Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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Every summer I think Chicago’s great. It’s sunny, warm, the beaches are filled with people, the city is bustling with activity, and the lake is beautiful and inviting. I am convinced that it’s the greatest city in the world. Then winter hits (in November, or perhaps October or maybe even in [...]

News at Seven is a recent project launched by Northwestern University (my Alma Mater). This thing is really amazing. It is a completely automatic news generator. Using characters from Half-Life, the program creates a news feed by scraping news sites, blogs, videos and more to create a news program with absolutely [...]

Michael Hovnanian of the Chicago Symphony recently started a bass blog. Michael was my teacher at Northwestern University for my undergraduate and graduate degrees, and it is really great to see him start a blog! I just added his blog to my Blogroll in the sidebar of this blog.
In addition to playing in [...]

If you are interested in learning more about this subject, check out the follow-up post to this article here.
I have a B.M. and M.M. in Double Bass Performance from Northwestern University. Although I had a good financial package for my undergraduate degree and had a full-tuition fellowship or my graduate degree, I still owe [...]

Last night the Chicago Philharmonic played in Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. You can read my previous post about the concert here, or read all of my recent concert posts here.
I have played countless concerts in this hall for the past over the past 15 years, and I always forget what a strange and [...]

I will be performing with the Chicago Philharmonic at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall on the Northwestern University campus this Sunday at 7 p.m. We are playing the Brahms Symphony No. 2 and the Sibelius Violin Concerto. Andreas Deák is the conductor for this program, and the soloist is violinist Krista Stuart. Ben Rachlis [...]

Believe it or not, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago used to advertise in Time magazine. Here is an ad from 1998 featuring the bass section. I am the second player from the right. One of my favorite things about this picture is the obvious empty stool in the middle of [...]

The term “social bookmarking” may not be familiar to everybody, but it has emerged as one of the most useful tools of the Web 2.0 movement. The service del.icio.us (now owned by Yahoo!) is the oldest and best example of the power of social bookmarking. Del.icio.us allows users to save their bookmarks online, [...]

I live in Evanston, Illinois, which is a college town just north of Chicago. It has a population of just under 100,000 people. Most of it is densely populated, much like Chicago. South Evanston in fact looks almost exactly like Chicago.

Evanston is a beach town. That statement may seem strange to [...]

Michael Goode of the Chicago Reading Orchestra was recently interviewed this week in the Chicago Reader by Deanna Isaacs. The article caught my attention because it was referring to a piece written by composer Bjorn Berkhout. Bjorn was my roommate in college at Northwestern University in Chicago. He has taught at Loyola [...]