Surf Jazz

The Marketts weren't a band in the standard sense, but a collection of veteran Los Angeles session players assembled by producer Joe Saraceno to capitalize on the emerging surf music scene of the early 1960s. Loosely known as "the wrecking crew," and including, among others, guitarists Tommy Tedesco and Rene Hall, sax player Plas Johnson, bassist Jimmy Gordon, and drummers Earl Palmer and Ed Hall, the so-called Marketts probably had more in common with 1940s jazz than they did Dick Dale, and the charming collection of shuffles, stomps and trippy lounge jazz they produced for the surf market is really a genre all its own. The group's first single, 1962's "Surfer's Stomp" b/w "Balboa Blue," is indicative, featuring a lazy, sax-led shuffle on the A-side, reprising the same rhythm on "Balboa Blue," only with a different melody line (again led by Johnson's sax), that generates a leisurely, joyous, and infectious groove. It was wonderful stuff, and while this version of the Marketts (they were really more a brand than a group) was marketed as a surf outfit, their gentle merging of R&B and small combo swing is really something else again, a style that -- for lack of a better term -- might be called "surf jazz."