Blog

The year was 2009. My blog had gotten to be quite popular in certain circles and was getting some traditional media attention. I was taking calls from reporters from major publications like the New York Times for perspective on the arts music scene, and my podcast had really started to connect.

At the same time, I was enrolled in a post baccalaureate eduction program and hoping to teach high school orchestra. It was a strange experience fielding phone calls from major media outlets while walking between classes with a bunch of 18-year-olds. I was definitely the odd man out.

My Big Mouth
I got a call from Doyle Armbrust, one of my longtime music friends who was writing for TimeOut Chicago. This was the heyday of the TimeOut franchise, and the weekly magazine could be found everywhere. I was totally thrilled. Doyle is a gifted writer, and I couldn’t wait to do the profile.

In addition to the crazinessinmylife that you probably know about, I had gotten a particularly scary bit of anti-semitic comment vitriol directed at one of my recent podcast guests. Some of those comments were pretty scary, prompting my wife to ask me to remove any mentions of my home address on the blog.

Doyle and I had a great and quite frank chat about the music business, and I was thrilled with the piece when it came out. It made me look way cooler than I actually am! I had forgotten how much I had cursed in the article, and I cringed a bit as I read some of what I had said. I won’t repeat exactly what I said here to keep the blog G rated, but you can read it in Doyle’s original article (third paragraph).

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I had just gotten hired for my first high school teaching job when this came out, and it immediately went to the top of the search rankings when looking for my name. I believe that the words “jason heath” came up with this exact quote:

TimeOut Chicago – Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

Jun 30, 2009 – Jason Heath is not “a facilitator of the Zionist plot to overthrow the Palestinians.” Yet after … published in Time Out Chicago on June 30th, 2009.

Not “a facilitator of the Zionist plot?” Oh no! That’s the exact sort of thing that a potential employer would click when doing some web sleuthing. Clicking on that would then feature me cursing and talking about how music school is a pile of lies.

I had a tense few days waiting for a phone call from my school’s district office. Visions of conversations like “Jason… can you come in and talk with the superintendent?” danced in my brain. Lucky for me, that call never came, and I successfully flew under the radar into my new job.

One of the things that I’ve heard in all three new teacher training programs I’ve done is to not say, do, or write anything that you wouldn’t want on the front page of the newspaper. Well, I’d done something that was landing me on the first page of Google!

New Jobs, Old Skeletons
Two years later, I decided to apply for a new job. As I was putting in my paperwork, I decided to chance another vanity search on Google. What did “jason heath” bring up? That same story!

I vividly remember sitting in the principal’s office doing the “final interview” for the job with two former coaches turned principals. I remember tensing up as they began each new question, waiting for the inevitable probe about my “Zionist plot” or how “You are sold a giant lie when you go to music school.”

Though my blog did come up in the interview, thankfully the conversation never went to a dark place. I guess the good news for someone like me is that while there was one story out there in which I let loose about the music business, there were literally thousands of other articles featuring me contributing to the music world.

Lessons Learned
Despite the occasional scary comment, putting myself out there online has been 99.9% positive. It seems like you don’t even exist if you don’t have a web presence these days. Also, I more or less relinquished my privacy online years ago. Having a policy of openness has worked well for me, but it’s not for everyone. Having a web presence while also maintaining a sense of privacy is very challenging these days, and it doesn’t look like it’ll get any easier in the near future.

Though everything worked out just fine for me balancing these two worlds, it’s probably not a good idea to put out things that make you sound extreme if you are looking to teach children. I think that I was a special case given the totality of what I had been doing, but if a potential employer goes to your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and sees a string of questionable content, you’ll probably be dropped as a prospect in a millisecond.

It may be unfortunate, but teachers really do live in a fishbowl in terms of their community, and they are subject to scrutiny above and beyond what they do in the classroom. Partying to the max in the local bar that all the parents frequent is probably not a super-smart move, for example. Nor is buying three cases of vodka at the grocery store where your students bag groceries.

While it all worked out for me, it’s probably good to follow a policy of not putting extreme opinions on the public record in a teaching job as well!

I’ll admit it—I had been under a lot of stress.

It seemed like everything in my life was all of a sudden coming to a head. I was living 2600 miles apart from my wife in what may very well be the world’s worst bachelor pad. My school orchestra was performing at the Midwest Clinic, the world’s most prestigious pre-college music event. I was gigging like a fool. And I had decided to leave my job but not tell anyone just yet. I was in hardcore orchestra director mode, recording rehearsals and listening back while furiously scribbling notes, trying to keep my temper in check and my outlook positive so as to not go postal on the kids.

Layers upon layers of pressure…

I collapsed most nights on the couch, intending to watch a little Netflix but falling asleep in some contorted position moments after kicking up my feet. But I always made sure to set my multiple iPhone alarms the moment I walked in the door, knowing that, if I didn’t, I would be likely to fall asleep before even thinking about it.

My Brush With Surreality
One morning, with a wooden taste in my mouth and a feeling of unease creeping into my mind – my circadian rhythm felt off – I was asleep in a vampiric pose, arms crossed over my iPhone.

I glanced at the clock—7:30 am! That was a full two hours past my alarm. I’d never slept that late. What the heck?

I got up and staggered groggily into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I turned to face the bathroom mirror, I gasped at what I saw: my face was covered in blood! And not “cut yourself shaving” polite little blood spots but more like something out of a horror movie: thick, ropy blood was all over my face, neck, ears, and hair!

