Among the 10,000 new options possible with my recent move to WordPress is the option to print any post.  Folks have been asking about this for a while now, and it was really hard (basically impossible in any useful way) to implement on my old Blogger set-up.  Check it out–it’s really slick.

BTW, I’m in the process of fixing old links.  My Road Warrior Without an Expense Account series is 100% fixed, and I’m moving through the other ‘bedrock’ posts and fixing those links.  Most things should work within a few days.  If you’re still finding broken links a week from now, don’t hesitate to email me at jasonheath@doublebassblog.org and let me know.  We’ve got almost 2000 posts here, and that’s a lot of potential broken links!

I was thinking recently about a funny and masterful prank pulled by the principal bass of a very high-quality orchestra while performing Mahler’s First Symphony several years ago.  Now, part of this piece utilizes offstage trumpets, and this particular prank revolved around these musicians.  Mahler was a big fan of the offstage instrumental sound, as were many of his contemporaries.  I suppose that offstage brass was the 19th century equivalent of special effects, and that what composers might envision doing with electronics or other methods these days had to be done with techniques like player positioning, muting, and the like.

The bass section was lined up against the stage right side of the acoustic shell in this particular venue, and the offstage trumpets were positioned on the other side of the shell directly behind us, with a video camera between the first and second stands of the basses like a honorary member of the section.  This video camera was pointed at the conductor, allowing the offstage trumpets to see the conductor and come in at the correct moment.

I don’t know who thought this particular video camera placement up, but putting a video camera smack dab in the middle of a bass section is just asking for trouble.  Although there was the dim possibility of us running into it (we are bass players after all, and tend to barrel through spaces like giant wooden tanks), the greater danger was tempting the insatiable prankster spirit found in most bass sections.

The dress rehearsal rolled around, and the trumpets filed backstage, ready to play their parts.

Now, most offstage brass parts are solos, and this one is no exception.  The sound of the faraway brass is supposed to float hauntingly out underneath the orchestra and into the audience, creating a vivid musical atmospheric texture.

About five seconds before the cue for the offstage brass, the principal bass suddenly stood up from his stool, turned back, stuck his face in the camera, raised two middle fingers, and leered like a crazy man mere inches from the lens, his face and waggling middle fingers filling the monitors backstage just as the brass players were inhaling for their entrance.

He timed it…..perfectly.  He suddenly pulled back from the camera, sat on his stool, and was the embodiment of attentive orchestral decorum by the time the conductor turned his head and cued the camera.

The brass came in:

"Bwwwa….. *HONK* waaaah…. *FRACK* aaaaaaaah…."

Not exactly the effect Mahler had in mind!

Puzzled, the conductor waved his hands, halting the rehearsal and quizzically calling back to the brass players.

"Everything OK back there?"

"Uh… yeah!  We’re OK."

"Really?  Well…..let’s just try that again."

The brass players whispered curses through the shell at the principal bass as he leaned back, his face filled with the satisfaction that can only come from a perfectly executed prank.

That particular prank bears the stamp of a true professional.  Although I like being a goofball as much as the next bass player, only a real pro has the chutzpah to pull off a quite public camera-leering flip-off and get away with it with no one (outside of the bass and brass players) the wiser.

Photo credits:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelgflanagan/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/phlewght/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolas-hoizey/

Double Bass

Originally uploaded by krakow81

Here’s a great shot of George Lyle playing double bass with the Tight Meat Trio, a free jazz ensemble, at the Hive, GUU, Glasgow, on Saturday 24th, February 2007.

My recent interview with the always entertaining and anecdote-filled Justin Locke prompted me to poke around his site in search of more amusing tales.  There, I found this post about ways in which musicians woefully misrepresent themselves to orchestra contractors.  As a performer-turned-contractor, Justin now finds himself on the other end of the hiring spectrum, and he is continually surprised by the disparity between the musician perspective of contractor hiring practices and reality.  Justin writes:

One thing I often found myself doing when I hire a full orchestra was an amazing amount of tossing names around on lists. Typically, here is what happens: I have a list of, say, violinists, that I know to be good players. But as we all know, some violinists are better than others, and so I have a numbered list: the best violinist is number one, the next best is number two, and so on. Let’s suppose I have a list of 20 violinists, but I only plan to hire 15 of them. What always happens is, something like violinist number 14– let’s call him Ralph– can’t make the gig for one reason or another. Okay, violinist number 16 gets hired in his place.

OK, months go by, and I’m about to hire another orchestra. I have two lists now: the original list of all the possible people I could call (which is now all marked up with revised phone numbers and recommendations and notes about who will call me back when), and another list, the list of people who played the last gig, which is nice and clean and neatly typed, has no marks on it, and has everyone’s tested current phone number and address. Remember Ralph? I have nothing against him, he’s an excellent violinist, but his name is only on that old grungy list now, and I might not even have that list anymore. Unfortunately, Ralph may think that I am a very small- minded person and may think I will never call him again because he said “no” to me once. That’s not the case at all. I am looking at dozens and dozens of names, many of whom I don’t know personally, and I just wanna get this band booked. So Ralph gets forgotten.

Read the complete post here.

Justin goes on to describe the frustration of tracking down current contact information for freelance musicians–a notoriously transient set of folk, as I am well aware!  It is interesting to learn how few musicians have a website of any sort (not even a MySpace or Facebook account).  Websites already function as a sort of Internet business card, and this will only become more common over time.

People reading the bass blog on their Google Reader (or other RSS reader) won’t probably be noticing anything strange at the moment with this post, but folks reading this on the DoubleBassBlog.org site will notice that everything looks….different!  I finally made the move from Blogger to WordPress, which means two things:

1. There is a huge amount of new functionality that will be available in the coming days and weeks.
2. There are a lot of things that are broken, misshaped, or just plain weird.

I’ve known for a long time that this blog needed to get off of Blogger–I’ve been really running into limitations with what can be done on that platform.  Getting off was a painful process (as anyone attempting to access the site within the last 12 hours understands), but most things are working fine now, and expect to see some big changes in layout and functionality in the next few days.

One really annoying discovery is how many links to old posts are broken.  I’ve done what I can automatically, and I am beginning to go through manually and make things work, so expect ‘404 NOT FOUND’ errors on a few things at present.  They won’t last, though.

I’ll be holding off on new posts until tomorrow (I’ve got a lot of new stuff to put out), but expect things to be moving along smoothly after this temporary bump in the road.