Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

It’s been a great year of blogging for me personally, and I’m really excited to have reached the phase of development for both Contrabass Conversations and doublebassblog.org that I’m at currently. We’ve got a large daily readership (we were pushing 2000 daily page views for these sites plus Arts Addict during the spring) and a [...]

I think that all men in classical music look at the concert attire worn by our female colleagues with a little bit of envy from time to time. Not that we men all want to wear heels and make-up (though some of us probably do….not that there’s anything wrong with that!), but putting on a [...]

I’ve got story for you, and I promise it’s true!
When I was getting started as a freelance musician at the tail end of my masters degree, I was quaking in my boots about my future prospects. After all, I was regularly buying CDs at Borders and Barnes and Noble from former Northwestern doctoral music students. [...]

Over time, professional freelancers develop a set of skills quite peculiar to the profession, alternately taking on the role of long-haul trucker, delivery man, cabbie, and crisis control expert. Though they share the same basic musical skills as their more stably employed colleagues, freelancers are constantly faced with foreign environments and unfamiliar faces, and are [...]

After publishing my first book Road Warrior Without and Expense Account last month, I’m hard at work editing my next book, which will feature scores of crazy gig stories and will (probably) be titled “My Car Caught Fire and Exploded!”
This amusing little story was told to me by a bassist as we were waiting [...]

This blog represents the constant, gopher-like work of one overcaffeinated bassist’s multi-year attempt to create a resource bank for the double bass community (plus crazy gig stories and cat posts, of course!).  Though I am constantly working to tweak the user interface to walk the line between showing too much and not showing enough, I [...]