Back in town

We came home two days ago. It feels kind of strange to be in a city again after the latest adventure. Since it never gets dark up there, we hardly got any sleep at all. Instead we had this strange and fantastic flow of fishing, filming, eating and laughing.

Some weird things happened, more about that will be showed later in the blog. Did we get any fish? Yes, we did. Did we loose any fish? Yes we did. Joona will tell you more about that. Here are some pics from the trip. Soon we’ll put up both beautiful and ugly movies, just wait and see! /Fredrik

Håvard casting

Alone on the mountain

Take a closer look!

Nice trout

Håvard enjoys something

Magic light of northern Scandinavia

Magic light 2

On the meny

At the fire place

Why is Tap smiling?

Our producer made some casts...

Tapani was very happy.

Beautiful Norway

Hot day running…

As a fly fisherman and musician I have to stay in shape. As a matter of fact, I believe it is more like this: as a human creature I/we have to stay in shape. Our modern lifestyle will otherwise transform us into cheese doodles!

Anyway, me and Joona ran the half marathon in Gothenburg last week, it is actually the worlds biggest half mara, 58.000 people this year! During the early spring I have been running in cold weather. I like to run in cold weather! On the mara-day, it was suddenly 26 degrees. Help! Guess I was nervous, maybe forgot to drink enough water, I don´t know.

At 13:39 the gun was fired and I began to run. I felt strong and hold up a good tempo. Nice! Perhaps I was aiming a little high. “Must not let anybody pass me, must not”… After 8 km I noticed that my brain didn’t work. But I still had my legs! After 9 km my right leg suddenly started to live its own life. Ignore! At 9.5 km the brain was gone, guess the sun melt it away. Then it happened – I crashed. What more to say. To my defense I can tell you that I wasn’t alone. 1407 people – mainly young, fit and stupid guys also collapsed. I somehow made it to the gig, pretty beaten. adios.

/Gone fishing.

Jazz & Fly Fishing…

What is jazz and what is fly fishing? Some of you who read and watch this blog might be fishing maniacs, musicians or maybe both. But I guess that many of you just discovered a site where four idiots are doing weird stuff and now you’re checking us out every now and then!? I will now try to (maybe you’re already into both J&F) make you try both jazz and fly fishing…

Jazz, is it strange? Do you have to know what you hear when you listen to it? Do you have to play an instrument and buy a hip jazz hat in order to listen to jazz? Of course not. I could write page after page but I’ll try to keep it short! Jazz CAN be strange and demanding to listen at, that’s for sure. But so can pop music. And rock music. And salsa. And so on… The thing is… jazz can also be very smooth and easy to listen to. If you never bought a jazz record in your whole life, there is one magic record that is perfect to start with. The cool thing is that this record never gets bad. It works every time you’ll put it in your CD. I’m talking about Miles Davis, one of the real heroes in the music world.

The name of the record is Kind Of Blue, buy it, it’s a keeper!

Now, what about the fly fishing world? Many people believe that you need to spend lots and lots of money and read thousands of books before you can start to fish. After that you must practice ten hours a day for three years before you will catch anything. This is wrong! People often say “it seems so difficult”. That is not true. It is not difficult! IT IS NOT DIFFICULT! Anyway, get a fly rod and you’ll be surprised! That’s all I’m saying. The only things you need is: 1 fly rod, 1 simple fly reel, 1 fly line, some flies and some regular fishing line. Good luck! /Fredrik

The Latest News

Today it is friday. What are the latest news?

1. Håvard is broke but happy. He found real happiness when he became the gear machine. He is also gonna get some more Norwegian oil money pretty soon, that’s for sure.

2. Earlier this week I promised to arrange a nice little competition. Have I done that? Yes and no… since I want everything to be perfect I don’t dare to start up the competition. There is to much pressure in the air. I’ve been looking for prizes all over my apartment, can’t find anything but trash and garbage. It is very strange. That is why I (as a boss over the whole competition) choose to delay the whole happening. T.b.c!

3. Joona is desperate. After many fishing days he still haven’t caught “the big one”. I say: Hang in there, brother, stay away from the alcoholic comfort-evenings. Sooner or later it’s going to bite over your fly… (but not this year)

4. Tapani is happy because… (nice cliffhanger)

5. I’m sorry.

Searching for prizes...

Creative competition

It is now in the middle of the night, I just arrived from a late gig. Since I’m very tired I might express myself in a not very clear way.

Well well, today I woke up (as usual), had my coffee, ran 14 kilometers, biked 20 kilometers, fixed some pics, thought about some bullshit-ideas and played the drums for three hours. Then I went home again on the dear bike. Tomorrow I’ll do some recording stuff in the morning, then go fishing by the sea – finally some peace.
Speaking about coffee – how come the coffee here in Sweden is at least twice as strong as the coffee in United States? Can someone tell me that please! I really need to know.

Aaah… I almost forgot about the competition! Before I reveal what it is about I can tell you that the prize is gonna be a hell of a prize. The lucky winner of the competition will have the huge and unique possibility to choose among five things from my apartment. One of those “things” is a frozen trout. More info about that later.

The competition… Well, I don’t know how to arrange that yet, have to come up with something smart. Sorry for writhing this messy text. The picture below illustrates how my brain works right now – goodnight. /F

Inside the head

JFF-Lifestyle

Me and Joona went to a well known area outside Gothenburg. As we drove to the fishing spot we listened to our new “not-yet-made-CD” in the car. It sounds really hip! Joona also filmed some weird stuff in the car with his brand new super secret camera. He is filming everything (all the time) and since his camera is very small, you cannot see it. I must destroy the content of that camera, otherwise thera will be problems. Hmmm…

Anyway, it was a beautiful day, the first warm spring day this year. We were aiming for the sea trout. We found the sea trout. We caught the sea trout. A NICE sea trout! My biggest so far actually. You see, here along the west coast of Sweden, the trouts in the sea doesn’t get very big. The average size is around, let’s say 37 cm. If you catch one around 50 cm, it is a quite good day. This trout that bit over my fly today had the length of 61 cm! The rod was bent to an o, I was screaming and Joona was (of course) filming. What a day. Later Joona caught a couple of nice trouts.

