Joshua Josue: 'Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom'

I rarely review rock albums, but every once in a while the music demands my attention, and such is the case with Joshua Josue’s ‘Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom’.

Fellow jazz buff, Matt Fripp wrote an article in 2024, exploring the importance of 1959 for JazzFuel. But 1959 was an equally important year for rock and pop music, with artists like Paul Anka, Elvis Presley and Bobby Darin producing some of their finest hits, with classics from Chuck Berry and Ray Charles. Above all else, 1959 is remembered for the deaths of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens in February.

What Portland, Oregon guitarist Joshua Josué has done is take what music was left after Holly and Valens performed for the last time on 2 February 1959 before stepping aboard that fateful plane.

Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom takes the musical snippets left behind by two young men with inordinate talent who had such an influence on thousands of musicians and Josué himself. The Surf Ballroom referred to was the location of that final appearance in Clear Lake, Iowa.

Listening to Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom takes us back to that seminal year in America, when music seemed to come to life. Josué takes demos recorded in Buddy Holly’s Greenwich Village apartment and during Ritchie Valens’ last recordings with Bob Keane. The new versions add a flavour of the technological developments that have taken music to new levels in those 65+ years.

One of the most covered songs in rock and roll is La Bamba, a Mexican folk song made famous in 1958 by the young Ritchie Valens. Josué’s version makes it his own while still using the vibrancy and energy of the pre-1960s. Meanwhile, the Paddi Wack song comes to us with a sense of humour and fun that contrasts brilliantly with the melancholic Now That You’re Gone.

The whole album seems to take those demos and brings them up to date in what is far more than a tribute album. Josué says: “With this album, I’ve returned to Buddy Holly’s intimate apartment tapes and Ritchie Valens’ final demo recordings, imagining what these songs might have become had their lives not been cut short. This project is not a venture into 1950s nostalgia, but a heartfelt homage to the songwriters who shaped my musical journey. Each track is completed with the sensitivity and clarity of modern recording techniques, while staying true to the spirit and forward momentum that Buddy and Ritchie might have brought to these songs had they lived.”