Whaaaaa??
Wounds!
Deep wounds! Why? How?
My initial panic at simply being late to work took on an aura of surrealism as I washed off the dried blood, revealing two wounds of surprising depth and length.

What on Earth had happened the night before? I hadn’t been staggering around like a drunk idiot the night before. I had pretty much just gone to bed when I’d gotten home.

Could I have been sleepwalking? Well, I’ve been together with my wife for the past 16 years, and she has never once seen evidence of me sleepwalking. Neither had my family growing up. It could have just started happening, of course—it had been a really stressful fall, after all, much more so than normal… but was that how stress was going to manifest itself? Also, what the heck in my place would have cut me exactly like that? I did a quick glance around the place but couldn’t find any sharp corners spaced like that, nor anything with dried blood on it (which I’d imagine there would be plenty of given the condition of my face).

Could it have been… the cats? Our cats aren’t declawed, and it had been a while since I’d trimmed their nails, so they were both sporting a pretty fearsome set of talons. Also, they loved to sleep on top of my chest at night. Usually, one cat would sleep on my and one would sleep on my wife. Since my wife had been in San Francisco, the cats had taken to fighting with each other over who got to sleep on my chest.

The likely scenario suddenly became clear, and as I came to this realization I also noticed some other wounds that, while not as obvious as the facial lacerations, were actually more puzzling.

I had a few other short lacerations (though not as deep) on each hand
I had strange cuts and scuffs on the inside of my wrists
Both of my knees were rather badly skinned.
Ummm….
Never in my life have I wished more for security camera footage to consult (footage of my car inferno would be a close second).

Testing Theories
Was I….battling the cats? Did I spring up like an angry zombie and careen around the apartment chasing after them, then collapse onto the couch to slowly bleed myself to sleep?

Another, more troubling, thought occurred. I hadn’t seen the cats that morning yet. Had I strangled them both in my sleep? They’re fairly large cats—more like small bobcats than regular house cats—so that seemed unlikely, but my heart raced as I zipped from room to room looking for them.

I found them both, looking peaceful and quizzical—certainly not scared of me.

This cat does not look concerned…
This cat does not look concerned…
Is this the face of a killer?
Is this the face of a killer?
Ummm…? Maybe I didn’t battle them after all.

This is how our cat Dan looks when he’s panicked, by the way:

Help!
OK—so, if I battled them, they seemed pretty uncharacteristically chill about the whole thing. Also, as I thought more about it, how could it be that a cat’s claws (five per front paw) make only one deep incision, and then another nearly identical incision at a 90 degree angle?

I vision of Dan sneaking up on me, one sole claw extended, then slashing “ha! meow!” down, and then another blow across “take that, human!” before retreating back into the shadows.

Had I angered the cats somehow? I’d had them for over a decade. Why did they pick today, of all, days, to make their move?

The skinned knees were almost the most confusing, especially since I didn’t have carpet in my place. What the heck had been going on that night to make me skin my knees, for Pete’s sake?

Here’s my best guess as to what happened:

Angel (sweet girl cat) sleeping calmly on daddy, us both lost in dreamland.
Angel (sweet girl cat) sleeping calmly on daddy, us both lost in dreamland.
Mr. Dan (cool but very assertive boy cat) decides his turn for stomach cuddles has come.
Mr. Dan (cool but very assertive boy cat) decides his turn for stomach cuddles has come.
Standard sibling cat fight ensues, only this time on top of my sleeping body.
Standard sibling cat fight ensues, only this time on top of my sleeping body.
Disturbingly long unclipped claws make contact with my sleeping noggin.
Disturbingly long unclipped claws make contact with my sleeping noggin.
Now is where I wish I has a video camera! Chaos of some frenetic variety ensues.
Now is where I wish I has a video camera! Chaos of some frenetic variety ensues.
Combat occurs. We all use shameful tactics that we will later regret.
Combat occurs. We all use shameful tactics that we will later regret.
We all collapse exhausted. Dreams resume, albeit of a more fractured ilk.
We all collapse exhausted. Dreams resume, albeit of a more fractured ilk.
I was already late for school, so I packed up my bass (did I mention that I had two gigs later that same very day?) and headed north, making it just in time for my first class.

Scaring the Children
Looks of confusion appeared on the faces of kids when they saw my head wounds, and not wanting to individually answer the same question sixty-odd times, I hid in my office until the bell rang and then burst into the orchestra room, Freddy Krueger-style.

“What’s wrong with my face?”

Shocked murmurs.

“Do you have any idea what happened?”
“Because I don’t….”

I suddenly became the most interesting adult of the day to them, like some character actor out of Blue Velvet or Pulp Fiction. Concern morphed into merriment as people pitched in to help “solve the mystery.”

We all seemed to agree on the following points:

The cats were the most logical explanation.
The skinned knees were most perplexing fact. How could that have happened given all the other circumstances?
Sleepwalking also seemed plausible, but the lack of any history of sleepwalking plus the skinned knees didn’t really add up. Also, I couldn’t find anything in the place that was even remotely likely to have caused those wounds.
Deep examination of the head wounds makes the cats seem unlikely as well. I mean, what kind of strange claw work would cause two single, extremely deep 90 degree angle wounds?
I then realized that, in my understandably confused morning state, I had forgotten that I was playing a rehearsal and concert that day after school. I did the math, and there was absolutely no way that I could make it back home to pick up my tuxedo and make it to the gig on time.

Even though I lived an hour away from school, I knew that I had to drive home and back and hope that I made it in time for my next orchestra.

