Surfing shouldn’t really have its own specific type of music. There isn’t a genre or a style that could honestly and wholly sum up the way each person experiences riding a wave.
If you were to just sit on a cliff, a beach, or a parking lot for an hour, watching each and every wave go by then you’d know no two people are looking at those walls of water the same way. One surfer might be aggressive, surfing a wave like for some reason he’s angry at it. The next might surf with patience and calm, letting the wave itself dictate each and every line he picks. The styles would all, or at least should all be different. And you could imagine the soundtracks to those rides would all sound different too. But throwing on a set of waterproof headphones with an mp3 player is a pretty taboo concept that probably won’t catch on in surfing anytime soon, so watching people as they surf to their own soundtrack isn’t something we can expect much of.
It is the idea behind Step N’ Soul though. Four minutes and 30 seconds of English longboarder Sam Bleakley groovin’ and surfing to trumpet playing jazz icon Wynton Marsalis. It’s proof that jazz tunes set some pretty good surfing vibes, and it’s also a reason we call it “the dance.”
Step N’ Soul, when Surfing sync to Jazz from Jablon Productions on Vimeo.
