Surf music was famously invented in the early 1960s by Dick Dale, a Lebanese-American kid from Boston. Dale’s big hit, “Miserlou,” was adapted from a Mediterranean folk song, and he played his guitar like an oud, which he’d learned from his uncle, with staccato verve. Dale turned up the reverb, employed non-Western scales, and included the celebratory Jewish tune “Hava Nagila” in his repertoire. More than a half-century later, New York guitarist Jon Madof and bandmates Yoshie Fruchter (bass) and Nate Rappaport (drums) make surf rock sound all kinds of new on the power trio’s debut album, Netzach (Eternity), which transforms the oceanic sounds of surf into something deeper, heavier and edgier.
Madof is probably best known for his band Zion80, a stunningly innovative concept ensemble that blended the polyrhythms of Fela Kuti’s afrobeat style with the baal teshuva balladry of controversial American rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. The Jon Madof Trio, however, is a stripped-down, amped-up take on radical Jewish music tradition that emerged in Downtown New York during the 1990s. It’s also probably fair to call Madof’s guitar sound the latest in a lineage that also includes the late, great Israeli guitar improviser Yosi Piamenta.
Netzach opens with Madof improvising an unaccompanied introduction to “Achdut” (unity, harmony), a rolling and tumbling synthesis of surf and associated styles extending from Brighton Beach to Tel Aviv. Madof employs a wide array of effects throughout the album, which also touches on jazz, epiphanic balladry, and the off-kilter “afrobeat” of “A Pure Heart.” Fruchter and Rappaport respond to Madof’s instrumental storytelling like the longtime cohorts they are. The album might reach its apotheosis in “The Beautiful Six,” which suggests a klezmer mosh pit replete with ancient gnarl. Madof and company demonstrate that surf music was never as simple as might have thought, and that it can still roar like the waves. Netzach is a significant contribution to the Tzadik label’s ongoing commitment to exploring Jewish musical culture in novel manifestations.
