to play the Euphonium and the Tuba. To play trombone he started at the age of 16. After musical studies at the famed Berklee College of Music in Boston and the Rutgers University in New York he toured with greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Abdullah Ibrahim, Henry Threadgill, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, The Eurythmics, Carla Bley and Don Pullen. He was a member of the first Bobby Watson Horizon Band and at the apex of his career as a sideman he spent a year and a half as musical director of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.
Besides the work with his own groups, Frank still tours a lot with Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy and the big bands of McCoy Tyner and David Murray. A first CD under his name was published 1991 under the TUTU/ENJA label: Tonal Weights and Blue Fire. A second one, Settegast Strut, has been released on the same labe