We first met Andrew Longaker at Distillinois, the craft spirit tasting event put on by the Illinois Craft Distillers Association. He and his band were providing the ideal soundtrack to an evening spent sampling the Midwest's best libations, which prompted Brian Cary, our man on the ground, to connect with Andrew and exchange info.
This was good, because Longaker is the epitome of the modern jazz musician, a living, breathing participant in that conflicted, undervalued, and delineated space. It's a hard place to be, and an even harder place to make a living, conjuring up images of sparsely decorated apartments with windows opening to fire escapes over the L train just in case the strain gets to be too much. There are some cats sitting there with a smoking ashtray and a bottle between them, and one of them is playing guitar like you've never heard it played before. That's Andrew Longaker in a nutshell.
The problem with jazz in this day and age is that people presume to know something about it. But knowing jazz is impossible, as it can't be understood, only experienced. Jazz is something that is only grasped in the moment. It isn't music you listen to, it's music you live through.
So what does a true jazz musician do when his occupation is co-opted by cookie cutter clubs filled with stereotypical patrons? He makes a surf movie.
Now jazz is just about the last thing that comes to mind when you think of surfing, but in truth the two could hardly be more alike. Both are about improvisation, about flirting with the razor edge of failure, about that delicate balancing act between flow and wipeout. At their core, they are cultures of resistance against the very assumptions of society, populated by practitioners so committed to their pursuit as to have eliminated all other distractions. Jazz and surfing? They're about as close to the truth as you can get.
Journey in Sound and Surf is an independent production by Andrew Longaker filmed in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca.