Jazz and Fly Fishing at Alphabet City - Northside

Jazz & Fly Fishing is a unique group of jazz musicians, adding a nuanced new genre to the  intersection of outdoor adventure and the arts. They are now embarking on their American tour, stopping at City of Asylum in addition to performing at clubs, festivals, fly shops, and river banks while documenting their adventures along the way.

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 interest in jazz music and fly fishing.

A couple of pints later, they had decided to make a TV documentary about the project, too, and then 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 established, professional jazz musicians, deeply passionate fly fishermen, and of course, decent human beings. Joona’s kid brother, bass player Tapani Toivanen, and Swedish drummer Fredrik Hamrå fit the bill. They completed the quartet with guitarist Håvard Stubø and Jazz & Fly Fishing was born. Since then, the group has toured extensively in Scandinavia and Europe, released three albums and a DVD, and produced a vast array of short films, gathering a substantial international audience along the way.