Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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Earlier this week I blogged a bit about a special bass case made for Serge Koussevitzky’s bass. Bass blog contributor Benjy sent in the following photos and information regarding this vintage bass trunk:
These pics were sent to me by a bassist friend of mine from Paris, Michaël Greenberg, who also lectures [...]

This is our next installment of Lyric Opera of Chicago and Grant Park Symphony bassist Andy Anderson’s Virtual Lesson series. This episode covers techniques used in developing smooth bow changes.
You can view all the released episodes of this series (as well as all of our other blog/podcast bass videos) in the bass blog video [...]

This is our next installment of Lyric Opera of Chicago and Grant Park Symphony bassist Andy Anderson’s Virtual Lesson series. This episode gets more in-depth with the French bow hold, featuring many exercises and close-ups of Andy’s bow hand and arm in action. We get a lot of close-up shots of Andy’s bow [...]

This is our next installment of Lyric Opera of Chicago and Grant Park Symphony bassist Andy Anderson’s Virtual Lesson series.  This episode covers holding the bow and concepts and exercises to aid in the development of a solid bow technique.  We get a lot of close-up shots of Andy’s bow hand and the various bow [...]

Here is another clip from my demonstration/recital at the 2007 Silk Music Camp in Lisle, Illinois. I perform “Capriccio No. 2″ by Louisiana Philharmonic principal bassist David Anderson. After the piece, I briefly demonstrate to the kids the techniques involved in this music.

I’ve got a few more clips from this recital that I’ll [...]

We’ll be featuring an interview with Chicago Symphony bassist Brad Opland this week on Contrabass Conversations. Brad has also provided some great tracks featuring both himself on electric bass and an arrangement of Ibert’s Quatre Cansons de Don Quichotte that Brad created for bassoon and double bass.
We will also be launching our Chicago Chamber [...]

This is the next part of my recital/demo/lecture for the Silk Music Camp last week. I played Rabbath’s Ode D’Espagne for the first part (you can check that out here) of the class, along with a “this is the bass” talk for the students. This video features more of that, plus a few [...]

This is a video of a section of my recital yesterday for the Silk Music Camp in Lisle, Illinois. I am doing a demonstration with the bass, and the first minute or so features me explaining some fundamentals of the bass. I’m basically improvising this demonstration as I go–I wasn’t sure of exactly [...]

The highly useful podcast text search tool EveryZing continues to both amaze and amuse me daily. It does a good enough job with the speech to text transcription to allow for really useful search results, but if you actually sit down and read the transcripts, you’re likely to find yourself rolling on the floor, [...]

I spent the past two weeks performing with the Grant Park Symphony. This has been a real treat for me, both musically and personally. The GPSO is a great ensemble, and we played a lot of excellent repertoire, including Beethoven 2, Mahler 5, and the Firebird Suite. Bass blog readers will actually [...]