Dylan, who is almost 4 years old, just rolled his eyes into the back of his head and said “I can see my brain!”

That’s my boy…

Via Jase:

88% Geek

77%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Bill Harrison posted this tidbit over at Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog about frustration playing with shitty musicians, and I could not agree more with this. It really sucks to be stuck in an orchestra gig with the one guy that insists on playing too loud and too fast. It’s a testosterone thing I assume – he’s too macho to play with the rest of these fools, so he’s determined to show everyone exactly how it is done by himself.

These assholes are part of the reason I left the music business. (That, and of course the massive injuries I sustained back in Boston in an accident, coupled with the lack of good benefits and decent pay – long story, another time…) I like music too much, and as a freelancer and prospective auditioning bassist I encountered just a few too many of these to really feel like this was going to be a good career idea.

This discussion reminds me of a particular incident which I love to talk about because it was just so amazing when it happened. There are certain conductors you don’t want to piss off, lest they shove the baton straight down your gizzard. In one rehearsal with Simon Rattle whilst working on the effing difficult but amazing to hear last movement of Shostakovitch 4, he let the last stand of my bass section have it. The instigator was doing his usual finishing the sections about 2 or 3 measures earlier than the rest of the orchestra, and getting the other player (who is otherwise an incredible bassist) all stirred up with a weird air of machismo and tandem crotch-grabbing more fitting for a football huddle than for an orchestra performance with the illustrious maestro:

Rattle (To me as principal):

Sir, would you please yell at them?

Me (Scared shitless):

Uh-huh….. Guys, could you please?

Me (After a second try – same problems – to the last stand – politely, maybe even timidly):

Guys – could you keep it together?

Rattle (To last stand):

If you can’t follow me, follow the concertmistress. If you can’t follow her, follow him (pointing to me). If you can’t follow him, at least listen! Because if you can’t do any of those things, you’ll never get a job! You’ll starve!

Rattle (After the third attempt with no improvement on the part of the problematic stand):

AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!!!!

Obviously I was being too nice, but lesson learned. As for the performance, they still finished early – jock-cupping and all at the end of said passage. Mind-boggling.

So to this day, Shostakovitch 4 is my favorite symphony, even though our performance didn’t even come close to doing it justice. It sucks that we have to put up with these situations in our professional lives, but it is how we handle it and pick ourselves up in case we fall that defines our level of professionalism.

In Basses, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Part 2 – Trains, Jason writes:

People think that they are very funny — One of the most annoying things about carrying a bass around town is having grown people gape at you, slack-jawed like drugged cattle, as you struggle to get from point A to point B. You know how cattle all slowly turn their heads and stare at you as you walk past them on a country road? That’s just what your fellow commuters do.

After staring for a while, a light bulb goes off in the back of their commuter minds.

“Hey,” they think. ” should make a humorous remark directed toward that person carrying that strange thing! What a great idea!”

They close their gaping mouths, wet their lips, and blurt,

“Did’ja ever think of playing the piccolo? Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw!”

this so reminds me of riding the T to gigs back in Boston. My favorite moment was when a fellow bassist and I were riding back on the Green Line from a rehearsal with our basses on one of those tiny little cars, and we received this exact same comment about how we should have picked the flute. Because the face on my friend after that one was priceless – looked like he just took a sip of 2 day old Pabst Blue Ribbon where someone dropped their coals in. I laughed out loud and our stand-up comic erroneously thought she was hilarious.

Some others I’ve heard whilst dragging my bass through the snow:

• Is that a body in there?
• Is that your canoe?
• That’s a big cello/guitar/whatever!
• How do you get that in your car/a taxi/on the train?

Every single time. Like clockwork. Try it. Walk down a busy street with a double bass in a case and see what you get. You will be running home frantically searching for the Absolut in no-time.

I get the same sorts of inane chatter from having a homophonically similar famous boxing legend.

This cracked me up. I was just reading it here while sitting in the BMW dealership waiting for them to finish giving an oil change to my iPod accessory and I started laughing out loud. People are looking at me with raised eyebrows.

hella frisch: an audition scenario

Old bass joke to make you groan:

musicmutt: A fun little story

A friend of a friend of a friend of mine told me this little tale of one of our local symphony orchestras doing a rendition of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. There is a passage in this piece where the bass section has a fairly long break. Long enough, in fact, that the double bass players stocked up the green room with libations and when this break came, they would skip down to the green room for a little sheep dip. Well, as the rehearsals went on, they started cutting their return close enough that even they started to get a little nervous. So, they got a hold of the conductor’s sheet music, punched a hole in the bottom corner and tied the pages together to buy themselves a few extra seconds. So, come performance night, you could just feel the tension. There, at the bottom of the 9th, the score is tied, and the basses are loaded.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Joe Volpe gets hip

Sharp-eyed reader Nora Renka noticed that the drop curtain at the Met’s Romeo et Juliette features a medieval figure reading a book, and on the book is written the phrase “LORVM IPSVM ALL YOVR BASE ARE BELONG TO VS.”

W00t!

Failing is indeed a very difficult piece for double bass. This is a nice little low-fi version of a performance posted over at violinist.com that is great for giving you an idea of what the piece is about. Very funny! I had never actually heard this piece, though I’ve heard several very similar ones. The double bass can easily evoke a bit of comedy, and it’s no wonder. It’s just such a sight to see someone carrying one around or sawing away with virtuosity during a performance on one – it makes for great theater. I can’t tell you how many times I had to suffer inane comments such as:

• “What have you got in there?”
• “You should have picked the flute.”
• “Is that a dead relative?”
• “Is that a guitar?”

And so on, ad nauseum. Those comments used to just deflate me. I remember once standing there on the T in a crowded car on the Green Line with one other bassist coming back from a gig, and someone literally comes up to us and lays the old “flute” quote on us, like it’s funnier the 10,000th time. I hate the flute. Sorry.

I take that back. It’s not so much the flute itself that I can’t stand, but the idea of myself playing one. I’m strings only: woodwinds and brass ain’t my bag, baby. Maybe I could deal with a bassoon or something, but flute is way at the opposite end of my mental tessitura. Sorry if I offended any flutists out there ��� it was purely unintentional…

Solo bass pieces are part of why I got in to playing this instrument in the first place. The humorous pieces like Failing are great and all, but I’ve never been attracted to them personally. I’m more into pieces like Psy by Luciano Berio, or Bach suites, or a good sonata with piano like ones by Misek or Schubert.

Seriously ��� I think it makes a great solo instrument. It’s not great in the sense of it being acoustically on a comparable dynamic level as a piano or something that can cut over an orchestra for a concerto ��� no. I just like the sound of it, and it does make a nice solo instrument with small string ensembles, a quiet accommpaniment with muted piano or a plucked string, and of course unaccompanied. I’ve been arranging certain accompaniments for common bass repertoire pieces for classical guitar, for example, because I think it makes a better acoustic blend than the usual piano. Another great example of this is Edgar Meyer and Mike Marshall’s performance of Zigeunerweisen with mandolin accompaniment and double bass solo. It’s a perfect role reversal of two instruments that should be logically in their opposite roles of accompanist versus soloist.