What a week we all had at the 2017 International Society of Bassists Convention! With nearly 1500 participants, this 50th anniversary convention was the largest ever for the organization. It started off with a bang with Gary Karr’s marvelous keynote and performance....
When George Amorim took a faculty position at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, there wasn’t a single bass student. He decided to change that. In 2008, he started the ¡Viva el Bajo! South Texas Double Bass Festival. Double bass virtuoso and University of...
I fondly recall the very first Chicago Bass Festival back in 2009. Allan Dennis, Jerry Fuller, and I had been chatting about the need for a festival like this for quite some time. As director of the Midwest Young Artists Conservatory, Allan had the resources to mount...
It was such a pleasure to be the featured artist for the 2017 San Francisco Winter Bass Bash! I had the chance to check out the 2016 Bash and was inspired by what I saw. Student groups from all over the Bay Area performed at Davies Hall (the home of the San Francisco...
For the last seven years, I held down a full-time job that obliterated any possibility of attending events like the BASS2016 European Double Bass Congress in Prague. The possibility of sneaking away to Prague for a week was out of the question. How thankful I...