I made it back in the nick of time, complete with UFC-style face wounds… and wearing a tuxedo! The kids didn’t know what question to ask first (tuxedo? knife fight?) as they streamed into the orchestra room.

Do I Live With Diabolical Sociopaths?
Actually, I suppose that the answer to that question is yes for any cat owner, no matter how much we wish it were otherwise. But I digress…

I spent several nights after the “incident” basically sleeping with one eye open. I’d drift off, then wake up suddenly, usually greeted with the sight of two sets of glowing cat eyes hovering very near my face.

Did they do it? Did they really knife me in my sleep? And if so….

would they do it again?

Part 1: My Strange Path Through the Music World

My career in music has unfolded in ways that I’d never have predicated.

I’ve had times when I’ve been on top of the world, followed by stretches of deep frustration and discouragement.

I’ve failed more often than I’ve succeeded.
Time after time, I’ve forged a new path, built a career, and become “successful” (whatever that means). Then I’ve intentionally set fire to everything and gone down a different path.

I think that a lot of musicians “find their level” in the world and basically chug along on that level for decades. Maybe that’s an orchestra job. Perhaps it’s a university teaching position. It might even be a freelance career built around the same set of gigs.

Regardless of what it is, I see so many musicians operating in job paths that resemble what our parents did.

Work in a job for 30 years.
Put in the time.
Get the pension.
Get the watch.
But these paths are eroding all around us, and not just in music. People don’t stay in jobs for 30 years. The average American doesn’t even keep the same job for five years!

I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to find my level. I started out freelancing. I added in university teaching and private teaching. I took on a fairly standard freelance life and chugged away at this for seven years.

But it always felt like wearing tight shoes.
I was always looking left and right to see if there was a way out. What else could I do?

I felt trapped. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

So I got out.
At least, I tried to get out.

I went back to school. For music education, of all things.

I never really wanted to do this. It was never my calling. But there was light at the end of the tunnel.

A traditional job.
Pension.
Benefits.
Maybe even a watch if I stayed long enough!
But a funny thing happened during that period of transition. Isn’t that when the most interesting things happen in life? John Lennon once sang “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” I think about that quote a lot.

I started a blog. I started to vent my frustrations. I organized those frustrations into pieces that resonated with people. I started to build a platform. I just didn’t know that was what I was doing.

But it was too negative! There was no light at the end of that tunnel. Only more darkness.

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So I started a podcast. It was positive!

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I talked about people’s experiences in music. We geeked out. It felt good to do this. It resonated with people. The platform continued to grow.

People saw value in what I was doing. They wanted to exchange value for value. They wanted to advertise with me. They wanted to hire me to work on their project. Or give them advice. Or come talk to their group.

I thought that I had self-immolated my career by writing critically about it.

But people liked it!

They hired me for better things than I’d been doing. Trying to hack my old career into pieces kicked me a few rungs higher up on the musical ladder.

Jason & Francois
Weird.
Meanwhile, I was banging away at this music education degree.

Why was I doing this? I almost quit.

But by dad talked me out of it. Why throw away all that time and money when I was 75% of the way done with the program? Why not just finish?

So I finished. And I got a job.
It was a good job! I’d never really had a “job” job before. This was new.

I had a salary! Money magically appeared in my account. What did I do to earn the money? I didn’t know! I was so used to trading specific time for specific money. This concept of money for your overall service was foreign.

I had benefits! I could finally go to the doctor.

But I was busy. All my time disappeared. I didn’t know what I was doing with the new job. I had to learn. But learning was fun!

I set fire to the blog and podcast.

Well, not really. They just kind of faded into the ether.

People kept telling me how valuable it was.

But I ignored them.
I quit logging in online. I deleted all the emails people sent me.

Now I had a boss. And he had a boss!

I got evaluated.
Everything I know, do, and love was reduced to a series of ratings. That was strange.

My colleagues had been at this job for 10, 20, and even 30 years. It was like my parent’s generation.

I had to take tests on bullying. My day was divided up into tidy increments of time separated by school bells.

But I liked teaching! And I liked feeling like I was a part of something. Part of an organization. Part of a team. Shared goals… at least on paper. I’d never felt that freelancing.

So I embraced my role as a team member. I worked hard at my new job. I studied scores, conducting, and tips on managing hordes of teenagers.

It was fun.
Challenging, but fun. I was learning new skills. I was growing as a person but also as a musician. This was surprising!

Another job opened up. I took that job. More money. More demands on my time, and the job was, well… someday I’ll write more about that job.

Then I got another job. This was a really good job that everyone in my niche wanted. Or a lot of people wanted, anyway. It was the kind of job you stayed in long-term if you were in this career.

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I was making more money with each new job. Now I was making “a lot of money.” At least, by my standards. I got more and more side gigs. People hired me to guest conduct. I was teaching university. Lots of clinic gigs. All this in addition to playing gigs.

I was a baller. Sort of, anyway… in some vaguely lame way.

But I had no time!
I was commuting from 35 miles away. My wife had a job in the city. I was working in the suburbs. Her job was “more serious” than mine. So I took the commuting hit.

I spent 3 hours a day at least driving. Often much more. This is what I hated so much about freelancing. Oh no! My old patterns repeating themselves.

Why can’t I break free?
My wife got hooked up with the best medical residency program in the country for her specialty. But it was in San Francisco. Oh no! All the castles I’d built! I can’t leave them.

So I stayed in my job. My wife moved thousands of miles away. Now I was lonely. Oh no! What did I do? What was really important in life?

