As my contribution for some laughs here’s a wonderful cartoon. This is from Quino, the great cartoonist from Argentina, author of Mafalda. For better effect you should first see the cartoon and then read the translation of the joke here.

The text reads as follows: “So, now that we are home and can talk alone, tell me in all honesty: what happened to the gentleman tonight that sounded so awful? The gentleman has something against Mahler, perhaps?”

It hurts, but it’s pure genius!

As one of my colleagues pointed out to me when I blogged this years ago, check out which bow gets the “special” treatment.

…or, as our young eastern European friend says o his YouTube page, “Exlusive perfomance using of modern thing for string-bow instrumetes.”

…from the International Society of Bassists E-Bass Line – join ISB today to receive these updates, Bass World, and much more!

video by INIT Editions

listen to Rabbath being interviewed by Jason

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPzcsPVyVdM

My student Dave Elbrecht pointed this out to me. Here’s what the video includes as commentary:

A "how not to play" demonstration of the Hindemith Double Bass Sonata, 3rd movement. Don’t play it too slow! Otherwise it will sound like this. Also, be kinder to notes at the ends of phrases, otherwise they will sound choked and squawky (good examples in this video).

What the hey?!?

I was playing bass for one one these aforementioned whole-note sessions, flipping each chart over as we wrapped it up and thinking about my various dinner options.

I flipped the next chart in the stack, and my heart took a sudden leap into my throat. The music I was about to sight-read for this session was absolutely covered in black, with sixteenth notes buzzing up and down the staff, intricate hemiolas and rest patterns, and tons of tricky accidentals all over the page.

Crap!

How could I have missed this one when I was flipping through my music at the beginning of the session? And what on Earth was a nutso chart like this doing in my stack of easy-as-pie first position whole note tunes?

With no time to think (the engineer was ready and waiting for our small string group to start behind the glass), I picked up my bow, knowing that I was about to embark on one heck of a sight-reading adventure.

Click, click, click…

We were off and running, and I was bobbing and dipping like a maniac, navigating these off-the-wall sixteenth note passages as best I could. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that all of my upper-string colleagues were watching me with bemused grins. Their parts were half-note and whole note chords, just like all the others, and I soon realized that this track (for Christmas album, of all things!) was arranged as one bizarre bass solo.

Fortunately, I’m a pretty good sight-reader, and I started to gain confidence as I realized that there would be no respite for me through the entire track. I jammed out as well as I possibly could given the circumstances, and was feeling pretty darned proud of myself as the other string players played the final chords of the arrangement.

As silence filled the studio, I shook out my arms and waited to see what the engineer wanted to punch in. After all, I did a good job, didn’t I? Maybe just few bars here or there to clean up?

Long silence.

My confidence wavered.

Finally, the studio speakers came on:

“Um… Jason. Can I see that bass part?”

I snaked my way through the cables and mic stands, meeting him at the door.

“Jason,” he said, “that’s the electric bass part.”

Apparently, the bass guitar part had been misfiled in my folder. The string tracks were just sonic padding on this record, and the electric people would be in a few days later to lay down the groovier stuff.

Blushing profusely (though it wasn’t really my fault, was it?) as my actual part was handed to me, I took my seat again, and we took it from the top, with my actual part being even simpler than the other tracks. I only played a few pizzicati and a couple of whole notes, in fact.

So much for my rockin’ Christmas solo upright bowed solo jam track!

Apparently, this orchestra never pre-screens their candidates, making for a quite egalitarian yet massively populated pool of candidates. Due to this policy, there are at least a handful of auditionees that have the panel rolling on the floor (figuratively, at least) in suppressed laughter or else slouched in their chairs with tears of pain rolling down their cheeks.

The double bass always attracts a motley crew of candidates anyway, and having no screening process usually means that there are some real characters stepping up on stage to strut their stuff. While painful to the ears of the long-suffering committee, it can also provide for some much-needed levity after hour after interminable hour of nervously executed symphonic snippets.

One such bass player entered for his audition (behind a screen, of course) and started tuning extremely loudly, roaring away on his low strings in an apparently futile attempt to get in tune. Not a good sign.

The committee was fidgeting away while waiting for the candidate to begin, only to slowly realize that, in fact, the candidate had begun, and that these crass attempts at tuning had somehow morphed into the first movement of the Vivaldi Sonata No. 3 for Cello, played as low as possible in the fist position of the bass. The candidate clacked and rattled his way through the first few phrases of this piece, grinding his low strings like some sort of lower life form, with the committee looking at each other with some amusement.

This audition was going to be fun.

The committee cut off the “grinder” after a bit, asking him to play the final movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, a tricky excerpt that requires quite a bit of agility on the part of the player. Not easy even for a top-caliber player, so how would this fellow fare.

Long pause.

The first four notes came out, a confused jumble of crud, then nothing.

Long pause.

Another attempt at those first four notes.

Silence.

Finally (and with much hysterically silent laughter from the committee), this fellow burped and snorted his way through this excerpt, like a piano falling down a set of stairs, only less graceful.

Having fun now, the committee proceeded to ask the candidate to play rehearsal number 9 from Ein Heldenleben, an even more fiendishly difficult passage for string bass.

Longer pause.

Finally, the proctor (the person with the candidate who points out what excerpts to play and helps coordinate the audition facilitation) calls out from the candidate’s side of the screen:

Proctor: Uh… the candidate declines to play this excerpt…

Committee: OK–thank you!

Don’t you just love bass auditions?

One of the shops exhibiting basses was using a classy kind of bass stand–wooden and elegant, something like the following:

Now, these racks are attractive, but as you can see from the photo above, they don’t provide a whole lot of stability for the instrument. In this scenario, each bass is resting in a shallow indentation, with nothing else supporting it.

Apparently (and I wasn’t there to see this, but word traveled fast across the convention floor after the incident!), one of the parents of a young bassist was putting a bass back that they were trying out. They put it back in the rack and must have gotten it off-center. As they let it go, the bass tipped over.

Now, this is bad enough on its own, but this was but one bass in a long line of basses, all in similar racks. The off-kilter bass smacked into the bass just to the side of it, knocking it over as well, thereby setting in motion the world’s most expensive set of dominos:

Can you imagine the utter shock and horror on everybody’s part: parent, shop owner, and conventioneers? Each bass clobbered the one right next to it, damaging (to greater or lesser degrees) the bass next to it, which in turn fell over, damaging the one next to it. Yikes! I still wake up dreaming about this… and I wasn’t even there to witness it!