Relentless

By the mid 1950s, two men – trumpeter Miles Davis and arranger Gil Evans – changed the face of bebop. Davis had not adapted to the frantic double and triple times of bebop and was looking for something else in music: space, elegance, aching notes and searching phrases. A new jazz emerged. This birth of ‘cool’ was played slower, with acres of space created to allow notes and phrases to hover and disappear slowly into the big bell of the sky.

So how does surfing relate to jazz? Whether you are a longboarder, shortboarder or big-wave rider, what is common is improvisation around two basic moves: the bottom turn and the cut back.

Longboarding has elegance with such moves as walking, trimming and noseriding, something that only a few can do with real finesse. Watch Californian Kassia Meador with a full hang ten in the sweet spot of the curl, suddenly suspending time, wringing out big blue notes from the sea’s body, lingering in space, like an aching Miles Davis solo.

Shortboarding has a twin vocabulary, something brilliantly spoken by Tom Curren. Firstly, it’s torque, speed and locking-in, getting at the core of the wave’s energy and exploiting this through radical turns in the pocket and via functional tube riding. Secondly, there are the manoeuvres that echo other board and bike sports; moves that work at the edges of the wave, pulling its energy ragged, toying with exclusion as outlaw and outsider in avoiding the pocket to ride the lip, launching outlandish aerials and making floaters stick as if at the eye of a storm, in a still patch of ocean, the movie reel flicking over, the screen gone white. From Christian Fletcher and Martin Potter, through Kelly Slater to Dane Reynolds, these moves continue to be developed in more radical ways. And in big-wave riding, the draw is the adrenalin rush in outrunning monsters at speed and sweeping turns like Laird Hamilton on a liquid mountain face; or through perfect timing at takeoff to stay alive as a massively thick square lip taps Shane Dorian on the shoulder out of curiosity and does not break his back this time because his positioning is uncanny.

Let’s say that the wave is the bass line of the sea’s music. This is the pulse that wrings itself out as the snappy snare drum flourishes and rim shots of the medium to smaller reelers – a punchy shorebreak, or an unraveling point break – are held taut by a strong offshore wind, snapping back at triple time towards shore as if on a piece of elastic drawn to breaking point, then collapsing with a flourish like a series of big cymbal splashes, onto sand, coral, rock or wall, or a deep-water pressure bed.

The surfer is the soloist, stating the melody (the basic moves of bottom turn and cutback) and then improvising against the ocean’s shifting backdrop of bass and drums – the grind and pulse, the rhythm machine, the accented accompaniment. First, the surfer must join the band, the often unpredictable mix of elements and topography – sea, wind, currents, bottom shape, tides; the booming, deep bass of the sea with its top note raked off as spray, or the foam apron rushing up and sucking back, shaping the sand or pebble bottom that is the sea’s sounding board. Your solo might be played against a gently unfolding and forgiving face giving room for manoeuvre, leading to cascades of notes, runs, arpeggios; or against a freight-train tube frantically unzipping down the line, the wave biting at you, just held up enough for you to slot in and play long, wailing notes held at an intense pitch, suddenly snipped short in a last-ditch kick out, the curtain coming down like a guillotine, the audience already set for the next act.

Once the surfer gets to know the band, the heart of surfing as jazz emerges in syncopation. Surfing does not march to a regular beat like a military band, but plays around the beat – just off it, just behind it, accenting the off beat. Hipsters are off beat, never satisfied with a regular pulse. Great surfers are always just behind or just ahead of the wave’s pulse – watch Joel Tudor, Dave Rastovich, Rob Machado and Joel Parkinson. They take off just behind the lip and slot in for a deeper tube; paddling in on a fade, a left-go-right, to give a bigger arc to the bottom turn and then gain more speed for a subsequent top turn just under the hook; or smacking the lip at an angle to gain a moment of suspension of gravity and backward slide, creating a space just behind the beat, and then running ahead of the pulse in a quick-time run only to stall, jam the tail, let everything suddenly reel on for a moment as the rhythm section wails and then hang on a long ringing note, only to step on the gas and chase down the drummer with a howling run, hollering the history of jazz as call-and-response slave song, letting freedom ring on the inside section with a big off the lip and a perfect coda.