I kept tending my castles, but my princess had left. So what was the point of staying? Was it ego? There are big egos in music and big egos in education. Sometime I’ll write more about that. But not now!

OK—I decided to move to California.

Wait a minute… that sounds pretty sweet! Goodbye, horrible never-ending winters. Hello, palm trees!

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I started looking for teaching jobs in San Francisco. Education is really weird out there. Where are all the high-paying orchestra jobs? Oh no! What to do?

But then I had a moment of clarity.
I looked back at the past 20 years of my life.

What felt right?

Was it the teaching job? I loved it, but was it my passion or did I just bring my passion with me from job to job?

More on that later.

Did I want to go back to freelancing?

Yikes.

What about doing something new?

But what?
I saw the next 20 years of my life stretching out in front of me. I was standing at a crossroads, looking two decades backward and forward simultaneously.

I looked at that period of transition again. Why did those experiences resonate with me? What did I like about that time in my life?

What if I didn’t look for another teaching job?
What if I invested in myself?

What if I went all in on building that platform that I had unintentionally began to create ten years ago?

What if I treated that like my full-time job?

Where would that lead me?

I decided to give it a go.

Part 2: Building my Freelance Career

It wasn’t until years later that I realized how lucky I was in terms of freelancing.

Several regional orchestra positions opened up simultaneously just as I was graduating from my masters degree.

During the spring and summer of 2000, I landed the following jobs:

Position Approx. Yearly Salary
Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra $5000
IRIS Chamber Orchestra $5000
Elgin Symphony Orchestra $6000

These dollar figures totaled only $16,000, which sounded disturbingly low, but I was only paying $300 a month for my apartment. I’d said to myself that if I could bring in at least $1000 a month, I wouldn’t worry about trying to get a job and would just focus on taking auditions.

I had student loans, but I deferred these and lived on a diet of peanut butter and jelly, pasta, coffee, frozen pizza, and Miller High Life. It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I started to eat a bit healthier!

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The good news with those three jobs is that, miraculously, none of the weeks conflicted with each other. This was the only year in my freelance career where nothing conflicted!

I’m glad it played out that way, though. It was a calming way to start a freelance career.

Other Work
In addition to that $16,000 base, I was called as a regular sub for the musical Forever Plaid. The regular bass player had three shows per week that he couldn’t play, so I had at least three shows a week on the calendar. The pay wan’t very high, but there was a bass waiting for me at the hall and I could take the train. It sure beat working a minimum wage job!

I also got called to teach electric bass at a music school in Chicago. Again, the pay was modest but it was within walking distance of my place. Another piece in the freelance puzzle.

Finally, I had made the finals of the Grant Park Symphony that spring, which put me on some really good sub lists, so within a few months I was getting called by some of the better in-town work in Chicago.

My first freelance season (2000-2001)
I ended up bringing in about $1600 that first September, and then $2400 in October. November was around $2000, and I made over $3000 in December.

In hindsight, I realize that my move into the freelance world was really easy for me. Most people don’t land a series of gigs like I did right out of school. The pieces came together pretty well for me.

My Problem with Success
In a way, I think that my early success was a detriment.

Why?
Because I lost that hunger for more.

I was so thrilled to have an actual income that I lost the urge to take that next step.

I kept taking professional auditions, but I was weighing everything I took against staying in Chicago and freelancing. And that option didn’t seem so bad. I mean, my girlfriend (who would later become my wife) was in Chicago. Things were going well for her in school and they were about to go quite well for her on the freelance scene.

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Squirreling away for the summer
After that first season of freelancing (2000-2001), I discovered one of the painful truths of the classical freelancer life: summer

Simply put, the earning potential drops off precipitously in those summer months. The regular gig seasons end. Summer gigs don’t pay as much. Students go on vacation.

That summer period often stretches into 4-5 months of underemployment or downright unemployment.

In the freelance game, it’s all about feast or famine.

Earnings for Freelance Season No 1: $36,000 minus expenses
positives:

I surpassed my minimum (albeit poverty-level) requirement of $1000/month by 300%
I had established a diverse set of regular gigs – if one went away, I wouldn’t lose everything
lots of time during the day to practice
negatives:

my nearest regular gig was 40 miles away, and my furthest was 600 miles away – lots of driving
many months of little to no income – the need for saving during the “good months” became clear
no assurance that I would be offered the same level of work next season
feelings of anxiety and helplessness surrounding future employment
ESO bass section better contrast
My Mental State
It’s amazing how clear things become in hindsight. I vividly recall how anxious I was about each coming month. OK–I had a great September…

But what about October?

I was obsessed with what others thought of me. I hoped for validation at every turn. This was subconscious, but it permeated every moment of my days.

My Freelance Orchestra Musician Mentality
Orchestra gigs became my safe zones. My gig family. The folks I hung out with.

But I was always looking to show them how great I was doing. I felt like I had to constantly prove that I was, in fact, a good player.

Good player = good person = life choice validation

“Yeah, there’s talk of [insert group I play in here] going full-time. You know, if I don’t get something else, I’ll be full-time there anyway.”

Full-time.
Those words were like magic to me. I felt like I could see a magical aura around any friend (or frenemy) of mine that landed a full-time gig. Even if that gig really didn’t pay a living wage.

They had made it.

I wanted to make it too.

I spent my first few years freelancing worrying that everything would come crashing down.

What if I looked at the conductor the wrong way? Should I smile more? Smile less? How are my pants? Are they too cool? Not cool enough?

