Very welcome to the very first JFFFN of 2011, the year of years! We wish you all a fantastic year with lots of big fish and beautiful music. Here are the latest and most important news in the world. Feel free to contact us if you have some new and as important stuff to tell!
0. We don’t have anything here.
1. The loch ness-monster has still not been caught. Maybe it will be possible to catch it on a dry fly?
2. The JFF-team just had a meeting this weekend. I guess you’ll see some of it later this week… Lots of stuff has been planned, we will visit many countries this year, something we look forward to. You will hear more about this soon!
3. Paul Hogan, perhaps more famous as Crocodile Dundee, is planning to charge Australia for 100 million swedish crowns. That is about 14.5 million dollar or 11.2 million euro. Let’s not forget that the guy is a talented fisherman, probably he’ll spend the money on dynamite.
4. When you fish you don’t age. (we all knew that already)
5. The JFF-quartet will make a tour in September this year. We will visit Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, France and maybe some other countries.
6. A trout can be fat but also very thin. Many of these thin trout often have a very big head compared to the size of the fish. There is a now a name for this look: monkey wrench trout or just monkey wrench
JFF Flying Cat
That’s all for now, folks! I suspect that there will be a new video blog tomorrow.
Hi!
Inspired by our friends at the excellent Norwegian fishing blog Utras.net, I decided to sum up the Jazz & Fly Fishing year 2010, as seen by yours truly. As it turns out, we did a lot more stuff than I remembered in 2010, but here´s some of it at least:
For me, the first big J&FF thing that happened in 2010 was that I got my self a brand new videocamera.
Time is strange. Some things that happened long ago seem like they took place yesterday. And for some reason, it feels like a long time has passed since I made my first ever J&FF video – and it´s been like 9 months! Maybe the reason is that we´ve worked so much with videos since then? Or maybe it is because this video is so weird? Watching this makes me feel like I´m looking at an ancient forefather.
Anyway, here it is:
See? Strange stuff, to say the least.
In late March, we recorded our debut album at Studio Epidemin in Gothenburg. The album, Slow Walking Water, is due for release in mid February, and we´re finishing the mastering as we speak. I had the camera rolling most of the time, and made two films from our session. They´re both pretty bad, especially the first one, but anyway, here is the second one (Fredriks´s improvised song in the end of the video is worth checking out):
The next thing that happened was that I tried to go fishing up north way too early and filmed the whole thing.
Meanwhile, Joona had gotten himself a new camera: the infamous GoPro HD. He used it to make a couple of really nice short films about seatrout fishing in the Gothenburg area.
I think this one is the better of the two (Click here to see the other one):
Spring was really moving along, and after Fredrik had shown us how to sing a really low note, it was time for some Urban Fly Fishing in Oslo:
This film drew lots of attention in Norway, and a few days after it was published on this blog, Norwegian fly fishing legends Lars Nilssen and Lars Lenth contacted me. They were starting up a new blog of their own called larsoglars.no, and wanted to do a film from Frognerparken together to kick off their blog TV-series. They had a really funny script, and the trout in Frognerparken delivered the goods again. The video became a big hit and was published in the general media and everything. Great success. Infact we had so much fun that we decided to keep working together, and in May and June we made a series of videos about urban fly fishing in Oslo (You´ll find all of them here).
Some pics from the larsoglars sessions:
In late May, I headed up north to catch the first midge hatches in the Upper Itchen on film, and got the chance to hook up with Erlend from utras.net at the same time. While up north, I also did a highly controversial documentary where we exposed one of Norway´s darkest secrets to the general public: the top secret Weapons Testing Zones (Big thanks to Roger Bråthen for shooting, directing and editing that masterpiece). Ransarån in Northern Swedenhas become one of my favourite places to go fishing in the early season. Since my first trip eight years ago, I´ve come back every spring. There is something special about the valley Kultsjödalen: the gin-clear water and the sight fishing for the big arctic char and brown trout in the midnight sun is like a drug, and I need a new fix every year. This year, Tapani and I joined forces with my friend Terje Storsten, another Ransarån-junky (and doublebass player), and as usual, we spent some cold and wonderful days staring into the water until our eyes rolled out of their sockets. Tapani and I both brought videocameras. I made a crappy film with a beautiful arctic char in it, and Tapani made a great film with no arctic char in it:
After Ransarån, Tapani and I went straight to Finland where we met with Joona and Fredrik for the first real J&FF tour of the season. And what a tour it was! We played concerts in Jyväskylä and Helsinki, and finally managed to shed some light on the mysterious Finnish word “lainen”. We also had a brief encounter with a charming Finnish girl called Karja, before we set off for Eco Rapids in the Kainuu region of Northern Finland:
(Click here to see episode 2)
We were unusually productive on this tour, and there are still several previously unseen videos from this tour coming up on the blog in 2011. Some seriously strange stuff will follow!