In the evening I made a nice and easy done fish soup. I have to say that sea trout is one of the best fishes on the dinner table. Some white wine, homemade bread, the soup, jazz music and a bunch of good friends made that evening really nice. It is the JFF-lifestyle.

Finally…

Lot’s of things are happening right now. The spring is coming, we are allowed to fish for the sea trout, the snow is gone, flowers starts to pop up in the nature and… most important of all: I am free to fish 24 hours a day in one week. So are J-man. The water is still very cold, around one degree (Celsius), something that transforms our legs to ice after a couple of hours out there in the water.

The first fishing day paid of – Joona caught a nice one around one kilo and I managed to catch a slightly bigger one (yes). Since it was the first trout of the year, it of course followed me home to join for dinner. Later this week we will show a nice and easy way to make them very tasty!

There are fly fishers out there who always release the fish, no matter what. Well, I’m not one of those cats (but I release most of the fish I catch), I like to cook and eat fish and feels great to skip the ugly fish in the freeze-box and eat fresh fish instead – fish that not belong to the big ugly fish-industri (grow fast, feed them with pellets, give them more pellets, make them bigger, make them to monsters, sell it to the people who can’t see how we are doing this)

Actually, I realize that I have to go now, Joona is picking me up in five minutes.

GONE FISHING

Hip stuff in the studio

It is done! We are done.The recording session is over and we are totally exhausted. Stylistically, many of our new tunes are more or less jazz, but some takes actually hold a hip beat. Super beat.  We do now have 14 tracks on tape which is more than excellent! The next couple of weeks we will spend many hours listening to the music and try to decide what tunes to put on the CD – that’s not an easy task.

The schedules of the days were about like this:

08:00 The angry alarm screams – time to wake up. Some of us had a light headache

10:00 The recording session begins. Lot’s of noise and voices during a couple of hours. Some tears also.

13:00 Time to take a short break – we went outside and casted with a fly rod. Håvard snapped the leader. Very funny.

16:10 Lunch – Plenty of food and bullshit.

17:00 Recording session…

19:00 Coffee and more coffee. Then tears and even more coffee.

20:00 Stop playing god damn it!

20:30 Spa

Spring Depression…

… or maybe you can call it pre-spring depression. Do you recognize the following things:

1. The food doesn’t taste as much as usual. Everything you eat feels like chewing grandmas one week old porridge.

2. You cannot sleep very good, every night you wake up and scream (very loud horrible sounds).

3. When you talk to people you don’t understand anything, all you here is bla bla ice bla ice ice bla bla.

4. You don’t recognize your self when you look into the mirror – instead you see a big grey fish that smiles back at you.

5. The madness is growing, it gets bigger and bigger every second.

Well, do you feel like this? In that case… maybe you should go to the doctor. So should I. The same goes for Håvard, Tapani and Joona.

Anyway, dear folks – We have a problem in Gothenburg! I know that you suffer with us when I tell you what it is about: the ice is still not gone!!! We can’t fish with our fly rods!! It is very bad! Very very bad!

If you take a look at the depression-list again, I have to admit that I lately have experienced number 4! A big grey slimy fish smiles back at me while I’m brushing my teeth. Is this normal?

Now, how shall we solve this “ice-problem”? The first of april we are finally allowed to fish for sea trout again. It is always forbidden during the late autumn, the whole winter and in early spring. That day is the only reason I go up every morning and eat breakfast (not totally true) and now there is a risk that it wont be possible to fish!

In one of the pictures below you see the harbor of Gothenburg. As you can see, there is no ice there but it is only because it’s a big river. In many places where we want to fish it is still 30 cm thick ice! The light is beautiful though…

Over in England

U.K is an interesting country. Maybe I should say England (sounds more royal?). I have been here for about a week now, playing with a traditional jazz band at trashy pubs and less trashy concert halls. The band I´m touring with plays old jazz – the average age on the audience is quite high, lets say… 93 years. That makes the gigs not too wild. Everybody in the audience is sitting with a pint in the hand and a big nostalgic smile all over the face. Some did not smile when I think about it. After the first set the nice old fellows in the audience tend to wake up a little; it is then time for the big raffle! The leader of the raffle, very often a big guy around the age of 87, takes place behind a microphone while I play a roll on the snare drum. Then he screams out the magic number of the evening and the roll gets louder. Suddenly a happy winner will rise and the battle is over. The price is very often some biscuits or a bottle of wine. After that we continue to play again. It is a challenge to play traditional jazz in a simple and groovy way for a modern cat. I have to say that the listeners here are very nice and polite!

Of course I brought a fly rod on the tour. Of course the guys in the band never stop the car and let me fish. The members of this band are more like… normal jazz musicians. It still feels nice to drive around all over England knowing that the rod is just under my seat. Today we drove up to Edinburgh, Scotland. Aaaaaahhh, what a trip! The landscape is really beautiful up here, it’s a shame that I forgot the monster camera at home!

So… no pictures this time! Instead you can take a look at this clip showing guys who play jazz in a really swingy way! Back in the good old days this was the pop music. People went out every night and danced! Who knows, maybe some people in this clip are the same guys that were listening and dancing to us in U.K. Jazz keeps you young!