Jason Heath in recital on the “Amati”
Please think I’m important!
Ahhh, hindsight.

That phrase: please think I’m important…

That right there is toxic thinking.

Those thoughts didn’t help me in any way. In fact, they clouded my ability to absorb the great experiences that I was having.

Freelance Season No. 2 (2001-2002) – Adding teaching to the mix
Outside of some electric bass lessons, I really didn’t teach that much that first year out of school.

My teaching really ramped up my second year out of school.

This changed everything.

A colleague from my college days called me about teaching bass at his high school. I agreed and found myself with a nice studio of bassists that fall up in the suburbs.

I also got a paid principal bass position in a local community orchestra just down the road from that high school.

Working out the $$
Combined, the teaching and the community orchestra gig paid about $200 for the day. I was still living cheap in terms of rent, and I had no car payment and low overhead. I realized that this weekly pay would cover my rent and expenses if I were to live cheaply. Everything else on top was, in a sense, gravy.

Now I was adding $800 a month to my income just from teaching and that community orchestra gig. That was the equivalent of one extra week of typical work a week. And all that just for going in one day a week. How cool was that?

Also, after I adjusted to the shock of having to wake up early one day a week and go teach, I found myself enjoying the experience of working with bass students. I had several talented students even in that very first crop, and it was satisfying to watch them progress.

2001-2002 Gig Portfolio
I played the following gigs regularly that year. I also started to work for several contractors in town. The contractor work was more sporadic but paid better and was closer to home.

Elgin Symphony
Milwaukee Ballet
IRIS Chamber Orchestra
Rockford Symphony
Lake Forest Symphony
Chicago Philharmonic
Chicago Opera Theater
Grant Park Symphony
To cancel or not to cancel?
Every successful freelancer has faced this issue:

The [insert amazing group here] calls.
“Can you play next week?” they ask.
You look at your calendar.
You’re booked… but it’s the [insert amazing group here] calling!
What do you do?
Do you leave your modest but regular gig for the amazing but infrequent other gig? What are the long-term ramifications?

If only someone would invent an app that could calculate that. They’d be rich.

Actually, they wouldn’t be rich, because we’re talking about freelance musicians here. Zing! Sorry.

My personal rule was never leave anyone high and dry. If I really felt like I had to cancel gig #1 for gig #2, I’d secure a possible sub first. Then I’d call the contractor and explain the situation and that person x could play.

If it was less than a week until the gig, then I never bailed. But that was my rule. Every person and every situation is different.

Earnings for Freelance Season No.2: $43,000 minus expenses
The teaching bumped up my earnings for the year, and I discovered the power of having a consistent revenue stream from students. All of a sudden it made sense why my other freelance colleagues taught.

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Figuring out the freelance formula
I discovered the power of two gigs per day. If I could get two gigs a day, I could work five or six days a week and actually have a day off.

I counted a gig as anything that brought in dollars. That included my private teaching.

A typical day would look like this:

Weekday:

teach 3 hours: $120 (I didn’t charge much in these early days…)
play rehearsal/concert: +/- $120
Weekend:

gig or teach in the morning: $120
evening gig: $120
If I could double up like that, I was making more like $240 a day. Multiply that by 5, and I was bringing home $1200 a week.

That dollar figure went up if I got better paying gigs. Also, some of my gigs paid more than that.

The flexibility of lesson income
The beauty of teaching lessons is that I had the ability to schedule them in the gig gaps. I kept a policy of “I’m flexible with you if you’ll be flexible with me.” that way, when I had a really busy gig week, I could reschedule or even cancel my students for the week.

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My teaching hack: have more students than I could actually teach
I realized something early on. This might sound strange. But here’s what I realized:

It’s OK to have more students than you can actually teach
Strange concept, right? But here’s the thing.

My students would cancel lessons. They’d get sick. They’d be out of town. Unforeseen conflicts would arise.

I’d never teach all my students every week. That simply wouldn’t happen.

It’s kind of like owning too many clothes to actually fit into your closet. If all of your clothes were washed, you couldn’t do it. But some of your clothes are always dirty and in the hamper waiting to be washed. So it all works. A bad analogy perhaps, buy you know what I mean.

Freelance Season No. 3 (2002-2003) – Adding Adjunct University Teaching
I got an exciting email during the summer of 2002. One of my Milwaukee Ballet colleagues passed along the announcement of a double bass adjunct faculty position opening up at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. I applied for and got this position, and I was thrilled at the opportunity to get some college teaching experience on my resume.

As a freelancer, I had an inferiority complex about institutional affiliations. I didn’t like the feeling of being so unattached. I liked saying “hi, I’m Jason Heath from _ University!” That alone made a university gig of any sort attractive.

I threw myself into building a bass program at this school, and it was a resounding success. I went from 3 students to 11 students by the end of that first year, and I was teaching bass classes, playing recitals, and doing all sorts of things at the school.

My Crazy Schedule
For most of my time at UW-W, I sent up for one incredibly long day of teaching. At my busiest, I taught 10 1/2 hours in an 11 hour block. I used that precious half-hour off to walk to the local sandwich shop and eat my sandwich as I walked back to my office. Man, were those long days! Driving up in the Wisconsin winter snow was not a fun experience either.

This job added a solid $11,000 to my income that first year and was a core component of what I did until I made the decision quit.