Where good surfers improvise through extended syncopation, knowing how to match the uncertainty of the wave’s motion, it’s rhythm that keeps all of this together. Without a sense of rhythm, surfers look awkward, unsure and unstable. But rhythm is not just about riding the wave with great timing, it’s about the art and style of the whole surfing experience; eyeing the conditions, judging where to paddle out, duck diving, finding the take-off spot and exploring its limits. The complete ride, as one round performance, is from paddle in to kick out, often in a crowd. This is a holistic grasp of a gig, from setting up to packing up the drums. It’s the drummer who maintains the rhythm in the band and a good jazz drummer accents, or plays around rhythms, dropping bombs, switching to double time, smacking out rim shots, filling in with booming tom-tom rolls, and making colour from cymbal splashes.

After rhythm comes knowledge of the pulse and beat, or following the bass player. While the drummer creates the top end of the beat, the bass player creates challenges around pulse. On some days, the house band just grinds out predictable six-wave sets, the fourth wave the biggest, 15 minutes between sets, the wind combing every unwinding face, stripping off spray. These are rare days for most surfers, whose house bands are jobbing musicians playing low-key gigs, as onshore slop unfolds and now the surfer must work hard to create scintillating solos. This is the beauty of practice, where good surfers can improvise even in the worst conditions. Before the best-waves-in-the-world current ‘dream contest tour’, surfing’s 1980s elite events were held at crowd-pulling places like Huntington and Newquay, often in mushy surf. Australian Tom Carroll trained extensively in sloppy waves to win back-to-back world titles through finals from two-foot Pennsylvania wave pools to 10-foot Pipeline and Sunset in Hawaii.

The tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, at the top of his career by 1959, felt that he had got stuck in a groove and wanted to reinvent his playing. He took a three-year sabbatical from public performance and recording, and took regular trips to the Williamsburg Bridge, in New York, where he would practise eight hours a day and rethink his style. The result was a stunning album, The Bridge, that showed a better-developed tone and an ear for more radical improvisation. Playing solos, improvising against the pulse of the elements, requires a good ear to hear that pulse. Knowledge of the bass line of the sea is the building block of good surfing as it develops discrimination between which waves you choose in a set, where you sit on take off, and which sets you leave alone, often close-outs. Great bassists like Charles Mingus and Dave Holland, and drummers such as Art Blakey and Tony Williams, led bands from behind, stalking their horn players, with pulse and beat running down the soloists like inspired ghosts.

When the basics – the chops – are in place, and the soloist has a stock of tunes, improvisation can be developed. Modern jazz and modern surfing are grounded in two Dukes – Duke Ellington and Duke Kahanamoku – two great improvisers who made things look and sound easy. Both were masters of the lazy sound – music rolling like water, water played like music. Jazz surfers must want to be like these Dukes, making the difficult look easy, stuff just rolling out as if it were second nature, where actually it is carefully constructed, painstakingly learned, beautifully improvised and honed. And, like Sonny Rollins, jazz surfers must reinvent style on a regular basis, trying new equipment, surfing new spots, and learning to play with challenging bands – gaining a new repertoire.

The Dominican novelist Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, wrote a poignant short story called ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ about a black woman living in London in the 1950s who suffered from racial abuse. As a celebration of her difference, she improvised wild tunes in her head. She met a man who saw value in these tunes, transcribed them for her, and sold them to publishers who called the music ‘jazz’. The woman could not understand why the music needed a label at all. For her, all life is improvisation. So let them call it jazz if they wish, just because it’s away from the norm. Let’s ditch the simile: surfing is not like jazz, surfing is jazz. It’s radical music, the sound of freedom, the yells and hollers and the sweet sighs, taken to the ocean’s skin and tattooed as blue notes in sharps and flats.

Last.fm page for Duke Ellington: www.last.fm/music/Duke+Ellington

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