Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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As I started to drive up to Milwaukee to begin my annual Nutcracker run, something suddenly struck me–I hadn’t left the state of Illinois since the summer! In fact, the furthest I’d wandered the whole fall was to take a few trips to Elgin, just 35 miles away from my lake front home.
The [...]

It’s early December and I am knee deep in Messiah season, pumping them out on a daily basis for ensembles all across Chicagoland. 
Messiah Messiah Messiah Messiah Messiah….I eat, drink, and breathe this piece morning, noon, and night this time of year.  Just what I think I’ve escaped, it pulls me back in with [...]

 

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This week’s Contrabass Conversations episode features an interview with Suzuki Bass School pioneer, pedagogue, and teacher trainer Virginia Dixon. Virginia shares her years of experience performing and teaching the double bass, highlights unique aspects of the Suzuki bass method, and offers advice for those interested in pursuing a career as a double bass [...]

National Symphony Orchestra principal bassist Robert Oppelt put together a great page of information about the wide variety of grips used by professionals on the German bow.  As a French bow player, I always find myself struggling when offering advice to students on how exactly to approach the subtleties of German bow technique, and [...]

We’ve gotten slammed here in Chicago with the first really big snowfall of the season.  This kind of thing used to strike terror into my very core as I envisioned the slipping and sliding that I would be doing on rural Wisconsin back roads, commuting hundreds of miles between disparate locations in the frozen and [...]

I hope that folks enjoyed this weekend’s interview episode with the always interesting Justin Locke. We’ll be wrapping up this interview on an upcoming episode and really get into some interesting topics about the music business and how musicians market (or, more often, don’t market) themselves effectively.
This upcoming weekend will see the release of [...]

I blogged previously about the sudden and unfortunate demise of the International Music Score Library Project and how this may be a harbinger of things to come as the Internet age progresses.  One of my favorite podcasts, Buzz Out Loud, also weighed in on this story, and MusTech.net just wrote a post about it as [...]

Why, indeed? Answering this seemingly innocuous three-word question is an ongoing process constantly revisited by music educators throughout their careers, the answer constantly shifting and evolving as teachers gain new insight and experience. While there is always a circular justification that can be made in defense of any subject (i.e. the value of knowledge [...]

I had the opportunity to appear as a guest lecturer for the orchestral studies seminar class at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of the Performing Arts earlier this week, which was a lot of fun for me and hopefully a good experience for the students as well.  I inhabited the role of grizzled freelance music veteran, [...]

 

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This week’s Contrabass Conversations Episode features the second part of our interview with double bassist Brad Opland. Last time we heard from Brad (on episode 37), we talked about his experiences in the Minnesota Orchestra and Chicago Symphony, plus some of the most memorable highlights from Brad’s performing career. This episode we discuss Brad’s experiences [...]