Earnings for Freelance Season No.3: $56,000 minus expenses
Grant Park Concert July 2006 003
My Final Few Years of Freelancing
I continued to freelance until 2007, when I made the decision to go back to school and do something else. My income continued to grow throughout those years, however, largely due to the following four factors:

taking more in-town work
eliminating low-paying contracts that locked me in schedule-wise
raising my rates as a teacher
attracting a higher quality of private student
I ended up making between $70,000 and $80,000 as a freelancer my final few seasons. This was before expenses, but it wasn’t a bad living for a freelance musician ten years ago.

Here’s how these factors helped to solidify my income:

1. Taking more in-town work
   In a large metropolitan area, the best-paying gigs tend to be in town. The further you leave the center of the city, the worse the gigs pay. You end up driving further (which costs $$) for less money… and usually with a lower-quality group!

Luck and persistence raised my “gig profile” over the years, and more in-town work came in as a result. Lyric Opera Orchestra and other such high-end sub work helped a lot. There was always the struggle of keeping my regular contracts while taking the better-paying sub work, but that’s the life of a freelancer.

2. Eliminating low-paying contracts that locked me in schedule-wise
   I held onto several contracted gigs way longer than necessary. I was terrified of giving up guaranteed income.

But when I gave one of these gigs up, the next year my income was always higher.

Why?
Because those lower-income gigs limited my ability to take better work.

When you’re starting out, playing in a low-wage community orchestra or per-service gig can be a good move. But over time, these gigs can hamper your ability to move forward. I had more time to do other things when I left some of these groups, and my income and happiness levels benefited.

3. Raising my rates as a teacher
   I have always undervalued myself as a teacher. It’s a complex I have. I think “I’m not worth that” and I always undercharge. Sadly, I still do that. But I’m getting better!

But when I finally did start raising my rates in Chicago, I saw the massive impact that this had on my bottom line. Multiply a rate raise of $10 over the nearly 50 students that I once taught (I’m insane, I know). Then multiply that over the weeks and months you’d be teaching them. It’s a major boost in income!

4. Attracting a higher quality of private student
   After for or five years of teaching, I ended up being the private teacher for many of the top bassists in the local youth orchestras. Referrals from parents in those groups led to more students, and before long I was teaching most of the bass students in these groups.

These students were motivated. They wanted to be there. They practiced what I assigned them. They cared. They didn’t cancel.

Those are fun students! Do you notice how an hour-long lesson can feel like five minutes with a great student. Doesn’t that same hour-long lesson feel like an eternity with other students?

My studio moved more and more toward the “awesome” category. As a result, I started to love teaching more.

In fact, these positive lesson experiences were what pushed me over the edge. After years of successful freelancing, I decided to torpedo my career and totally change gears.

Part 3: Sinking my Freelance Career

Like most significant decisions in my life, bailing out of freelance life happened as a result of a conversation with my wife.

We were both freelancers.

Fairly successful freelancers, actually.

My wife’s music career had really taken off after getting her masters in harp.

She was subbing regularly with the Chicago Symphony and the Lyric Opera of Chicago
She had contracts with two regional orchestras
She taught Suzuki harp at two music academies
She had built up a busy wedding and event business for herself
As a freelancer, she was crushing it.

But she didn’t set out to be a freelancer. She wanted to play in an orchestra full-time.
Putting it mildly, there aren’t a ton of full-time orchestra harp positions. During her five years of freelancing, only one job opened up…and that was for the Army Band!

I also wanted an orchestra job. I thought I did, anyway.
But that ship seemed to have sailed. As I drifted through my twenties, the idea of a full-time job seemed more fantasy than reality.

I had settled into my freelance life. For a few years, I was paranoid that everything would fall apart and I’d never get called again.

Eventually, I realized that everything was going to be OK.
Gigs would come and go
Students would quit and new students would show up
Something would fall apart and something else would work out

My career karma had built up enough that I always ended up doing well, even though my schedule would look different from year to year.

My wife sent off her resume for the Army harp job. She made a tape and made it to the finals.

Before going to the finals, she had to go to an Army recruiting facility and stay overnight for a barrage of physical fitness tests.

Her roommate that night was a 17-year-old girl basically running away from home to join the Army.

She passed the tests, went to the audition, but didn’t get the gig. Surrounded by a pack of hyper-competitive harpists, she came to a realization.

This life stinks.
She can home and told me that she was quitting music to go to medical school.

Time to become a doctor.

At this point, we were both bringing in a decent combined income as freelancers. We had more or less “entered the middle class.”

A humble aspiration for sure.

But a real achievement for many musicians.

The path from musician to doctor is, to put it mildly, long:

3 years of pre-med
1 float year taking the MCAT and applying to medical schools
4 years of medical school
1 year of internship
4 years of residency
1 year of fellowship
We were looking at eight years of her earning little to no income, followed by six years of fairly modest income (good freelance income but horrible doctor income).

The realization that I’d be the breadwinner for the next decade got me thinking:

Do I like what I’m doing?
Really, do I?

50,000 miles a year of driving.

Constant anxiety about slipping a few rings down the gig ladder.

Driving to a $75 gig in a snowstorm.

Working every evening, weekend, and holiday.

No benefits.

No health insurance.

No savings.

No pension.

I had just turned 30. I looked down the road at my 40-year-old self. Playing the same gigs. Hoping to impress the right contractor. Worried about losing my steady work.

To me, the freelancer lifestyle felt like sitting in a waiting room for the next step in life. That next step never came, however.
The years went by. Wrinkles began to appear. Fresh faces kept appearing on my regular gigs. I used to be the first person at the hall and the last to pack up. Now I was one of the last to arrive and the first to get out of there.

