Hellau! So far, J&FF´s Friday Jazz has presented music from the 50s, 60s and 70s, so I guess it´s about time we give you some contemporary sounds.
In 2010, the brilliant Swedish trumpeter/composer Goran Kajfes released a great album called X/Y. The opening track, called Sand Boogie, is a real knockout: it has one of the hippest grooves I ever heard, the tune is super catchy yet original, and the sound is incredible.
Goran´s band, a Swedish all-star line-up called Subtropic Arkestra, plays great throughout the album, and they´re also a really happening live band, as the second video shows. Despite crappy audio and some drunken filming, the video is highly enjoyable.
Here´s the awesome album version (the video, presumably made by the kind individual who put the song on YouTube, leaves something to be desired, though;):
Just back from Gothenburg, where we recorded the soundtrack for our upcoming DVD (working title: Season 2 – F***ed for Life) and did some additional shooting – interviews and such.
Despite Fredrik and me getting sick with some kind of stomach flu that we probably got from Joona (thanks, man!), we were highly productive this time. Joona and fredrik had brought all sorts of exotic instruments, and we had a blast, jamming out lots of weird and wonderful tracks between the many toilet visits. Many of the tracks have a kind of fake ethno feel. Well, let´s see what we think when we hear the final mix – it might turn out to be mostly unusable crap, but it was a lot of fun anyway.
Let´s be honest: January sucks. At least in the northern hemisphere. It´s cold and boring. And at 68°26.3028′ N, where I´m sitting as I´m writing this, it´s pretty damn dark, too.
And everybody´s flat broke, hung over and fat after Christmas´ insane excesses. Well, at least things are moving in the right direction.
Here´s some music for you:
This is a rare live video of John Coltrane´s legendary quartet playing Resolution, the second part of his 1964 masterpiece A Love Supreme. Too bad that the video cuts before Trane´s solo, but seeing and hearing him playing the theme is more than enough for me. And what a band… Unbelievable.
PS! Going to Gothenburg on thursday to meet the other guys, record some soundtrack material for season 2, and plan upcoming stuff. It´s gonna be a blast!
We´ll keep you posted.
Hi! We have a brand new column for you today. It´s called Friday Jazz, and the concept should be quite self-explanatory.
For this first edition of Friday Jazz, we´ve found a real treat for you:
Miles Davis´ legendary performance at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970. The 38-minute performance took place in front of an audience of roughly 400.000 people, 99% of them rock fans. By the end of this performance, Miles probably had at least 200.000 new die-hard fans.
Personel: Miles Davis (trumpet), Gary Bartz (sax), Chick Corea (piano), Keith Jarrett (organ), Dave Holland (bass), Jack DeJohnette (drums), Airto Moreira (percussion)
Some of you might have noticed that our site was down during a couple of days the last weeks. We were attacked by mean internet hacker robots, probably sent to us by our competitors at deathmetalandjerkbait.com. No hard feelings, we’ve survived the crash and are up and running again. However, please report if you experience stange behaviour or bugs on the site.
I got a mail about a problem with the confirmation page after a purchase from our shop. We’ll investigate that, but meanwhile you might be redirected to a blank page. However, this doesn’t affect the functionality of the shop, and the PayPal payments are working safe as always. So if you still don’t know what to give your mother-in-law for Christmas, take a look at our DVD och the album. We’ll be extra fast with shipping so you can hopefully get them before Christmas.
We have interesting stuff coming up next year, starting up with a filming/recording session in January. More about that later – time to go post some DVDs!
Two weeks ago, Norway´s first award show dedicated exclusively to fishing was held for the first time at Riksscenen in Oslo. Gullkroken (The Golden Hook) was a great success, and the theatre was jampacked with happy people (mostly men, unfortunately).
Gullkroken was also the debut of The Maggots, a group of musicians/fishermen that was put together exclusively for the show. Personel (left to right: Lars Lenth, Alexander Engebretsen, Ian Kenneth Åkesson, Andres Rafael Diaz, and yours truly. We performed two songs, Neill Young´s Rocking In the Free World, and Norwegian rapper Diaz´own hit song Mitt Stille Vann (my peaceful lake), which you´ll hear if you check the bootleg cellphone video below.
