I’m down at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana today to do a talk about setting up a private teaching studio. Being the neurotic musician that I am, I arrived extremely early, knowing that where there’s a music school, there can’t be a coffee shop too far away. That turned out to be the case, of course, and I’m hanging out at Espresso Royale right now, getting juiced up on a dark roast brew and doing some blogging for the next few weeks.

Contributor posts this past week

National Symphony bassist Jeff Weisner wrote a wonderful post this week about the “no-hire” audition situation that happens, unfortunately, at all too many auditions. It’s great to hear the perspective of someone in a major orchestra who, while being on the committee side of things during his NSO tenure, also was on the receiving end of many of these “no-hire” auditions. Check his post out if you haven’t yet.

Phillip Serna has also recently put out a couple of early music posts, and Peter Tambroni has contributed several posts recently as well. In addition to being regular doublebassblog.org contributors, both of these gents have been Contrabass Conversations guests as well (Pete’s interview link – Phillip’s interview link).

More good stuff for Contrabass Conversations coming up

We’re also putting out several all-music episodes on the podcast in the next couple of weeks, including one featuring Indiana University student Ben Jensen and another with the very cool bass-centric Los Angeles band Haberdashery. We’re also continuing our interviews with Mark Morton and Lawrence Wolfe, and we have a few funny and thought-provoking special episodes in the can from bassists David Cardon and John Grillo. Whew!