Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

You are browsing the archives of 2007 February.

I hate being passed by trucks in the winter. Getting slush and gravel splattered on the windshield of my puny car always makes me grip the steering wheel a little tighter. At least I’ve never been passed by trucks like these (photos from Dark Roasted Blend):

Does that truck look stable to you?

There is only one double bass orchestral vacancy listed in this month’s International Musician. That’s right–one job! Not even any per-service jobs are listed this month. The job is for principal bass of the Spokane Symphony, and the details are listed below.
The 2007-08 salary for this position is $20,462.40, and it [...]

The following image comes from the NASA archive. Volcanoes are an amazing thing to behold:
Here is the NASA data for this plume of smoke:
At 3:00 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time on May 23, 2006, Flight Engineer Jeff Williams from International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 13 contacted the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) to report that the [...]

Here’s a clip of University of North Texas professor Jeff Bradetich performing the Courante from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. Jeff is playing it at pitch and in a very different style than the recent Edgar Meyer recording:

If you haven’t checked out Edgar Meyer’s recording of the Bach Suites, you’re missing [...]

June Matayoshi recently contributed a post to Chicago Classical Music blog about getting by as a freelancer. I have played a lot of gigs with June in the past, and it is great to hear from her on this blog. In the post she describes the complications of keeping a full-time job while [...]

Anyone who has spent any time working in an office (I worked in the legal department of Citibank off and on for a few years) can relate to the fantastic movie Office Space. I had a link sent to me recently from YouTube in which someone recut Office Space to make it look like [...]

OK–the Bears lost the Superbowl, but this is still a video worth checking out. This is ‘Bear Down, Chicago Bears’ as performed by the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Bryan Griffin:

There is another famous individual with the exact same name (only spelled Brian instead of Bryan) that you all may be familiar with:

Whew! It’s a nice feeling to get that car explosion story off of my chest. I’ve been waiting to put that one out on the internet for a long time. Those event happened in early 2004, and I remember thinking then that this is a story that has to be shared online.
People [...]

Listen to the audio version of this story here, and check out the video version as well!
This is the worst gig story ever.
 

I’ve told a lot of gig stories on this blog. Some of them are humorous, some are annoying or cringe-worthy, but none even [...]

Here is what I came up for my recent talk on podcasting at DePaul University. Podcasting is a simple concept in some ways, yet I struggle to clearly communicate what it is and how it differs from previous technology. As I did this talk I realized at, while my brain is always spinning [...]