Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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This story was in the New York Times earlier this week:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that the city’s Department of Education will require all schools to maintain arts programs, and that principals will be rated in their annual reviews on how well they run those programs. The [...]

Bass Blog reader Jon recently let me know about this great resource from Rice University bass professor Paul Ellison on career opportunities in music. This resource is especially relevant considering some of the subjects that have been explored in the past on this blog such as musical entrepreneurship and reinventing music performance degrees.
You [...]

I spent the majority of this week playing up around Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. While the concerts were fun and in a beautiful setting, these long drives are slowly killing me, and I see less and less of them in my future.
I played the same festival last year right around the time that I started [...]

I spent this entire week in Wisconsin, first driving to Madison to play in the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, then heading up to Milwaukee to play a yearly concert called Gathering On the Green about 20 miles north of Milwaukee. This kind of driving reminds me of what it was like playing in the Milwaukee [...]

San Diego Symphony Principal Bass Jeremy Kurtz recently passed this announcement along to me. Joel is a phenomenal player, and I would highly recommend checking it out.
Joel writes:
The Toronto Summer Music Festival and Academy is a new program taking place this year at the University of Toronto from July 23 to August 19th.
I will [...]

Charles Noble wrote a very interesting post on his Daily Observations blog recently concerning his thoughts on teaching, mentioning that he always compares the attitudes and levels of preparation, commitment, and overall dedication to his own attitudes as a young student:
I guess it’s not a totally fair judgment, but I always put the students that [...]

Here’s a quick wrap-up of this week’s bass scene news, blog posts, and other activity:
I released the first part of my new series called ‘This Crazy Business’. This first installment lays the groundwork for what follows in future installments. I wanted to make sure that I had established my position on the general [...]

 

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This week’s Contrabass Conversations podcast features the first part of our interview with double bassist Ranaan Meyer. John Grillo (a frequent guest and collaborator on the podcast) and I co-interviewed Ranaan, who is the bassist for the band Time for Three and has had a very interesting and multi-faceted career. In addition to [...]

An insider perspective on the psychology of performing musiciansThe essay that follows is intended to serve as a theoretical foundation for the arguments presented in subsequent installments of this series. It is based on contemporary theories on arts education plus my own personal observations of the music business. I welcome any additional reader [...]

This is my first real week of vacation in over six months, and it is a humongous relief to finally have come time to kick back and relax. As a result of all this discretionary time, I have made some big behind-the-scenes changes to the blog and the podcast–the sort of thing that has [...]