The ​​Schooled Chaos of Jazz

In a middle-class beachside community—not the tawniest on the coast at the time, but center of the road, peopled with hard-working families, downwardly mobile intellectuals, free-range kids, returning vets, acid heads, spiritualists, and rock and rollers, a landscape bordered by estuaries and defined by crumbling cliffs, spindly pines, railroad tracks, and miles of ocean—worked a surf-jazzed mailman named Steve Soderberg. 

This was in the early 1970s. The community was called Del Mar, California. 

Letter-carrier Soderberg had picked up the surf bug a decade earlier during the 1960s boom in Los Angeles. The avocation may, or may not, have led him south to San Diego County. He was described as an ultra-smooth practitioner of the era’s style. And when adulthood came knocking, when the boards and the direction of surfing changed, Soderberg couldn’t put it down. 

For a family man, there was no money in this nearshore play. So, his big idea to keep the thrill going was to make surf films, to capture a thing that changed as quickly as the tide—and to charge money for screening it. 

Frame grabs from A Matter of Style by Steve Soderberg. Frame grabs courtesy of Steve Soderberg.

Obviously, this surf flick scheme had its challenges—the cost of equipment, film, processing, plus the editing, promotion, and mostly, the time. Soderberg would ask his young wife to meet him in their car down at the beach, loaded with photographic gear, at a prearranged hour. He’d hustle through his mail route, park the USPS vehicle, and sprint to film waves and surfing.

For any documentarian, the defining challenge is always, in the end, finding talent. Soderberg’s first gambit had lobbed him into a group of rascals that hung out down at Del Mar’s 17th Street. They wore shaggy hair and made their own boards in a nearby basement—calling them “Basement Surfboards.” They thought they “owned the place.” They talked yoga and Ram Dass. There was no professional surf scene on the coast to speak of, and if there had been, these kids would have sneered at it. Instead, they fawned over a teen-phenom-turned-drop-out named Wayne Lynch. Worth mentioning: Lynch lived in near seclusion on the other side of the planet, in Australia. There were no “posts,” no instant clips, no updates, messages, or electronic mailings. Wayne Lynch was lauded as the “inventor of vertical surfing,” and in mimicking his style, this group of Del Mar surfers might as well have been interpreting Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring through a tin can. 

And yet, there was evolution in imitation.

Some 45 years after Soderberg captured tiny moments in Del Mar’s shore break, I sat with renowned jazz guitarist Peter Sprague in his music studio, SpragueLand, and watched and rewatched a clip of Sprague that Soderberg captured when Sprague was a teen. The surfboard is very short, wide, and flat—a saucer with a single, thin, flexible fin. The scene is backlit, green, silver, and ragged. Sprague, a regular footer, drops into a crunchy, left-breaking wave in a low crouch. He grabs the rail and guides it through a bottom-turn arc—a spoon slicing through a dollop of mint jelly—before slinging vertically up the wave’s face and flaring through the hackles of a platinum lip. The turn is as complete from beginning to end as a peacock’s tail fan and, to my mind, just as brilliant. Sprague lands back into the trough of the green wave again and disappears into history.

It goes without saying that the initial bursts of the shortboard movement were conducted, with notable exceptions, on single-fins. Riders tended to load up powerful bottom turns and hurl themselves up a wave’s face only to stall there—a bird caught on a wire—almost expecting the wave to help them down again. I’ve always found these top turns an anticlimax, a letdown.So much kinetic potential in the approach, so little follow-through. 

Sprague’s turn was not that. More than ten years before the advent of the thruster, Sprague’s arc appeared foundational to something Mick Fanning might do today. A tail waft or a blow-tail. And studying it, I began to suspect that I’d tripped upon an evolutionary arm of surfing that might have been so potent, if only…

*

I heard rumors that Sprague had pulled off an “El Rollo,” on his feet, in the 1970s. There was an actual backside cutback, a roundhouse, in which Sprague would carve deep into the flats, redirect toward the approaching lip, go vertical and, on hitting the curl, pivot switch-stance, dropping back in on his forehand. 

“We had some moves,” he said, recently.

The cause of my visit to Spragueland had to do with another skill the teenaged Peter Sprague had nourished. About the time he was destroying lips in Del Mar, he was also becoming a dutiful musician—not only him, but a gang of local kids. Sprague’s younger brother Tripp chose the saxophone. For Peter it was the guitar. A friend picked up drums, another piano. At some point Sprague seemed to see the dual trajectories of his chosen arts approaching up ahead. He could be an underground shred-rat-turned-shaper, no doubt. He’d already shaped 50 to 60 blades. The other path was fraught. Del Mar was not New York, or even Los Angeles. San Diego, at 20 miles away, seemed very far.