In early July, we traveled up north for a glorious, long fishing trip. Several remarkable things happened: Our producer, Petzi, finally got his revenge, and Tapani chose to hook himself in the nose with a large streamer fly. For some unknown reason, Fredrik was cursed on this trip. But most importantly, we had one whole day of pure trout fishing magic:
For the second part of this trip, we had to change our plans a little bit. Due to some unforeseen events (and sloppy planning), we found ourselves having too little time to visit the remote wilderness river we were planning to hike to. Instead we went for some serious sight fishing in a beautiful and very secret lake:
(The second part of our sight fishing adventures hasn´t been published yet. Stay tuned!)
Except for a few gigs, I spent the rest of the summer fishing up north, and did several expeditions into undiscovered country, checking out some exciting new spots. On one of these trips, I stumbled over a real gem: a series of beautiful, small lakes connected by a tiny creek, all of them filled with my favourite species, the arctic char – and big ones, too! Meanwhile, Tapani spent his time watching Finnish jazz musicians oil wrestling, and Joona was doing some serious research on how to make fish look bigger in pictures.
I also did an expedition to the mysterious “X”, an area so secret that not even the other guys in J&FF know where it is. The “X” is in fact so secret, it´s not even on the map. As usual, “X” did not disappoint, and my friends (their identities are of course also secret) and I caught several spectacular fish.
Come autumn, I went back to Oslo´s urban desert again. A few interesting things happened: we discovered the truth about Tapani´s lost monster trout from the Magical day, Joona finally found out why he had such a funny taste in his mouth that July morning, and eventually we started plotting and planning for 2011.
One October afternoon I got a call from Lars Nilssen, who had witnessed some pretty spectacular stuff in Frognerparken (where else?). The next day, I brought my camera and shot this little video of big, wild trout spawning in the heart of Oslo:
A couple of days later, Nilssen brought in expert underwater photographer Arnt Mollan to film the spawning, and we discovered a strange-looking trout spawning with the native brown trout. It turned out to be a rainbow trout, which caused a huge buzz among fish scientists. Rainbow trout and brown trout are related, but still different species, and no one had seen a rainbow trout spawn with a brown trout in Norway before. You see, rainbow trout are native to western North America, and spawn in spring, while brown trout are native to Europe and spawn in autumn. Again, the media was all over the story, and Nilssen made a series a of funny videos, bringing in trout scientist and hybrid expert Morten Kraabøl from NINA to analyze this unique phenomenon. You´ll can find the whole story and all the videos on Larsoglars.no.
On our long fishing trip in July, there were of course some periods when the fishing wasn´t really happening. Instead of just drinking whisky, we decided to try to develop a brand new way of fly casting. Inspired by the movie “A River Runs Through It”, directed by Robert Redford and starring Brad Pitt, we called it the New Shadow Cast™, and when Tapani published his Shadow Cast video in November, it was an immediate hit in fly fishing circles:
We were a bit puzzled by the huge success of the Shadow Cast video, but I guess it was about time that someone did some humoristic stuff about flycasting. Fly casting is a really serious buisness, but if you ask me, very few things are too serious to joke about, and fly casting is definitely not one of them. As with all successful parodies, some people didn´t get it, though.
Among the many reactions to Tap´s Shadow Cast video, a comment on the blog by someone called “JB” was especially interesting. The comment said something like “the beauty of it brings tears to my eyes”, and of course we all agreed. But it was Joona who pointed that the mystical JB might be none other that Jason Borger himself, the inventor of the original Shadow Cast, and Brad Pitt´s stunt double in “A River Runs Through It”. Tapani “Bergman” Toivanen waisted no time, contacted Jason (who of course turned out to be a really cool guy) and Jason did a very thorough analyzis of the new, improved J&FF Shadow Cast as a guestwriter on our blog (We´ll soon be lauching a competition on this blog where Jason will play an important role – another good reason to stay tuned).
The last thing worth mentioning that happened in 2010 was our participation in the European part of the RISE Fly Fishing Film Festival. I went to the Oslo show, and it was a hell of a lot of fun to team up with old and new fishing friends for lots of beer, laughs, and great fly fishing scenes on the big screen. Finally meeting Nick, the mastermind behind the festival and the director of several flyfishing films like The Source: Iceland and The Source: New Zealand, was especially nice. A really cool guy and a truly kindered spirit. Here´s our contribution to the festival:
Hellau! We in J&FF would like to welcome you all to 2011 – the year of the rabbit and the year of J&FF!
2010, the year of the tiger, was kind of a test season for us. After recording Season One in 2009, we were a bit unsure of the future of J&FF. We had this blog up and running, made some articles for magazines and had a TV-show in the making, but didn´t really know where to go with the project from there.
One thing we never doubted was that we wanted to keep doing this in some shape or form. You see, we all love jazz and fly fishing. All four of us are nerdy jazz musicians and nerdy fly fishermen, and from the first time I met the other guys in late 2008, I understood that this was going to be something really special. It is a very strange feeling when four perfect strangers from different countries understand everything the other guys say, down to the nerdiest of references. And I for one can say that some of the best times I´ve ever had are the tours with J&FF.
