Your Moment(s) Of Zen

How a screwball troupe of Scandinavian, fly fishing jazz musicians can lighten your winter load

Jazz & Fly Fishing’s Håvard Stubø taking a smoke break on the river.

There’s nothing more boring than people complaining about the weather. Except maybe for people complaining about their commutes. But now that half the country has resigned, or else decided to work from home in their sweats like degenerate meth cooks or Substack writers, commutes aren’t so much of a problem anymore. Giving up might be bad for GDP, but it’s good for relieving traffic.

So we stick with old faithful, complaining about the weather. Which unlike complaining about your tyrannical boss or dipsomaniac spouse, in all their variegated awfulness, contains limited complaint options: it’s always either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. We get it. Still, in the interest of staying awake, I’d rather listen to you complain about your Satanist nephew.  

Personally, winter doesn’t bother me all that much. It’s hell on my fishing numbers, to be sure. But without the outdoors’ siren song constantly beckoning, it provides an excuse to tend to less important business, like feeding the family and paying the mortgage. Besides, I like four distinct seasons, which is why I’ll never move to Florida. (Aside from it being populated by Floridians.)

But winter is not so easy a burden for some to bear, especially in February, that dreariest of months. Shakespeare even referred to having “such a February face, so full of frost, of storm and cloudiness.” Not for nothing do they call the attendant malady SAD (seasonal affective disorder). The external weather has the capacity to internally change us, making everything from our serotonin and dopamine levels lower, to our asses bigger (the average person puts on at least a one-to-two-pound “winter coat”), to our cerebellums smaller. I don’t know about you, but I have enough trouble wrapping my brain around the modern world without winter shrinking it up on the sly.

And so during these days, whenever I’ve been pent up for too long, or it’s still getting dark too early, and I start feeling the effects of what fishermen call The Shack Nasties, I often turn to four unlikely soul Sherpas - a screwball Scandinavian troupe of four jazz musicians who obsessively fly fish. They call themselves, appropriately enough, Jazz & Fly Fishing. I have been watching their entertaining and hypnotic videos for well over a decade, which tend to give me the spiritual lift that my Eckhart Tolle desk calendar or day drinking are often unable to provide.

As told by their online bios and in their videos (I deliberately didn’t interview the fellas for this piece, on account of it always being a dicey proposition to meet your inspirations), the enterprise kicked off in Helsinki in 2008. Joona Toivanen, an award-winning piano player and fly fishing addict, and Petri Luukkainen, a Finnish documentarian who was interested in both jazz and fly fishing himself,  met up where most good ideas get hatched: in a pub.  Many pints later, they decided to make a TV documentary, melding these two seemingly incongruous interests. Though they’re not so incompatible when you think about it. Being a decent fly fisher or jazz musician both require one to be a connoisseur of improvisation and adaptation, of exploring freedom within a form, of playing loose, but with laser focus.

All they needed was a band to document. One which fished a lot in between gigs. So, much like superproducers put together boy bands, Joona set about forming one of the most unorthodox man-bands of our musical age.  Every member would have to meet all three of these strict criteria:

1. Be an established, professional jazz musician.
2. Be a deeply passionate fly fisherman.
3. Be a decent human being.

From the video’n’vinyl breadcrumb trail left behind over the last decade (three albums and nearly ninety videos (mostly of the fishing variety), Jazz & Fly Fishing appears to have met all three of these prerequisites.  Joona set about recruiting his kid brother, the bass player Tapani Toivanen, Swedish drummer Fredrik Hamrå, and the Norwegian guitarist Håvard Stubø.  It was important for them to get a Norwegian, since not only does Norway have a vibrant jazz scene, but more vitally, lots of great fishing spots if you’re into oversized brown trout and Arctic char. (And who in their right mind wouldn’t be?) Stubø, whose deceased father was also a jazz guitarist and fishing obsessive who wrote articles for fly fishing magazines, is the Django Reinhardt of the group, not only serving as the band’s front man of sorts, but who also appears to be the driving narrative force and most fanatic fisherman in a great many of their videos.  (Fun-fact side note:  the storied Drake magazine, edited by my friend Tom Bie, once ran a Tom McGuane piece in which it was asserted that “when jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt felt abandoned by luck, he gathered his fishing tackle and was renewed by the site of the river. One day, on the banks of the Seine, he had a heart attack. It had been difficult to find a doctor and when one finally arrived, Django uttered his last words: ‘You’ve come now, have you?’ He died with his wit intact; maybe it was the fishing.”)

