Jazz & Fly Fishing
THE HATCH STARTS IN AN HOUR: Jazz & Fly Fishing Does America
Jazz & What?
Jazz & Fly Fishing—part jazz quartet, part quirky film project, and a dream come true—traces its beginnings to a pub in Helsinki, in 2008, when two young men came up with the ingenious idea of putting together a jazz band of flyfishermen and making a TV documentary about the project. Those two men were Joona Toivanen, an award-winning Finnish piano player who is also a passionate flyfisherman, and Petri Luukkainen, a professional documentarian from Finland with a profound interest in jazz music and flyfishing. After hatching the idea, all they needed was a band.
The actual process of putting the band together turned out to be similar to that of creating a boy band, with slightly different criteria. The band members would have to be: 1. established professional jazz musicians; 2. deeply passionate flyfishers; and 3. decent human beings. Joona’s younger brother, Tapani (a bass player), and a Swedish drummer named Fredrik Hamrå fit the bill. To complete the quartet, they needed someone playing a lead instrument, preferably someone from Norway, since Norway has a vibrant jazz scene and lots of fantastic fishing. That’s where my guitar and I came in...
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