Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

Here’s a great clip of Stephen Colbert singing and playing the bassoon. It’s pretty funny and definitely worth checking out:

Many musicians are familiar with the distinctive (to put it mildly) vocal stylings of Florence Foster Jenkins. Convinced of her greatness, she became a cult sensation for her unabashed badness. For those who aren’t familiar with her, here is an excerpt from her Wikipedia entry:

Born Florence Foster in 1868 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, [...]

Here’s a great story I recently found through the Chicago Classical Music blog. A trombonist decided to use his bell to shoot off firecrackers. Read the story here. I would have loved to see this happen.

Try to watch this video without smiling at least once:

I just found this link in a recent post on The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross. Would you like to hear some classic trumpet screw-ups? Then check out this page. It is especially funny to hear an instrument with such a prominent role screw up. When bass players screw up [...]

Yahoo! just published this interesting list about the top searches in various categories. They list the top 10 overall searches, news searches, celebrity searches, baby searches, politician searches, and many more. One of my favorite lists is the top blog/blogger searches. Most of them are trashy celebrity blogs. The list is a [...]

Play!, the video game symphony, has a medley of Mario tunes hat is worth checking out. Arnie Roth directs this ensemble, and I have worked with Arnie many times in the past in various ensembles. He is based here in Chicago, Illinois, and he does work for the Mannheim Steamroller, Irish Tenors, [...]

Here’s a news story about my home state from the Onion:

Overpopulation Concerns Force U.S. To Reopen South Dakota
WASHINGTON, DC—Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced yesterday that, in order to deal with a growing population that just… (read more)
_____________
I love the Onion and read it all the time.

Playing Handel’s Messiah this weekend reminded me of this great clip that was circulating last year. After some digging around online I found it. Things aren’t going well for this chorus and orchestra anyway in this performance of the Messiah, but they are about to get much, much worse….
powered by ODEO

This is definitely worth checking out. Flip Baber (johnnyrandom) did an arrangement of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker using only parts from his bikes:
I was recently approached by award winning advertising agency, Goodby,Silverstein Partners to do a composition for their client,Specialized. Specialized is a bike manufacturer and they needed someChristmas [...]