Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

You are browsing the archives of 2007 June.

I am wrapping up my portion of the Midsummer’s Music Festival in Door County, Wisconsin this week with some fabulous performances. This is my third summer with this ensemble, and it is a great way to decompress after getting up at 4 a.m. and working until 11 p.m. for the past six months. [...]

 

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It is my pleasure to bring you this great interview with Pittsburgh Symphony principal bassist Jeff Turner for this week’s episode of Contrabass Conversations. Jeff has excellent advice for musicians, and he reflects on his early years on the instrument in this very engaging interview. You will also be hearing a [...]

Blogger (and Contrabass Conversations guest) Michael Hovnanian wrote a great gig story on his CSO Bass Blog about an incident that happened about 10 years ago during a Chicago Symphony Orchestra performance. And I think that this thing only happened in second-tier orchestras!
It was ten years ago, maybe more – one of the first [...]

ArtsJournal blogger Greg Sandow wrote a recent post about the Dakota Chamber Orchestra and the South Dakota Symphony, both mentioning Music Director Delta David Gier and providing a link to musical examples from a recent Dakota Chamber Orchestra performance from this past April.
I was a member of this orchestra from 1991-1994, which was a great [...]

Bass blog contributor Benjy sent me a link to this feature from the New York Times website. It is a Flash movie documenting some of the new and innovative concert hall designs being commissioned from various architects. Very well done and very interesting.
Related Posts:

Strollin’ Down the River - post from Benjy
Remembering Jean Cros [...]

I love posting about the kitties, although I try to keep it to a minimum. There have only been 26 posts about cats out of nearly 1200 posts, so I don’t think this is too bad a ratio.
Anyway, this video definitely falls into the “so bad it’s good” category. It’s a montage of [...]

Our next installment in the Gary Karr video extravaganza is this recording of the Paganini Moses Fantasy. Many double bassists have been inspired by Gary’s performances and recordings of this work (I know I have), and I’m pleased to be able to share this with blog readers:

If you’d like to see a video of [...]

Drew McManus wrote a thought-provoking post regarding internal conflict within the American Federation of Musicians on his blog Adaptistration recently. This post outlines a proposed .10 percent work dues increase for AFM musicians. The most recent work dues increase (.05 percent) occurred in 2003, with the proposed goal of improving project and staff [...]

I have been doing a few tweaks here and there to the user interface for this blog. Nothing major, but hopefully it will help to clarify things and make some features more obvious. In addition to the Articles and Forums links below the Contrabass Conversations banner, you’ll notice that I have added an [...]

Finally, Gary Karr footage has made its way to YouTube, and I’m happy to be able to share it on the Bass Blog. This footage is generally pretty hard to find. You’ll be seeing many videos from Gary in the future (barring a takedown notice!) but we’ll start with a clip of Gary [...]