Did I want to keep doing this?
No!
But what the heck am I qualified for?
I felt lost. I also felt the looming financial pressure. We had to pay our bills. That would be mostly on me. Our finances were about to take a dive.

I made a list. What could I do? I flailed around.
For some reason, I went on the FBI website. Join the FBI! That sounds interesting.

I looked into it. Hmmm… maybe no FBI for me. That seemed a little intense.

I looked into some other jobs. Nothing seemed right.

OK–I wanted to do something else. But I didn’t want to start from scratch. I had expertise. How could I use that expertise?

Education was the only thing that felt acceptable to me.

Both my parents had taught in the public schools. I knew that world.

In a state of total doubt, I sent emails to two close friends who were music educators. “Does this make any sense for me?” That was my question.

Both responded enthusiastically. They were so encouraging. They pointed out all the benefits:

Satisfying job
Salary schedule
Benefits
Pension
Time off
Career advancement opportunities
This sounded so appealing after years of freelancing. I met with the music admissions director at DePaul University.

He laid out a clear plan for me that would allow me to keep my freelance career going and finish off a music education degree in about two years.

I chatted with a couple other DePaul faculty members that day. I hopped on the train that afternoon with a clear plan and a genuine smile on my face for the first time in months.

I felt like a great weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.
Those feelings of anxiety about freelance work fizzled and died.

I stopped worrying about what everyone thought of my bass playing. Would I get called again? Did I use tooo much vibrato? Not enough vibrato? Too friendly to the contractor? Not friendly enough?

I no longer cared. I was bailing.
That was around the time that I realized this hard truth.

I was so worried about what people thought of me. Really, though, nobody was thinking anything about me at all.

This was hammered home when I started to tell my freelance colleagues that I was going back to school for education.

I was convinced that all the gig calls would dry up when people learned about my decision to go back to school. To quit. To admit defeat.

People’s reactions were quite the opposite, however:

They congratulated me
They were curious what the job looked like
Many people told me that they were secretly planning exit strategies themselves
The gig calls didn’t stop. If anything, they picked up!
I had started a blog around the same time as making this decision. It was basically a resource dump firmly students. At the time, I had nearly 50 private students at two colleges, three high schools, plus my private studio.

Organizing all of those students was super-challenging. The blog became a place to post lesson summaries, music to order, and favorite recordings to check out.

The blog grew organically.

I started a links page. I started to write a few posts about advice for buying an instrument. Over time, I added posts about strings, extensions, summer camps, and the like.

People started to link to my site. They left comments. Offered recommendations for resources. Sent me messages. The trickle of web traffic became a steady flow.

As I prepared to go back to school, I began to write more and more. All that worry over auditions, freelancer hierarchy, and career uncertainty had stunted my creativity. Making the decision to change careers opened the creative floodgates.

Ideas were flowing like crazy. I became fascinated with two different creative threads:

My experiences trying to “make it” as a freelancer
Crazy gig stories from my past
Both of these resonated with people who found my blog. My readership began to grow exponentially. I began putting out more and more content.

My first couple of years blogging changed my life markedly:
I was featured in several publications.
The International Society of Bassists brought me on as a board member.
DePaul University hired me to teach bass and music education.
Every gig I played, musicians came up to me and shared their own gig stories and freelancer experiences. I had become like a minor celebrity!
Several organizations hired me to help develop a web presence.
Advertisers were approaching me for sponsorships.
I wrote a book on freelancing which garnered much critical acclaim.
I was getting hired as a speaker for events.
I started a podcast and began interviewing famous bassists from across the globe.
At the same time, I was taking undergraduate music education courses and cramming in students and gigs in every spare moment. I was sleeping 4 hours a night at best and was running on coffee and junk food. The podcast and blog were eating up 20-30 hours a week on top of everything else.

I saw two trajectories for my life:
Go full-force into this blog/podcast/consultant/speaker life
Stay the course and go into education
Clearly, there was momentum behind the projects I’d started. The opportunities were increasing for me in this arena.

My concern was that this new path would just be a different form of freelancing. I had gone through such a cathartic moment giving up (in my mind, at least) the freelance thing. I was reluctant to chalk up the education degree as a mistake.

At the same time, the education courses were bumming me out. It was frustrating working these creative new projects and sitting in elementary music education methods classes with 18-year-olds.

I was on the verge of quitting the music education degree.
A conversation with my father talked me off the ledge. I decided to compromise. I dropped down to part-time at DePaul, which extended my coursework by six months but opened my schedule up a lot.

In the end, I decided to make a go of the education career. These reasons tipped me in that direction:

I really wanted, for once in my life, to have an actual full-time job.
I liked the social nature of public education. I wasn’t sure about sitting in front of a computer by myself all day. The idea of working live with large groups of young people appealed to me.
The idea of being part of a full-time faculty appealed to me.
I was obsessed with having a salary and benefits. I’d spent years dreaming about having these.
I wanted to be a member of a “tribe.” Freelancing felt fuzzy and alienating to me.
The idea of a clear career path with professional development opportunities was compelling.
I didn’t want to work seven days a week anymore and was worried that this was what life would continue to look like for me otherwise.

I’m down to the last few weeks of my teaching job before heading out to join my wife in San Francisco. Here’s a conversation that I have with folks about once a day:

“San Francisco—congrats! What will you be doing out there?”

“Um, er, well…..”

“Will you be teaching?”

“No, not really, but maybe… well…”

“What? No teaching? What… playing?”

“Ahh.. some, probably, but….”

