Musicians - Stewie Speer

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	Musicians - Stewie Speer

Australian drummer Stewie Speer (born Melbourne, Victoria, June 26 1928; died Sydney, New South Wales, September 16 1986) is best known as a member of the 1960s-70s Australian group Max Merritt & The Meteors. Like Charlie Watts, Speer was one of many rock players who began their career in jazz, and like other contemporary Australian jazz musicians who worked in popular music – Bob Bertles, Bernie McGann, Warren Daly, Bobby Gebert, Don Burrows – he was known for his ability to work across many musical genres.

Speer was part of the generation of distinguished Melbourne jazz drummers who came onto the scene in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Alongside contemporaries like Len Barnard, John Sangster, Laurie Thompson and Alan Turnbull, Stewie was strongly influenced by Melbourne's three leading "trad" drummers, Bob Featherstone, Charlie Blott and Billy Hyde (founder of a well-known Australian music company).

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. While '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 Andresw Bissett records that on returning home in the early hours after fter gigs, Stewie 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."

In early 1956 saxophonist and bop fanatic Brian Brown returned from Europe and formed a new band with like-minded players – Stewie, trumpeter Keith Hounslow, schoolboy pianist Dave Martin and bassist Barry Buckley. Bisstett remarks that in Speer, Brown found a drummer "… who swung. Speers had beautiful time, especially on cymbal, hard and straight ahead, with the message on his kit 'Art Blakey For Pope'."

The Brian Brown Quintet were regulars at Horst Liepolt's influential Jazz Centre 44 in St Kilda, which operated from 1955 to 1960. As indicated by the 'Blakey for Pope' message on Speer's kit, the Quintet championed the more progressive (but less popular) east-coast style of modern jazz. At that time, the preferred genre was the "cool", west coast style epitomized by artists like Chet Baker and Dave Brubeck who were then all the rage with modern jazz fans in Australia. The Brian Brown Quintet were enthusiastic ambassadors for bop, introducing Melburnians to music whilch was still largely unheard in Australia including artists like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. Speer continued to work in trad bands to earn a living, but he was a regular member of the Quintet until it split in1960.

Stewie then moved to Sydney and became a regular at local jazz haunts like Quo Vadis in Martin Place, Chequers, and Sammy Lee's legendary Latin Quarter, where Jimmy Sloggett's band (which included Bernie McGann, Bob Bertles and Graham Morgan) was introducing Sydney club goers to the latest sounds of soul music. It was during this period that Stewie succeeded legendary New Zealand actor-drummer Bruno Lawrence as the drummer in the Latin Quarter's resident band, after Bruno (who was soon to join The Meteors) fell ill with hepatitis.

In the mid-Sixties, Speer was an integral part of the fertile scene that centred on the famous El Rocco Jazz Lounge in Kings Cross, playing with groups that included by John Sangster, Judy Bailey, pianist Col Nolan, clarinettist Don Burrows, Warren Daly and others. Founded by Arthur James in 1957, and developed by musicians including Sydney drummer John Pochee from 1957-59, the converted plumber's shop at the top of William Street became the centre of modern jazz in Sydney in the 1960s.

Speer might well have remained a respected member of the local jazz scene had it not been for a series of coincidences that brought him together with Christchurch-born R&B singer Max Merritt.

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