Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

There’s an annual Labor Day concert up at Ravinia (the Chicago Symphony’s summer home) that I often play. It’s a very patriotic affair consisting of an all-Tschaikowsky program, with artillery in the park for the 1812 Overture. You know the routine–standard outdoor concert stuff.
The encoré for the evening was, of course, The Star [...]

Double bassist Benjy sent me a link to this uproariously funny (to a music geek, at least) video promoting all the “familiar favorites” written by the warm and cuddly trio of composers from the second Viennese school of composition: Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern. What timeless ditties these three tunesmiths wove!

The greatest video of all time? If not, it’s certainly in contention for it! Note the “funky” bass solo (!) in the middle of this tour de force of moldy cheese.
[via www.kraznoy.com]

OK–maybe you actually don’t suck at using the image editing powerhouse that is Photoshop, but I’ll bet Donnie thinks you do anyway. Kind of like a sinister take on the old Jimmy Fallon tech support guy skits from Saturday Night Live,
Honestly, this set of videos (from My Own Damn Channel) cracks me up more that [...]

I got a principal bass spot in a local Chicagoland orchestra right after graduating from college. One of the side benefits of holding this position was having the opportunity to participate in the ensemble’s community outreach program. I’d already had quite a bit of experience doing outreach activities at this point, having participated in the [...]

I’m up at Ravinia in Highland Park, Illinois (the summer home of the Chicago Symphony) playing a Labor Day Tschaikowsky concert. Guess what’s on the program? Nutcracker excerpts! Nooooo…
Winter after winter of driving to Milwaukee to play the Nutcracker has given me flashbacks, and I find myself instantly teleported to the freeway in the middle [...]

I’ve got another little tale about what happens when cats and basses collide. Most bass players seem to love cats, and many have similar tales of feline mischief.
One of my colleagues was over at my place playing some bass quartets a few years ago. His extremely large bass had a beautiful lion’s head scroll, and [...]

My recent tale of a colleague who mistakenly left his instrument 250 miles south of his gig definitely struck a chord with many readers. Here are some of the great comments relating similar panicky tales:
Darlene writes:
I just played a concert yesterday that was held at a high school about 1/2 hour from where I live. [...]

Here’s a fun little story that one of my more senior colleagues recently passed along to me:
Many years ago, the conductor Hans Werner Henze was rehearsing Stauss’ tone poem “Till Eugenspiegel” with the Chicago Symphony. There is a particularly snarly passage for the bassoons and violas in this piece–it’s the sort of thing that regularly [...]

I like going out after concerts (who doesn’t?), but over the years I’ve grown weary of the stares and chuckles that I always get when I show up to a bar or restaurant in my tails and frilly shirt. I get enough wise comments from people just carrying my dang instrument around, so I try [...]