Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

Double bassist Brian Roessler recently sent me a link to this new double bass case design by Olivier Rabbath from New York weighs only 35 pounds and utilizes a suspender system to hold the bass in place. IT will cost you $4500, but it may save you a lot of flight headaches. [...]

My low-end friend Matt Heller (hellafrisch blog, New World Symphony) was recently featured in a New York Times article titled The Face-The-Music Academy by Daniel J. Wakin. This article is an in-depth look at Miami’s New World Symphony program, and it is a must-read for anyone who considers themselves a classical music fan.
Matt [...]

Episode 8 of Contrabass Conversations features the second part of our interview with double bassist Phillip W. Serna. We covered a lot of interesting topics in this interview, and I hope you’ll find it enjoyable. At the very end of the show I tacked on some of the worst instrumental playing I have [...]

Lyric Opera of Chicago and Grant Park Symphony double bassist Andy Anderson has just been appointed as a member of the bass faculty of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois. This is really exciting news both for Andy and for the bass community at large.
Here’s why:

Andy is [...]

This is the fourth installment of my Road Warrior without an Expense Account series. The intent of this installment is to highlight the increased competition for the progressively decreasing full-time orchestral positions. The statistics I present here are only theoretical and may certainly differ from the exact number or audition openings and candidates, but [...]

There is only one double bass orchestral vacancy listed in this month’s International Musician. That’s right–one job! Not even any per-service jobs are listed this month. The job is for principal bass of the Spokane Symphony, and the details are listed below.
The 2007-08 salary for this position is $20,462.40, and it will [...]

Here’s a clip of University of North Texas professor Jeff Bradetich performing the Courante from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. Jeff is playing it at pitch and in a very different style than the recent Edgar Meyer recording:

If you haven’t checked out Edgar Meyer’s recording of the Bach Suites, you’re missing [...]

This week’s Contrabass Conversations episode features an interview and musical performances from double bassist John Grillo. John has got some great insight into the world of the bass, and this interview was both a lot of fun to do and very informative and interesting.
Click to listen (right-click to download)or click player below:

You can also [...]

My most recent installment in my series on freelancing features a discussion of the emergence of the the modern symphony orchestra as a full-time employer. If you are interested in the details of modern orchestral funding and the implications of this kind of model, check out ‘Who Killed Classical Music?’ by Norman Lebrecht. [...]

This series is based on my own experiences as a professional freelance classical orchestral musician. While everyone has a slightly (or vastly) different individual path in the freelance world, I believe that these experiences reflect what a growing majority of orchestral freelancers are dealing with in their professional lives.
__________
The traditional pot of gold [...]