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."
Read more about this topic: Stewie Speer
Famous quotes containing the words early, jazz and/or career:
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.”
—Isadora Duncan (1878–1927)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)