With the 2008 financial crash and other market forces, the aspiring docuseries never made it out of the blocks on Scandinavian TV.  But no matter. The band had become so accustomed to recording their own fishing adventures, that they kept going anyway, dropping fishing videos every few months or years on YouTube and Vimeo – mostly with their own music serving as the soundtrack - where a smallish but fiercely devoted American fly fishing audience also lapped them up on must-read domestic fly fishing sites, like Moldy Chum and MidCurrent.

The boys, sadly, aren’t famous. Even if they deserve to be. Though they seemed to have worked out the math as to why. As the always self-deprecating Stubø intoned in an intro to one of their shorts called The Only Way Is Up: there are about 25 million people in Nordic countries. Out of which, eight million go fishing. Of those, 100,000 are into fly fishing. From that select group, “10,000 don’t hate jazz.” Which “leaves around eight people who are both fanatic fly fishermen, and professional jazz musicians. This movie is about four.”

I first caught a Jazz & Fly Fishing video– Advanced Trick Casting: The Shadow Cast – around 2010. To this day, it is their most watched video at 270K views. About 5,000 of those views probably come from me and the people I sent it to. I was, as they say in the fishing business, hooked for life. (Sorry, you didn’t deserve that, and it won’t happen again.) The Shadow Cast short is a goof on the shadow-casting scene in the film that inspired it -  A River Runs Through It - the 1992 Brad Pitt vehicle based on the Norman Maclean novella of the same name. (Both, part of the fly fishing canon.) In the film, Pitt, or at least his stunt double, “shadow casts,” artistically waving his line in loop-de-loops from side to side, without letting his fly ever touch the water so that a greedy rainbow trout, prompted by the fly’s shadow, will rise.  As the pros and even the amateurs will tell you, shadow casting looks real pretty, but gives you about a 0.00001 percent chance of actually catching a fish. If you want a fish to belly-up to the buffet, you have to serve it a fake dinner. Not to present a shadow of a fake dinner.  So Jazz & Fly Fishing took this cast to absurdist lengths, looking like magicians having grand mal seizures while waving their magic wands:

Any fly fisherman with even a hint of self-awareness of how ridiculous we look when trying to complicate the simple has to love drummer Fredrik Hamrå’s devastating line, delivered so dryly: “Sometimes, the shadow cast is not very useful. But, there are situations……”

Even in this early, less-developed work – funny, but not representative of the artistic heights they’d eventually scale – all the hallmarks are there.  They look like eccentric refugees from a Wes Anderson film, one without all the Nico songs and Owen Wilson appearances. Even during lengthy backpacking trips, they seem to fish in attire more formal than what their American counterparts are accustomed to, often sporting their Donegal tweed newsboy caps, and sometimes even suit jackets, as if they’re English gentlemen making off for a private chalk stream, even if most of the places they fish are wilder and more remote than anything you or I will ever see.

And of course, northern Scandinavia (they are often fishing above the Arctic Circle) is itself a character in their shorts.  I’m not necessarily a Scandinavian fetishist – I can do without their exorbitant tax rates, their pickled fish, and their Norwegian death metal. Even though I love Viking shows, Northern Lights, Swedish meatballs, hot saunas, and Ingrid Bergman. (Taking a sauna with Ingrid Bergman in a horned Viking helmet, feeding me Swedish meatballs, would pretty much be an ideal afternoon.)  But the landscapes in their films are utterly beautiful, possessing that peculiar Nordic mix of lush barrenness, with the light adjusted just right – luminousness with the shades drawn.  It’s the kind of light the Swedish artist Carl Larsson called “a painter's dream, it transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary." Or what the Nobel laureate writer, Par Lagerkvist, described as possessing “a tender quality, it embraces the landscape and whispers secrets to the trees and the seas."

You can see this in a Jazz & Fly Fishing video I watch every bleak midwinter, titled It’s Hardly Ever Like That, one of my favorites.  The piece opens up with Håvard Stubø brooding like a good Scandinavian. His landscape and vehicles are covered in heavy snow.  Like the rest of his bandmates, he appears to be something of a stubbornly cheery melancholic.  His voiceover opens with the band’s original composition, “Flawless Bear,” playing in the background:  “The winters above the Arctic Circle can be pretty rough. Perpetual darkness, interrupted by brief flashes of intense blue light. It’s a good time for indoor activities, such as playing guitar and planning next season’s fishing. And it’s a really good time for tormenting yourself with fly fishing blogs from goddamn New Zealand.”

