Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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I am wrapping up my portion of the Midsummer’s Music Festival in Door County, Wisconsin this week with some fabulous performances. This is my third summer with this ensemble, and it is a great way to decompress after getting up at 4 a.m. and working until 11 p.m. for the past six months. [...]

Matt Heller put out a thoughtful post last week on his blog hellafrisch about Paul Ellison’s teaching style. You can visit Matt’s post here, but I’ll put out a few teaser quotes.
Matt paraphrases Ellison:
First there are the things that you know you know - that’s probably a small section, maybe 10 or 15 [...]

Doing a weekly wrap-up is something that I have been thinking about for a while. I got the idea from Lorelle VanFossen’s blog Lorelle on WordPress, an excellent blog about blogging (of great interest to me–probably not so much for most bass blog readers). Anyway, she does a weekly wrap-up that I always find [...]

Northwestern University double bass faculty member DaXun Zhang has accepted a position with the University of Texas-Austin beginning Fall 2007 and will be leaving his Northwestern teaching post. This is sad news for the double bass community in Chicago, but great news for DaXun’s future career.
Northwestern University has a long history of undervaluing their [...]

Double bassist Brandon Mitchell just left a great comment about my Advice for Aspiring Music Performance Majors post:
This a really amazing article. It definitely scared the crap out of me, though! You know what they say (paraphrased) “the best music teachers are the ones who try to convince you to get out of [...]

I really appreciate all of the feedback people have sent in (both in comment and e-mail form) on my latest installment in my Road Warrior Without an Expense Account series. Although the subject matter can be somewhat depressing, I think that it is important material for musicians to reflect upon (whether or not they [...]

Adriel Bettelheim sent me this recent Denver Post obituary for former Colorado Symphony bassist David Potter. David was a well-loved bassist and teacher with former students in all corners of the country. Boston Symphony bassist Benjamin Levy is quoted in the following obituary from the Denver Post.
A Colorado Life
Bassist a dedicated, “incredible” teacher
By [...]

So where do we go from here? Do we all just turn in our instruments and quit this miserable business? Not me, and not you either, I imagine. We musicians know the value of what we do. We know that our art can change lives, create happiness, inspire greatness in others, [...]

University of North Texas and Cleveland Institute of Music bass professor Jeff Bradetich will be hosting his annual master classes this coming week in Denton, Texas. With that in mind (and with some gentle nagging from my students), I’m putting Jeff’s technique packet up as a PDF download. This packet is the one [...]

The 2007 International Society of Bassists Convention will be taking place June 4-9 at Wanda L. Bass (fitting name) School of Music on the campus of Oklahoma City University. I imagine that many bass blog readers will be attending this event, and I’d love to hear your experiences during and after the convention. [...]