Season One was a relatively big and costly enterprise. When we shot Season One, our producer Petzi and his camera crew followed us around for a whole summer, and it was shot more or less like you would shoot a documentary about monkeys, with us guys in the band having no part in the film making process what so ever. This kind of approach limits the flexibility quite a bit – the scale of the production means that everything has to be planned in minute detail with few possibilities for last minute changes, and it also demands a big budget, something we really didn´t have.
So in late 2009, we started playing with the thought of doing the filming ourselves. We invested in our first amateur video cameras and started doing wobbly videos of everything and nothing. Some of these videos can be found under the Jazzcam tab – and some are better off in the eternal abyss of some hard drive. After some experimenting with these cameras, a few things became clear to us:
1. It is very difficult to make a really good film.
2. If you want to make a good film, you need to have a (good) story to tell before you press “record”, otherwise you´ll be putting a lot of effort into something that will most certainly be rubbish.
3. The best stuff is the stuff that comes naturally. Keep it real.
Since we´re musicians, none of this should be new to us. Through my small experiments with making videos, I´ve learnt that there are endless similarities between music making and film making, with the clearest common denominator perhaps being the importance of form. Without a clear sense of form, it´s impossible to make a good film, no matter how good the footage is. And the outline of the form should be ready before you start filming, also when you´re filming documentaries.
In 2010, our test season, we tried to learn as much as possible about film making and made a lot of short videos, experimenting with all sorts of styles and ideas, trying to find our own voice. A couple of them turned out quite good (and some of them are quite bad). Some of them haven´t been published yet, so stay tuned – there is some good stuff coming. Since we started doing these videos, our video gear has improved quite a bit, and at least technically, we´re now set up for some serious film making. However, as far as the actual filming goes, there is a lot that we don´t know too much about: the scripting, the storytelling, the shooting – we definitely have a long way to go.
Fortunately, we have an ace up our sleeves: Petzi, our producer, is a professional documentarist, and he is going along with us on the journey as an “embedded professional” (I guess he had too much fun doing this as well). You see, we have big and ambitious plans for 2011 (and the next years)! J&FF is going global, and our plan is to make a film (or two) about the whole experience, mixing documentary, mockumentary and fiction into a blend never before seen in a film about jazz and fly fishing…
Our first scripting session is in Gothenburg in a few days, and I can´t wait to meet up with the other guys to start planning the next years.
Some keywords for the future: New album, Season One release, Down Under, Balkans, the Nordic countries, Russia, England, USA, jazz, fly fishing.
Hi!
Here are some more or less random clips from my recent tour in China:
Best things about China: People are warm and friendly, the food is great, and the energy is amazing. It is just so happening at the moment.
Worst things about China: The pollution is awful. It´s incredibly bad.
Here´s a little Christmas treat for the followers of Jazz & Fly Fishing: a sneak peek of Jazz & Fly Fishing Season One! This is the same edit that was screened on the European part of the RISE Fly Fishing Film Festival.
Enjoy, and merry Christmas from all of us to all of you!
As we saw in Fredrik´s latest issue of JFFFN, web-based translators like Google Translator and Yahoo´s BabelFish can create some really interesting pieces of text, especially when they are used to translate languages that are very different from each other. Like Chinese and English, for example.
In China, they use these translators a lot. Most public texts, like roadsigns and restaurant menus, are written in both Chinese and English. Sometimes the translators work, but in most cases the results are completely absurd and totally hilarious. Great fun!
Here are some examples from my recent tour in China:
It is finally done – the new, fresh and groovy santa song. The lyrics are in swedish, but the story is simple!
Santa basically lost his coat and cant find it anywhere. Hope you’ll enjoy it!
The last week, I´ve been touring in China with my own band, the Håvard Stubø Quartet.
On this tour, we´re travelling as a trio, with Steinar Nickelsen on the Hammond B3 sitting in for Torbjörn Zetterberg, the band´s regular bass player.
It´s been a really intense experience – China is totally overwhelming – and I´ll write some more about it when I get home in a few days.
Very soon it is, as you all may have heard of, christmas eve again. We will give to you, from us, a very nice christmas song!
But that is not all. We will also make a music video. It will be done very soon… hopefully on thursday!
Now, about christmas-gifts and all the stress about that thing; don’t buy anything, make something instead!
Tie some flies, make a painting, give yourself away, someone else, a rod, a cat and so on. Much more fun!
See you tomorrow!
I just came back from a small album release tour in Finland. That was with not with Jazz & Fly Fishing (JFF), but Joona Toivanen Trio (JTT), together with Tapani on bass, and the drummer Olavi Louhivuori. We had a great time and played concerts in Helsinki and Jyväskylä. It was fantastic to be back together and play with the trio after a long break!
I also have finished a new composition for big band. It’s called Views and Visions, and will be performed by Jyväskylä Big Band (JBB). I just realized I’ve finished most of the big projects this year, and there’s actually some free time in my life! After writing this blog post I will move my ass two meters to the left and start tying flies for the next season. It’s very handy to have the fly tying corner and the office table right next to each other!
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