PS! New video about autumn fly fishing coming soon, so stay tuned.
One night about a year and a half ago I was sitting in my rehearsal room, playing through my old sketchbooks. I have piles of those music sheets with small phrases, ideas, tunes, and I’ve basically written down this music stuff since I was a teenager. I found a lot of stuff I had forgotten I had worked on, and that started some kind of process that I’m in the middle of right now.
So here I am, going to studio next week to record a solo piano album. The thought of doing that was pretty scary at first. Doing something just by myself, all original compositions, just me having the power of making whatever music I decided to. Scary, but very inspiring.
It turned out I had lots of new and old ideas that would work with solo piano, and now I’ve cut down the material to about 20 “tunes”. That’s still too much and I’m ny trying to focus on a bigger picture, an album as a whole, tunes that work well together.
The music will partly be just plain solo piano: “one man, one piano” kind of stuff. I will also use some prepared piano tecniques, where different objects are placed on or in between the strings to produce different sounds, and this will be combined with some overdubs, so the piano will actually sound like several different instruments. I’ve decided to only use “natural” sounds, and by that I mean I won’t be modifying the recorded signal other than adjusting levels and reverb. I won’t be playing secret messages backwards or anything like that.
I’ve also documented some of this process through the camera lens, and found some interesting, abstract angles in the grand piano.
And one more thing: I’m really struggeling with tune titles. I have some 30+ solo piano tunes wihtout titles and I don’t want to call them just “untitled 1”, “untitled 2b” and so on. Suggestions? I know, you will say you need to hear the music first, but you won’t! If any of these end up on the album I’ll send a free copy to the title “author” and of course thanks in the credits 🙂
Hi, everyone! Are you still fishing or have you already decided to wait for the spring? In the Nordic countries the temperature is quite low by now. While the Australian fishermen have a temperature of around 25 degrees, we have around 5 here in Southern Sweden. Up North it is way colder.
So, what fly should you tie on the leader if you want to go for the dry fly this time of the year? With freezing cold fingers, I try to avoid fishing with feather mosquito imitations, it can be very effective but also a bit boring if you ask me. If I had to pick only one fly to use during this slow season, it would be an ant-imitation. Why not try the JFF Ant? I have caught hell of a lot of fish on this pattern, if you excuse my language.
It is not too difficult to tie and very easy to fish with. If you fish in still waters, try to make short casts in places you think look good, for example bays surrounded with trees, step rocks where slow and almost frozen insects will fall into the water, edges between windy surfaces and flat calm water…
Make a cast, stretch the leader and wait…. wait… stretch the line so that the fly moves a little bit… wait… wait… stretch the line… wait… STRIKE!!
If you fish in a river or similar, use a long leader and let the fly drift dead
How to tie the JFF Ant
By the way, do not go under 0.18 leader – this fly attracts big fish… /F
I had a day off and decided to go for a fishing trip to a put and take lake to let out some fishing steam. My usual fishing buddy Fredrik was busy with other stuff, but luckily I found a “victim” from the jazz club a few days earlier. My old friend Johan, who usually plays the trumpet or the drums, has gone into the world of hunting lately. I convinced him that fishing is just a variation of hunting, and after a beer or two he had decided to join me and go for the rainbow trout this time.
I picked him up when it was still dark and we were by the water already before the sun was up. The temperature was -5 degrees celsius and the coffee tasted better than ever. I was armed with two fly rods and he with a spinning rod. The day turned out to include all possible weather types, from dead calm and sunny to windy, rain, and we even had a pretty heavy snowfall for a half an hour. The fishing was not really happening, but I managed to catch 2 decent rainbow trouts and lost a pretty good one just before heading home. Johan lost a good fish, and I think he got bitten by the fishing bug.
Today he’s been out with Fredrik on a “protect the nature by fishing dozens of rainbow trout” trip, and I received a message telling that Johan had got the biggest rainbow for a day, nearly 3 kilos. Freddy, tell us more!
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