• RIGHT • Left to right: Tapani Toivanen, Håvard Stubø, Fredrik Hamrå and Joona Toivanen stroll a dirt road near the upper Ruby River, MT. It turned out the river was in flood and very muddy, so the rods stayed in their cases. Still a successful stop—for once, we got a decent band photo. JAZZ & WHAT? Jazz & Fly Fishing—part jazz quartet, part quirky film project, and a dream come true—traces its be-ginnings to a pub in Helsinki, in 2008, when two young men came up with the ingenious idea of put-ting 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 mu-sic 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 profes-sional jazz musicians; 2. deeply passionate flyfish-ers; and 3. decent human beings. Joona’s younger brother, Tapani (a bass player), and a Swedish drum-mer 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. We’d been talking about doing a U.S. tour for years, but the idea had always felt slightly over-whelming, partly because of the massive logistics and financing needed. A U.S. tour would also mean spending time away from our families in the middle of the best jazz festival and dry fly fishing season in Scandinavia. But, to be honest, a big part of our hesitation came down to a sneaking lack of self-confidence. Did we actually have an audience in the United States, or were we going to be playing empty halls? What’s more, the rivers of the western United States were said to be extremely technical. Did we have the skills necessary to trick those educated Henry’s Fork and Missouri river trout, or were we going to make complete fools of ourselves? During a podcast appearance with author and an-gler Tom Rosenbauer in 2021, I mentioned that I’ve always dreamt of doing a tour in America, playing concerts and flyfishing across the country. People started reaching out, and we realized we had to seize the opportunity. ORIGAMI After that podcast, the tour, naturally, started in Vermont—but not for me. I missed the first gig in Manchester due to a visa issue, and while my band-mates chased rising trout with Rosenbauer, I endured a grueling 35-hour journey from Narvik, Norway, to Washington, D.C., battling layovers and stormy chaos at New York’s JFK airport along the way. At the security checkpoint in JFK, frustrations ran high as cancellations piled up. I found myself in a brawl with a man harassing a woman about line-cut-ting. After I said, “Take it easy, man,” he snapped. I managed to evade his right hook, but chaos erupted. A massive security officer tackled the guy, folding him like origami. He probably survived, but I bet he missed his flight. All I know is I didn’t get to fish the Battenkill with Rosenbauer, and I missed out on a great session with Trout Unlimited’s Jesse Vadala and Todd Spire in the Catskills too. 042 JAZZ & FLY FISHING
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 15.4: Page 40
