I have had a touch of fever now for two days. I find it extremely boring! After one day of sporadic practicing on the practice-pad and the piano I had to do something else. Started to bake and cook as a true maniac. My furious hands took over and I became the kitchen monster. No one can stop the kitchen monster from doing it’s work. It has to cook. When the food (Italian meatballs with lots of garlic, parmesan cheese and lot’s of other stuff plus pasta and bread) was done, the kitchen monster ate almost everything. Slowly I began to feel like a human again except from the the fact that I couldn’t hardly walk. Still, I decided to take a slow walk with my camera to catch the autumn before it’s gone. It looked like this. By the way… Soon, when the fever is gone, There will be some fishing for sea trout! /F
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.
The tour is over – more is coming!
The tour is over! What a tour! There are so many things that happened, so many things to tell. We will now give to you, dear readers, the secret stories about the tour, stuff that are so fascinating and sometimes even horrible, that some of you might get scared when you read it. Really scared! We also have some movies made by us (not by the professional producer) and I have to say that we are very proud over those movies. Since we in the band don’t know how to make a proper movie, they are very strange. Strange but wonderful. One of them is a very scary documentation over what happens when Tapani gets mad. Just you wait and see! But first, let’s start with a friendly blog about the happy life in Gothenburg.
Well, after our long long tour, far far away, I was very tired when we finally arrived to my hometown Gothenburg. My mind felt upside down after this magic and hectic summer and the body didn’t really work. That smell we had inside the car – it’s still in my head. It´s impossible to describe what the smell was like, that must be experienced. Old socks, rotten shoes, very old socks, slimy bananas and even older socks was everywhere in the car. Try to imagine that! It was the perfect, hmmm, blend… Back in Gothenburg I needed some peace without the other nasty guys in the group. Just for a while. Its not that I don’t miss them, Håvard and his great smile, Joonas silent moments, Tapanis furious anger, I do, but still, sometimes you need a short break in order to stay in one piece. After two days of doing nothing else but staring at the wall in my apartment, I decided to do something.
Why not go fishing, it was a while ago! My friend Dave and I went to the secret perch lake outside Gothenburg. Ida, my girlfriend joined us after some hours. The sun was shining and it was 25 degrees, a beautiful summer day. We caught a couple of really nice ones, some over 1 kg. One of them wanted to join us for dinner and after a short discussion, we agreed. To make the meal a little bit more complete, we also picket a bunch of chanterelles, the gold of the Forrest. The biggest perch was caught ON a smaller perch that was hooked on the fly! Nature is cruel! Anyway, the dinner later this day was… splendid. /Fredrik
Arctic Char fishing in Mordor
The next day, the festival staff hooked us up with a local fishing oracle, Morten, and together we embarked on a serious fishing trip for my favourite fish – the arctic char. Morten´s special place was like nothing I´ve ever seen. Just going there was an adventure in itself! The round was dangerously narrow (even by Norwegian standards) and razor-sharp cliffs were everywhere, looking like giant teeth that could take a bite of us any second.
The fishing was good, and we all caught some nice arctic char. Great success!
The next day, we started on the epic journey from Hamningberg (about far north as you can come in Europe) to Gotheburg.
Man, it’s a long drive.
At World´s End
The Varanger area is a place of great contrasts: Lush, green farmlands and sterile tundra wasteland within walking distance of each other. Vegetation of rainforest-like density juxtaposed with landscapes that look way scarier than Mordor from Tolkien´s Lord of the Rings. And, in the middle of all this, the beautiful town of Vadsø (pop. 6500), which hosts one of Norway´s finest jazz festivals, Varangerfestivalen.
From the moment we arrived, we were very well taken care of by the excellent festival staff. Playing the concert was easy – the crowd was really listening, and the music was flowing freely. After the gig, we went to a king crab feast. As much fresh king crab as you can eat and a few beer – wonderful!
Oulu, Elojazz
We had a very nice concert in Elojazz with a featuring sax player Antti Hynninen. He has recently released an excellent album with his group Auteur Jazz. It just so happened that Antti is also an established fly fisherman, so he decided to join us for the trip to Norway’s Varangerfest. We all thought that it was important to make Antti feel comfortable with the Tight Lines Quartet, so soon after the concert we decided to give him a crash course of the ways of the JFF. After many hours of driving, jamming and inside jokes we finally set up the tent at the beautiful lake Inari. While glaring at the silent wilderness, he began to understand.
You’ll hear Antti’s own music here.
The Elojazz Concert
Antti and Håvard Interplay
Getting Into the Mood
Pike Fishing
After building up our egos catching the beautiful brown trout in Ransarån we were confident to try something different so we went after the most fearsome of the scandinavian predators: the pike. Gafsele is a place where many of Sweden’s biggest pikes are caught and 10 kg is not uncommon in these waters.
We were pleasantly surprised to find out that we were staying in a cosy cabin for the night, especially since Håvard had gotten Borat from the gas station. We tied some monstrous pike flies while watching Borat. Not very productive, or even creative, but it sure was fun. For the next days trip we had an excellent guide from France, Alban, who took us around the river with small boats. We somehow managed to hit the hottest day of the year.
Stay tuned for more…
Joona's JFF interview on SR P4
You can listen to Joona’s interview on the Swedish Radio P4 at http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/Sisuradio/programsidor/index.asp?ProgramID=1018
The interview is in Finnish, you can find it at “Tiistai 1.9.” a bit down on the page.
The JFF High Life
The tent woke us up automatically after the temperature in the morning sunshine reached 55C. It was good to take a morning swim in the river although the water was way too cold. Finally, we had the time to do some serious fishing without too much hurry. Did we catch anything? Yes we did.
On the last days eve in the tundra we had a concert and a fish feast at the base camp. We weren’t expecting any audience, but something nice happened, you’ll hear about it later.
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