Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

You are browsing the archives of 2007 October.

Corin Long’s sister Vanessa has booked Longslade Community College in Birstall, Leicester for a memorial concert for the late Royal Philharmonic principal bassist, who tragically died in an accident earlier this year. 
Vanessa writes:
The concert will be from 7.30 to 9.30ish with a bar open til midnight. All are most welcome to attend [...]

I stumbled upon this blog post over the weekend, discovering a very funny Van Halen video from early October, 2007.  Apparently, the synthesizer in the opening of the classic Van Halen tune ‘Jump’ started playing at 48K instead of 44.1 K, causing a….bit of a problem when the other instruments came in.  Eddie Van [...]

This week’s Contrabass Conversations Episode features the second part of our interview with Chicago Symphony bassist Rob Kassinger. Last time we heard from Rob (on episode 25), we talked about his early years on the bass, growing up in Colorado, playing jazz and electric bass, studying the instrument, and studying with Homer Mensch in New [...]

What motivates us?
What makes us get into this business, anyway, making numerous sacrifices along the way?
Not the money (ha!), but rather the drive to create, to devote one’s life to the pursuit of organized (i.e. musical) creativity.
What percentage of active musicians feel that their musical thirst to create, that primal urge felt by creative individuals [...]

This is the last installment in our series of virtual lessons with Lyric Opera of Chicago bassist Andy Anderson. We hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and we’ll be rolling all the videos up this week into a dedicated player, allowing you to watch the entire lesson series from beginning to end. This feature [...]

The following is a guest post from Double Bass Blog contributor Phillip W. Serna. Check out Phillip’s recitals and interviews on his Contrabass Conversations page, and visit him online at http://www.phillipwserna.com/. Enjoy!
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David Miller with the Jefferson Baroque Orchestra
Continuing Contrabass Conversations and the Double Bass Blog’s series on early bass performers, highlighting the many different [...]

One of the biggest challenges for a blogger is making useful older content easy to access without becoming an annoying self-promotion machine.  I am always struggling with this, and I’ll probably do highlight posts like this every once in a while.  These are a few of my favorite blog stories and resources from the last [...]

Here’s an excellent video of the great double bass performer (and Contrabass Conversations guest) François Rabbath performing the slow movement of Vivaldi’s Concerto in F, Op. 3 No. 9. This was recorded at Ball State University in 2007. What a great artist!
Those who haven’t checked out our interview series with François can [...]

In the never ending quest to improve the usability of this blog, I have been experimenting with some new methods of highlighting posts and useful content.  Expect to see some new ways of interacting with the site very soon.  For starters, I have changed around the podcast information area in the sidebar (below the video [...]

We’ve got some really exciting news for bassists out there–double bassist (and Contrabass Conversations guest) Phillip Serna has secured the rights to release the Eduard Tubin Concerto on the Contrabass Conversations podcast, and we’ll be soon featuring a video performance of this fantastic concerto with Phillip as bass soloist.
Getting permission to have this 20th century [...]