Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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I just received this story from bass blog contributor Phillip Serna documenting an infuriating experience at the airport with this viola da gamba. It is quite fitting that I got this story just a day after putting out the first part of my Basses, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles series.
Phillip writes:
You won’t believe this.
I [...]

Charles Noble just gave my car fire story a plug over on his blog Daily Observations. Thanks, Charles! One of the cool things about blogging is how this content lives on over the months and years. Daily Observations is an excellent music blog, and I’d encourage folks to check it out.
Check [...]

There is no sick leave for a freelance musician. I sure learned that lesson the hard way.
A couple of years ago I was booked to play Bugs Bunny on Broadway, a popular show using the orchestra to accompany some Looney Tunes classics. These shows are like musical flypaper, attracting huge numbers of folks [...]

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 [...]

Just a couple of quick items for this Monday morning blog session:

I could definitely use some more double bass tracks for the Virtual Master Class project. If you have any recordings of yourself playing double bass solos and excerpts please e-mail them to me at jsh177@yahoo.com. If you haven’t checked out this project [...]

How quickly time flies! It feels like I just started this blog, and it is hard to wrap my head around the fact that I have pushed that ‘publish’ button one thousand times (and many, many more times than that if you count edits, rewrites, and the like). Think about it—if you looked [...]

I’d like to thank people who checked out my story about conducting the violas yesterday. I got some great feedback about it, and I appreciate it! If you’d like to check out any more stories about odd moments in the life of a freelance musician, you can click on one of the links [...]

My contribution to the Take a Friend to Orchestra initiative is now posted, so folks can check out today’s post at Adaptistration (the excellent blog that Drew McManus authors) to read my thoughts on how to introduce classical music to a newbie.
Drew has been featuring a wide array essays from classical music figures [...]

I am a big fan of gig stories from classical musicians (you can read my own stories here). I had an e-mail sent to me a little while back letting me know about bassist Justin Locke and his book of classical music gig stories titled Real Men Don’t Rehearse. I’ll include ordering information [...]

I’d like to thank double bassist and blogger Matt Heller for giving my story about my car exploding a plug. This was truly a surreal event for me. I am working on part 2 of this story, and I hope to have it out later on this week.
My crazy schedule makes it impossible [...]