Commuting to Sydney from Tasmania, Guitarist Steve Brien

JGT contributor Joe Barth talks to Steve Brien, one of Sydney’s finest jazz guitarists.

For years Steve Brien has been a core member of the jazz scene in Sydney, Australia.  He has been a first-call guitarist for all the local musicians as well as occasionally performing with world-class artists as they have traveled through Sydney. Since the pandemic, he has maintained his career while living in Tasmania.

JB:  Growing up in Sydney, what led you to play jazz?

SB:  I grew up on the north side of Sydney and through the last year of high school (1975) I was playing professionally in a “covers and R& B band.”  I heard George Benson’s Breezin’  on the radio and thought ” What the…?” Now that’s how the guitar should be played!” Later I heard a fellow high school student a year below me playing standards on the guitar in a classroom at lunchtime.  We became friends, hung out together and I got the bug to play.

JB:  In 1985 you moved to New York City and studied with Jack Wilkins and John Scofield. What did you appreciate most about that era of development?

SB:  I had met Scofield a few years before at a Jamey Aebersold clinic in Sydney. When I got a grant for some overseas development, I went to the US and did a course John Scofield was hosting at the Drummers Collective in New York City. Unfortunately, the standard of enrolment wasn’t high (bizarrely) but the upshot was that I got to play with John each class while he demonstrated turnaround ideas and other techniques. I also had some great lessons with Jack Wilkins and a lot of time to just hang out with him and talk guitar.  I realized the holes in my playing from just being around the level of musician in New York and so I began to transcribe solos and ingest the bebop language. 

JB:  To you, what are three of the most influential jazz guitar albums and why? 

SB:  One would be Her Name Is Julie by Julie London with Barney Kessel on guitar. Every song is a lesson in the art of accompanying a singer or solo instrument. Next would be Meditation by Joe Pass.  Solo guitar at its best in terms of chord substitutions, melodic playing, and getting a great sound out of one’s instrument.  The third would be Solid by Grant Green. Every song is a hard-bop masterclass. It is absolutely swinging from “go to Wohh (work of human hands).” 

JB:  Moving back to Sydney in 1987, how did you find the jazz scene there in terms of making a living as a player?

SB:  When I got back in ‘87 I went full-time with the James Morrison Quartet/ Quintet. We toured constantly Europe and Australia, so I was in a bit of a bubble work-wise. But I know the scene in Sydney was strong with jazz clubs and festivals and commercial gigs. There were TV shows with resident bands, and we have sports clubs in the Australian state of New South Wales in particular where gambling is legal.  These clubs had cabaret acts, so there were lots of big bands and small ensembles to work in. 

JB:  What brought about your move to Connecticut and the New York area around 1992?

SB:  My first wife was American, from Virginia, and she was homesick.  Basically, I had the opportunity to live in the USA and I didn’t want to later turn age fifty and wish I’d moved there earlier. We didn’t want to live in New York City but wanted to be relatively close. We had two kids at the time, so we chose Connecticut. 

JB:  You moved back to Sydney in 1998 to teach at NSW Conservatory of Music and got right back into the jazz scene in Sydney.

SB:  Yeah, I was looking for a teaching position in Connecticut but had no graduate degree.  NSW Conservatorium offered me a position. I loved living in Connecticut, but with a family, the steady income from a teaching position is important, so we moved back. It was a good move with plenty of work and the 2000 Olympics being in Sydney were amazing gig-wise for me.

JB:  What do you appreciate most about the guitar that you use?

SB:  I play a handmade guitar a “poor man’s Benedetto” made by one of my long-term students Ray Archie. He makes guitars as a hobby- but this one is special. He sourced the wood from Canada and it’s a type of spruce that’s been underwater for decades, so it has these wormholes instead of F holes!  It is a beautiful archtop.

JB:  During the pandemic in 2020 you moved to Tasmania to hone some specific skills. Tell us about that.

SB:  We bought a “fixer-upper” in Tasmania in 2017 and were working on it when the pandemic struck. The state border closed, and all my lessons went online. We ended up riding out the pandemic in Tasmania and after a year or so found we really liked the lifestyle.  So, we decided to sell our place in Sydney and live in Tasmania. I commute (1hr 15min flight) for my 2 teaching days and stay with a friend during the University semester. I leave a bicycle shackled at the airport and I have a room at the Conservatorium where I have amps & a guitar. The downside is that Tasmania is sleepy and not a lot of gigs going.  So not a lot of high-level players, so I do a lot of solo gigs. I used the pandemic time to hone my vocal skills. I have always advised my students to sing (particularly their lines) as it makes them doubly employable. So, I took my own advice and learned the lyrics to the standards I play. I found I knew most of them anyway.   I now feel a deeper connection to the melody, and I’ve become a scat specialist and improved my bebop language in a way I don’t think would have developed without singing. 

JB:  Tell us about your most recent album.

SB:  The last recording I did was a few weeks before the lockdown with my good friend Bruce Brown (an expat Californian jazz vocalist & piano player living in Wellington, New Zealand where he teaches for the University there). It is a great and clever album called The Death of Expertise. Since then, I haven’t had the bug to record, but recently I have been talking to my old saxophone friend and ex-Jazzmessenger Dale Barlow about recording some originals. It’s just in the planning stage but I’ll let you know when it’s in the bag.

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