Still, Stubø flashes back to “those magical never-ending summer days, that make living above the Arctic Circle worth it.”  The next shots are of him standing in some Nordic river during the magic hour, in lush greenery, throwing long-distance casts, and hooking in to beautiful browns, him cackling joyfully as his click-and-pawl reel screams  – the sweetest music they make - with a fighting fish peeling out line. He greets “the supermonster” in his net. He wishes it well. He lets it go. Watching a nice fish swim out of your hand is often more satisfying than catching it. It’s like watching the natural order that you chose to interrupt for selfish reasons, restored. Extending an act of mercy that we wish the rest of the world would extend to us.

As Stubø intones: “All the fishing scenes in this little video were recorded during the course of a couple hours. Heaven knows it isn’t always like that. In fact, as we all know, it’s hardly ever like that. And that is the beauty of it.”

And that, in a nut, is why I love Jazz & Fly Fishing.  Because unlike most of the Monster-Energy-drinking, cork-biting, Instagram-exhibitionist  fish flashers of the day , as often as not, Jazz & Fly Fishing videos are as much about their failures as their triumphs.  (To that end, I highly recommend their four-part study of mojo – only about 14 minutes in its entirety. Or their 25-minute two-parter, The Sorcerer, a meditation on fishing curses/getting skunked.)  They are good fishermen, and pull plenty of gorgeous speckled submarines, mind you. But their failures often serve as the bassline underneath the music, the inducement that keeps them coming back. Because if success were guaranteed, it wouldn’t even be called “fishing,” it would just be called “catching.” And who wants to live in a boring world with assured results?

Stubø summed it up nicely in a 2021 Tom Rosenbauer podcast, speaking of the peaks and valleys of both playing jazz and fly fishing:

They both offer this kind of fundamental freedom. And both of them are something you can never quite master. You can get good at it. You can get good at anticipating what is going to happen. You develop your technical skills. You develop your skills at interplay with nature or the music. But……you never nail it. With fly fishing, you know how it is. One day you’re out on the river, and you’re catching all the fish you’re casting for…..it’s really happening…..and the next day, you can’t catch anything. It’s very much the same with jazz music. And that’s something I really like about it……Without getting too philosophical, I think {losing yourself  either on the water or in a song}, that’s a big part of what drives humans to do a lot of things, whether it be alcohol or drugs, or the nasty things people do. But they are sort of expressions of the same thing: that you want to sort of escape yourself and immerse yourself into something that you cannot control. Fly fishing is very much about that for me. Taking part in nature, not just looking at it.

And so, just about everything that can go wrong on a fishing trip does indeed go wrong in their videos. They run out of food and propane for their camp stove. They stay water-logged in their tents for days on end during heavy weather.  They hook themselves with streamers in their nose.  Through it all, they smoke and drink and curse the fishing gods, sometimes even offering sacrifices (their last piece of chocolate) to shed the bad juju.  In one video, Stubø says, “Fishing is like 90 percent suffering.” To which keyboardist Joona Toivanen replies, “And jazz is like 95 percent.”

And yet, many of their videos conclude with “The End For Now.” But it’s never really the end. Because most addicts can’t quit, and don’t even want to.  And so the boys from Jazz & Fly Fishing always keep coming back for more. Thank God, for our sake.  It’s the beauty of fishing, in many ways –  a beauty that they capture time and again. The very act of casting is one of optimism, like offering up a prayer - blind hope that something fine and unseen will meet you on the end of your line, even when everything around you has gone sideways. And what meets you is almost incidental, whether it’s a seven-pound Artic char caught on the edge of the world, or a seven-ounce bluegill caught in a subdivision retention pond.

As Stubø said to one of his fishing confederates after a lengthy skunkathon, but now spying a bandmate hooking up with a bruiser: “The wind is turning. That’s a good one. Now it’s really happening. Something is changing, and it’s in our favor. Cause it couldn’t get any worse….”

Bonus Tracks: Speaking of Ingrid Bergman, this is the best Ingrid Bergman song there is. (There aren’t many.)  Billy Bragg singing “Ingrid Bergman” off the 1998 Mermaid Avenue album he cut with Wilco, both Bragg and Wilco having gotten their beaks into old Woody Guthrie lyrics that had never been set to music.

The aforementioned instrumental, “Flawless Bear,” from Jazz & Fly Fishing.

Here’s a pretty tune I like from Jazz & Fly Fishing’s Håvard Stubø – even if I can’t understand a word of it – featuring some nice twin guitar work and vocals from Johan Airijoki, who is a Swedish self-taught musician and a miner in his day job.  The song was recorded in Gällivare, Sweden in 2016, and is called “Vissa saker måste brännas.” Which, if my Google translate is at all reliable, means “some things must be burned.”