Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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ArtsJournal blogger Greg Sandow wrote a recent post about the Dakota Chamber Orchestra and the South Dakota Symphony, both mentioning Music Director Delta David Gier and providing a link to musical examples from a recent Dakota Chamber Orchestra performance from this past April.
I was a member of this orchestra from 1991-1994, which was a [...]

I have been doing a few tweaks here and there to the user interface for this blog. Nothing major, but hopefully it will help to clarify things and make some features more obvious. In addition to the Articles and Forums links below the Contrabass Conversations banner, you’ll notice that I have added [...]

John Floeter put out a great post on his bass studio blog recently about his thoughts and observations on freelancing and auditioning. This post is quite relevant to many of my writings about the freelance business (which you can find under my Articles link).
Here are a couple of key points from this post:

I’m in [...]

This interesting story from Polyphonic.org ties in well with my thoughts and observations on future directions for the music business covered in Road Warrior Without an Expense Account Part X - Refocusing (Musical Entrepreneurship). You can find this complete series (and dozens of other long-form essays) under my new Articles link above the post [...]

I blogged about this site last summer, but I was again just spending some time on DoubleBassGuide.com, a great resource for players of the instrument out of Germany. The site is operated by Jonas Lohse, who also maintains a double bass blog. It has articles, a gear guide, and a great bass links [...]

One of the challenges as one’s blog grows in size is finding an efficient way of organizing all of the various posts on the blog to make them accessible and useful to readers. I have tried to be as user-friendly as possible on the bog, with tabs and a search box at the top, [...]

Doing a weekly wrap-up is something that I have been thinking about for a while. I got the idea from Lorelle VanFossen’s blog Lorelle on WordPress, an excellent blog about blogging (of great interest to me–probably not so much for most bass blog readers). Anyway, she does a weekly wrap-up that I always find [...]

Jean-Yves Bénichou sent me a link to this beautifully created video of 500 female portraits amalgamated into one continuous video (a la Michael Jackson’s ‘Black and White’ video, for those of you who watched MTV in the early 1990’s). Benjy has contributed several articles to the blog in the past–you can visit all of [...]

This is a post from double bassist from Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music student Nicholas Hart. Nick will be contributing weekly posts to the bass blog about life as a music student in one of the nation’s most exclusive programs. I think readers will find this different perspective on the double bass world and the music [...]

I found an interesting article through oboeinsight recently from the Arizona Republic about Yo-Yo Ma and how his crossover projects are perceived by audiences, critics, and colleagues:
Few people who care about classical music question this theology: Among the great musicians of the world, Ma is the most complete, the most fluent, the most profound. To [...]