Jazz and Fly Fishing

Jazz & Fly Fishing is a jazz quartet, a quirky film project, and a dream come true. It all started in Helsinki in 2008. Two young men met in a pub and came up with the ingenious idea of putting together a jazz band of fly fishermen. Those two men were Joona Toivanen, an award winning Finnish piano player who is also a passionate fly fisherman, and Petri Luukkainen, a professional documentarist from Finland with a profound inte-rest in jazz music and fly fishing. A couple of pints later, they had decided to make a TV documentary about the project, too, and now all they needed was a band. The actual process of putting the band together turned out to be very similar to that of creating a boy band, only with slightly different criteria. The band members would have to be: 1. Established, professional jazz musicians. 2. Deeply passionate fly fishermen. 3. Decent human beings. Finding three other guys who met these standards wasn´t easy, but Joona´s kid brother, bass player Tapani Toivanen, and Swedish drummer Fredrik Hamrå fit the bill. To complete the quartet, they needed some guy playing a lead instrument, preferably someone from Norway, since Norway has a good jazz scene and lots of awesome fishing, and that ´s where guitarist Håvard Stubø came in. Jazz & Fly Fishing was born. Since then, the group has toured extensively in Scandina-via and Europe, released three albums and a DVD, and produ-ced a vast array of short films, gathering a substantial interna-tional audience along the way. 

www.jazzandflyfishing.com

Bookings