Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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Summer has always been a slow time for me bass-wise. Though I’ve always done at least one summer festival since college, I usually find myself with quite a bit of time on my hands during the warmer months.
The lack of summer work used to cause me considerable stress, especially in my early years of [...]

It’s a great feeling to have completed and put out Road Warrior Without an Expense Account, my first book, earlier this year. It’s a considerable amount of work to publish a book; though I think I always knew this, going through the process personally really drives it home! If you are interested in where [...]

Adaptistration blogger and Inside the Arts mastermind Drew McManus recently put out a post about summer music festivals that really caught my eye. In this post (dated 6/27/08), Drew writes:
Unlike regular season positions, music festivals have an added bonus by offering their exclusive location as an added incentive to performance and travel pay. Add to [...]

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 [...]

 

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This week’s episode concludes the interview with jazz bass legend Steve Rodby that we featured on episodes 58 and 78 of the podcast. Rodby has played bass on every Pat Metheny Group record since 1980, co-produced the group’s last five albums and won 10 Grammy Awards with the group. He has toured with jazz greats [...]

Though this post’s title could easily be tied to a post about slow practice or something like that (which would make a good future blog post!), I’m actually referring here to the deliciously laid-back summer schedules that I’ve managed to get away with for much of my freelance career. While I have certainly had my [...]

MYA Saxophone Quartet featured on From The TopThe What’s Cookin’ Saxophone Quartet, made up of Midwest Young Artists members Amanda Peterson, Mira DeJong, Kateri Tumminello, and Joshua Plotner, was recently featured of NPR’s program From The Top. I do a lot of work with this metropolitan Chicago program–I host their weekly podcast at WMYA.fm, and [...]

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. [...]

 

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We’re featuring something a bit unusual for this week’s Contrabass Conversations episode. Ball State University bass professor and International Society of Bassists president Hans Sturm has been featured several times on the podcast in video episodes, and this week we’re featuring Hans discussing the fundamentals of the Rabbath technique left hand positioning system.
This dialogue was [...]

While it may seem like a strange activity (and, looking around, I certainly seem to be the only guy with a laptop out here!), there is a certain kind of strange satisfaction that I get writing out on the beach, surrounded by nothing but Lake Michigan’s sandy shores and the spruce and pine forests of [...]