“I really wanted to be a player,” Sprague said. “And to be a player you have to sit in a room and practice. I remember having stuff I had to practice and Steve [Soderberg] coming over and saying, ‘Hey, let’s film,’ and I’d have to say, ‘No.’”

There were initial, maybe obvious, unanswerable, questions. For example, when you ride waves, is there flow? Can it feel rhythmic? And if so, does that experience correspond to anything approaching tempo? Amid the soundscape, is there a soundtrack? Does surfing create, display, and highlight elements such as harmony? Is there art to be had between the trough and the peak? And if so, does that combination have a name? 

It’s hard to fling a dead cat into a lineup and not hit a surfer/musician. Sharp minds have plumbed the relationship between the two arts. Some point out that music and surfing share ever-changing canvases. Timing is critical. This provides opportunities for improvisation and style. The comparison has almost become…a thing.

When I broached the subject with Sprague, he was reticent to weigh in. The first day we met he offered a minimalist view: “Well, there are ocean waves, and there are sound waves.”

It seemed practiced. The statement was an elemental truth that conjured an image of energy moving across vast stretches. And it also smuggled an implication: that you could ride both.

Sprague was cagey. “There are times,” he said, “when the instrument disappears. It’s rare, but it happens.” 

Before this juncture, I couldn’t help but indulge in the surfing/music comparison, but in talking to Sprague that through-line stumbled, felt vapid. In profiling the world-class jazz guitarist, in real life, I saw a more grounded line of questioning: What happens when passion overlaps passion? Can one win out? For how long? And then what?

*

“The influence was right there in the house,” said award-winning classical guitarist and music professor Fred Benedetti. He’s known Peter Sprague for 30 years. Benedetti also played in a band with Tripp Sprague, Peter, and their father, Hall, a percussionist. Benedetti said, along with all of the jazz records in the home, that the patriarch was the influence. 

A sociologist, Hall Sprague punched the clock at a think tank in La Jolla called Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. It was a renowned research lab that churned out groundbreaking ideas, including Carl Rodgers’ work on group behavior. On his own time, Hall seemed a bit of a bon vivant. “My father would pull out the bongos and Zen out for hours with the Miles [Davis] recording Miles Ahead,” Peter remembered. “I thought he was nuts.”

“He was a character,” said bassist Bob Magnusson, already a professional musician when he first noticed Hall and the boys. “Their dad would take them to jazz clubs where we were playing.” 

Peter and Tripp were into rock and roll at the time: the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, John Mayall and Cream. They were starting to play around town themselves—street corners, steak houses. Magnusson had the foresight to drive up from San Diego and check them out. He took to calling the shred-rat brothers from up the coast, “Del Martians.” An elder musician, he seemed to see a change happening. He remembered Peter always with a beater, nylon-string guitar, which was often brought to the beach without any intent to jam. 

But there was something more. “[Hall] got the boys listening to advanced harmonies that they weren’t getting from pop,” Magnusson said. “It was natural. The more they heard [jazz], the more they were attracted to it.”

The Sprague brothers remember this time differently. For Tripp, things were clear-cut. Their parents didn’t seem to push the boys toward any particular discipline, recreational or artistic. Early on, Hall would paddle out with them. The excitement still clear in his voice, Tripp recalled a rather long drive up to San Clemente so that the family could purchase an electric planer. Their mother allowed them to set up the shaping operation under the house. Then one day, Tripp said, “We rediscovered our dad’s jazz collection.” Soon, he said, “We abandoned any thought of making money shaping.”

 Musically, Peter said, “I remember a real pivot point.” He was about 15. Tripp was a year younger. John Coltrane’s solo on the song “Dear Old Stockholm” lit the imagination. Peter said he began asking questions of the music he’d been living with. He began “practicing like crazy,” putting time into the theory, an effort to make it invisible. While in high school, he was able to take music classes at the nearby University of California, San Diego. The gigs started to pile up as well.

But Sprague still loved surfing.

“It was on the edge,” he said. “Maybe I had a little intuition.” He reasoned that shaping, which was the only way he could make money in the surf scene, wasn’t nearly as fun as the act of surfing itself. Whereas, when playing music, “It was always 5-feet and glassy.” It wasn’t some “heroic decision.” He thought, “If I can just survive in some basic manner, that’s a really great thing.” 

Though Sprague seemed to have everything he could want in Del Mar, the teen was struggling academically. He just wasn’t into mainstream high school—he called it “slow motion stuff.” But both of his parents held masters degrees, thus academic failure would not fly. So, Sprague lobbied his parents to send him to the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. It was cold and far from the ocean, but Sprague loved being surrounded by a cast of international musicians. His year there was spent holed up in the basement practice rooms, “immersed in a world of scales.”

