Bolage – BLGCD015 – 2011
Joona Toivanen: piano
Havard Stubø: guitar
Tapani Toivanen: bass
Fredrik Hamrå: drums
Interview with Jazz & Fly Fishing
If wandering in the Scandinavian woods, we should meet four guys discussing about harmonic variations, interplay ad drumming, well, we probably stumbled in the members of Jazz & Fly Fishing. This unusual name belongs to a band composed by four Scandinavian guys: exactly the Finnish Toivanen brothers, Joona and Tapani, respectively on piano and bass; Norwegian guitarist Havard Stubø and Swedish drummer Fredrik Hamrå, united by a common passion for jazz as well as for pikes, carps and trouts. Jazz & Fly Fishing, in fact, is an original project which involved these musicians in a long musical-adventurous journey through Scandinavian countries, between gigs in the clubs and fishings in the nature. Additionally, all their adventures have been filmed by a troupe of professional video makers and posted on their official website www.jazzandflyfishing.com.
Life on the road has been followed by this studio recording in which musical influences are as many as the member’s personalities and their different stylistic approaches. Pianist Toivainen provides mainstreamed and Blue Note sound-influenced compositions, perfectly crafted for jazz club gigs, Hatch and Czech Nymph, while Stubø focus on landscape-designing slide guitars on Lahppoluobbal and Slow Walking Water. Again, In Lights On and Attrapp, Toivanen puts away his acoustic piano, showing a groovier personality on Wurlitzer and Rhodes, while pushing the rhythm section to speed-up its support, as in the case of Tapani Toivanen, who performed solid and creative bass lines all the time. Hamrå, instead, possesses a surprisingly, at least for a drummer, melodic sensibility, expressed in the quiet opening track Something or in the Gospel-like Last Station.
Twelve heterogeneous and well played compositions suited to entertain the audience of a jazz club as well as to meditate while waiting for the fish to be catched.