Finnish Nonsense

Blog from Eco-Rapids #3

Hellau!

I´m back from Russia. Here are some interesting videos from our tour in Finland in early June.

The first one was made by Fredrik, who stole my camera and made this epic masterpiece entiteled Karja while I was searching desperately for the camera, thinking I´d forgotten it somewhere along the road:

The second film, What´s Up with the Lainen?, deals with the mythical Finnish word “lainen”.

Fredrik and I have been asking Finns about the meaning of this word for more than a year now, and we still haven´t gotten any good explanation for it. Poor Tapani is the victim this time:

Soon, we´ll go fishing together again! First, we´ll fish a mystical river somewhere on Nordkalotten for a couple of days, and then we´ll move into undiscovered country for a real expedition.

Stay tuned – lots more videos and stuff coming up!

The Tight Lines Quartet Is Dead – Long Live Jazz & Fly Fishing!

When we were in Gothenburg recording our new album, we had a vote and the result was unanimous: The band is no longer called Tight Lines Quartet, but simply Jazz & Fly Fishing.

Nobody was using the other name anyway – everyone just called us Jazz & Fly Fishing (we even did ourselves).

Jazz & Fly Fishing is just a way cooler name for the band, and I guess it´s also less confusing for people now that we have the same name for the band and the show.

We´re doing a lot of planning at the moment. Scheduling the rest of 2010 – the fishing, the playing and the filming is a lot of work, but we´re getting very close to a finished schedule now. We´ll post things here as soon as everything is in the pocket.

The real fishing season is so close now – there´s barely enough time to tie the last flies. Mowahahahahahahah!

Here´s one of my favourite summer memories:

Big is beautiful!

Easter Rise

Hi everyone!

This little video is from my first day of fly fishing up north this year. Lots of ice and not too much fish, but it still felt fabulous to be out and about, fencing with the fly rod!

Easter Rise from Jazz and Fly Fishing´s Jazzcam on Vimeo.

Mood from the studio

It’s been a great success.

Håvard was shouting “let out it!” to the mics, and Freddy was counting one two three four… The feeling was there for the album to be born.

Nine pieces recorded in two days. It sounds that it’s quite a lot of work, and that it is. Tapani’s hands are sore from beating the bass, but still, these couple of days in the studio resemble our summer tour in the intensity of output. We want to do this, and we’re pushing it. Now the setting is done, the tunes are finished  and we know our stuff.

Still, we had had the usual problems of a jazz band, this time with the coffee machine. The modern Italian-look coffee maker tried to slow us down, but Johannes, the sound engineer, knew how to fill the bean section and saved our session. The point in recording a full length album, where you need the the espresso, will present itself at some point.

At the moment, we have listened through the selected takes. We have recorded two days, made 46 minutes of good and solid material and we still have one day left at the studio.

As Håvardi says, now we have a great opportunity to choose what the album needs, as we already have the ingredients to make it. So Monday is going to be a day of free creating without pressure. Hopefully all this is ending as a great success!

We´re gonna keep doing this!

The tour was a blast. I had the best time ever. Seriously! Although touring with the TLQ and the camera crew was a lot of fun, coming home to my little family wasn´t too bad either…

There are lots of things going on at the moment. Since the tour ended, I´ve released a new record with my own quartet. The reviews have all been excellent, and the releaseparty at Oslo Jazzfestival was a lot of fun. You´ll find some fresh sound here.

Right now, the TLQ is working with several interesting future plans for the JFF concept. Firstly, we´ll do a tour in the spring, playing in Norway and Sweden. During the tour, we´ll of course be fishing – mostly in saltwater for seatrout and proper saltwater fish like big sei, cod and maybe even the elusive halibut… We didnt have the time to do any serious saltwater fishing on this first tour, but April/May is an excellent time for saltwater fly fishing, so this is going to be a lot of fun! We´ll be putting out pics & videos from the gigs and the fishing as we move along. Furthermore, our first full-length CD recording is coming up soon, and we´re also toying with some really big plans for the future – more on that later…

Anyway, the point is that we´re gonna keep doing this! It´s just been too much fun, and it feels like we´re just getting started. We´ll keep on playing gigs with the Tight Lines Quartet, we´ll keep on fishing together, and we´ll keep you guys posted. The response from the general public has been overwhelming, and people from all over the world have been checking out our material, giving lots of good feedback. Keep on doing that!

First and foremost, we´re going to keep the blogs coming. We´ll be writing about all kinds of stuff that goes on in our lives. Being huge jazz & fly fishing-nerds, it´s of course  going to be mostly jazz and flyfishing-related stuff, but I guess we´ll  be touching on lots of diferent topics. For example, I´m going to recommend some really cool jazz records and maybe review a concert or two, Fredrik is going to show us some of his secret cooking tricks, and Joona might enlighten us on the deep connections between jazz piano and fly tying. And, being a medical scientist, Tapani might be able to give a scientific description of what he does to make women´s hearts beat so fast…

PS! I´ve stumbled upon some decent lakes in Nordmarka, very close to Oslo. Blog coming up soon!

Competition judging, on-going!

We are now trying to decide the winner from all the photos send to us! Thanks to all contenders!

Judging our way, is a delicate and time consuming process, so we kindly ask some patience from all the participant.

The winner will be contacted next week, latest.