Stewie Speer - Early Jazz Career

Early Jazz Career

Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Speer was one of the generation of distinguished Melbourne jazz drummers who came onto the music scene in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Alongside contemporaries like Len Barnard, John Sangster, Laurie Thompson and Alan Turnbull, Speer was strongly influenced by Melbourne's three leading "trad" drummers, Bob Featherstone, Charlie Blott and Billy Hyde, who founded the well-known Australian music company that bears his name.

Throughout the 1950s Speer played the prevailing trad jazz style with Roger Bell, Bob Barnard, Frank Traynor and others, but he was drawn irresistibly to bebop, which had begun to filter across to Australia from the USA in the late 1940s.

Although 'trad' ruled the roost in Australian jazz well into the 1950s, both Speer and Charlie Blott amassed considerable collections of imported bebop records and both were avid fans of the new genre. Jazz historian Andrew Bisset records that on returning home in the early hours after gigs, Speer and his friends, including sax player Splinter Reeves, would "... sneak in through the back window so as not to wake his mother and stay up until breakfast trying to work the records out."