It was when Sprague returned to California that, ironically, he shot some of his best clips with Soderberg. Likely, it was the case that Sprague was merely growing into his full form as a surfer. But things were blossoming musically as well. He assembled a string of bands. He traveled to Boston and studied with Albin Czak and Pat Metheny. One break came when a saxophonist named Bob Mover came to San Diego with Chet Baker’s band and stayed on after Baker left town. Sprague linked up with Mover, a veteran of New York’s jazz clubs, and the former brought Sprague to New York for his first legitimate jazz recordings.

One skill that separated the “Del Martian” from other studio musicians was his ability to arrange and transcribe music. Since his time at Interlochen, he’d been a big fan of Chick Corea’s piano solos. On one of Sprague’s early recordings for a label called Xanadu, Sprague played a 20-minute mash-up of Corea’s hits. The label asked Corea himself to write the liner notes for the album, putting Sprague in touch with his hero. Sprague began transcribing Corea’s music for him. The latter invited Sprague to play at his famous Valentine’s Day party in Los Angeles. All of the greats were there. And the surfer must have played okay, because Corea asked Sprague to join the band on some gigs, one of which was at the National Mall in Washington D.C., with Corea and jazz legend Al Jarreau. Trading licks, before a sea of fans in the nation’s capital, Sprague said, was “some golden territory.”

Recently Sprague made what he called a “home movie,” a sprawling, nostalgic compilation of footage from family archives, jam sessions, and surf trips. One notable scene in particular was built of a series of still photos that Hall captured of his sons in Oahu during the summer of 1969. Sprague’s parents had been split-up for some time. Single, Hall rented a house east of Diamond Head. Peter and Tripp flew over to join him. The boys surfed a reef out back, and Hall dutifully snapped shots all summer. 

The element that caught my eye, in these otherwise ordinary family photos, was the style. Again, I was confronted with that aggressive, yet graceful, single-fin action that I’d so admired in the Soderberg clip. In the rest of the home movie, which spans most of Sprague’s life, you can see how he managed his two passions. He went on surf trips, a lot of them, always with some gig or recording as an excuse. My favorites occur in Hawaii, as if Jimi Hendrix’s Rainbow Bridge had been stretched into a lifetime. For me, the definitive scene occurs as a sideline, a blip. Sprague is in his thirties, sitting on pavement playing a nylon-string acoustic. An elegant woman named Char Dyer is standing and singing jazz-standard, “When You Gotta Go (You Gotta Go).” The duo is framed by palm trees and backed by green volcanic heights. To me, it sums up Sprague’s vibe: world class jams in a parking lot in the tropics, filmed by a shaky VHS recorder.

Not long after I began wading into Sprague’s work, he let me know that Soderberg would be screening one of his old surf films at La Paloma in Encinitas, and invited me to join him. We thought there was a chance of catching a clip of a teenaged Sprague on the big screen. I was surprised to see the theater so packed. It struck me that many of the people around us were Sprague’s contemporaries—a lifeguard who used to chase Sprague and the gang out of the swim zone, a least one surfer who’d had a hand in building competitive surfing into a full-fledged tour, and a range of surfers who took to the thruster and left Wayne Lynch’s brand of slashing in the history books. 

Sprague has played Jazz at Lincoln Center, toured internationally, published a number of music books—even a few on his own technique—and had recorded an impressive discography. Here we were sitting in a theater filled with his surfing contemporaries, people who went all-in on his other passion. If Sprague had made different decisions, I imagined, he would be among them. Soderberg took to the stage and made a funny, self-deprecating speech. He was elderly now, and had long suffered from health issues. He said his surf-filmmaking scheme never did result in any money, but there was a whole lot of fun. You could see that in his face.

When the lights dimmed, Sprague seemed to open up. “I loved these surfers who prioritized beauty,” he said. “That’s what I [tried] to do in surfing.” And in music too, he said—not a move or a note out of place. I supposed he was talking about virtuosity, its energy in multiple forms. “There is something about being in water that is just magical. Surfing is so involving, you lose track of time. You’re in the moment. Music is also an opportunity to enter that space.”

But ultimately, Sprague said, surfing is “kinda selfish, don’t you think? You’re always taking, using an object to mess up a wave.” Most of the time, the act doesn’t generate anything for anyone besides the solitary rider. Music on the other hand, “energizes everyone, touches everyone.”

Passion is passion. If there was a difference in the way that Sprague felt about his two arts, that may have been it. One wave broke inward, the other broke outward.

[Feature image: Photo by Thomas Westerlin.]