I usually end with something like “taking time off” and “entrepreneurial activities,” and I’m left with moderately puzzled good wishes for the future.

What’s really important?
Truth be told, I’ve got a plan on what I’ll be doing in California. It’s just not a plan centered around work.

I’m a reflective guy, and I’ve taken the last nine months of living apart from my wife (which royally stinks—I don’t recommend it) to think about what’s really important to me.

It’s a fun project to sit down and really ponder what’s important. Honestly, I’m not sure that I’ve ever really done this kind of thing before. It has been a great process—I highly recommend doing something along these lines regardless of where you might be in your life or career.

So, I asked myself the question: what’s really important?
Here’s the list I came up with:

my wife
walking
writing
traveling
reading
growing and developing
making a contribution
Note that a job is not on this list. It probably would have been 5 years ago, and most certainly would have been 10 years ago. But my thinking has recently evolved.

Soul-Sucking Tedium
tedium
For years, I was obsessed with getting an orchestra job. I drove and flew to at least 30 auditions all over the country, spending an insane amount of cash, time, and energy in the process.

Did I learn some things in the process?

Sure.

But did the positives outweigh the negatives?

Not for me.

There must be a way to win a job, I thought.
I’d always thought of quitting the audition circuit as an ultimate admission of my own inadequacy as a musician. Doing so would invalidate of all the years I spent in college and afterward taking audition after audition.

If only I tried a little harder, practiced a little more, took more lessons, bought a different bass, changed my bow hold, changed my warm-up technique, recorded myself more…

As turning 30 loomed ahead of me, I started to see my life stretching out in front of my eyes, with repeat brackets put around all of my activities.

I saw myself at 40 driving the same highway, a little grayer around the temples, worried about subbing out of a gig and falling to second place on a contractor’s list.

I saw the endless stream of station wagons and SUVs that would pass through my possession. I saw concert after concert of the same repertoire performed “pretty well” by the same orchestras.

I saw the private students filtering in and out of the room, the checks handed to me, the endless trips to the bank with little wads of personal checks.

I asked myself if this is really the final destination for me in this world.

I decided that the answer was no.

So I quit. I said forget it—no more auditions.
Time to figure out another path.

new skills
Quitter
That feeling of giving up, of quitting, of allowing myself to, in my eyes at least, willfully become a loser was really painful. I decided to go back to school for something else. I quit most of my work. I decided, at 30, to go back to school and bang out a music ed degree.

This was a practical decision, not a passionate one. Thought I’d taught a lot of lessons over the years, I’d never really felt a “calling” to be a full-time teacher. From many conversations with colleagues, I know that some in the teaching profession really do feel this calling. Others land in the career for less idealistic reasons. I was the latter for sure.

It’s amazing how much my thinking has changed since those initial years of music ed, and how insanely more gratifying this second career has been for me than the freelance career.

The most valuable takeaways from this teaching career are things that I’d never in a million years have imagined. For example:

I’m a much better musician after years spent conducting, arranging, studying scores, and listening with intensity to multi-layered music.
I have a whole new set of skills that I never dreamed I’d have, from organizing trips and planning budgets to hiring guest artists and motivating large groups of people.
I’ve never felt that “endless cycle” tedium in this second career. Never once. There’s always the opportunity for creativity in my approach to any given moment in the teaching jobs. Exact for administering standardized tests. That is a nightmare example of everything back about our educational system, and if I never have to do that again it will be too soon.
These teaching jobs have stimulated my creativity and made me grow as a musician and as a person exponentially more than the freelance circuit.
Also, while I was a B list player, I was an A list orchestra director, and I found that I really was working with the best in the business in terms of my colleagues. There were a lot of creative minds on faculty with me that were searching for new ways to further what they did in music and in education. It was very inspiring to me—much more so than a lot of the freelancer mentalities that I’d encountered.

Still, while I loved that career path, I never ended up feeling like it was my specific calling. I knew that I liked it…or really loved it, to be honest. But I still played a ton. I taught university on the side. I did a lot of guest conducting gigs.

wife
walking
writing
traveling
reading
growing and developing
making a contribution
…it was the last two areas—growing and developing plus making a contribution—that the job really satisfied. Maybe freelancing hit those to an extent as well, but only faintly for me. I guess there was a lot of traveling involved in freelancing, but driving for dollars isn’t really what I mean when I list “travel” as a goal.

As I transition out of this job and into a new phase of life, I’m working on orienting myself not so much on a specific career but more on that set of life goals.

Cops, firemen, teachers…. and orchestra musicians
I’ve realized that I have been working in two of the most traditional career paths imaginable.

In what other career paths do you see someone staying in the exact same job for 10, 20, 30 or more years? Yet this is the norm in both teaching and orchestral music–the two worlds in which I’ve spent my adult life. Yikes!

What if I decided to focus only on things that connect with these life goals? What would that life look like?

Goal No. 1 – My Wife
wife
I know what I don’t want to do anymore—live apart from my wife. I decided to stay back in Chicago and keep “doing my thing” while she got her new career going in San Francisco. That felt like the wrong move about 30 seconds after her plane took off from O’Hare, and I’ve been counting the days ever since.

My wife is the coolest person I know, and being apart has really put things into perspective. Though I know many musician couples that maintain a long-distance set-up, working in different cities and reuniting on weekends and for breaks, I miss making dinner as my wife makes her way home, spending lazy weekend mornings together, and exploring our neighborhood on foot together.

walking
Putting job in front of family is dumb. Bad move, Jason.

Goal No. 2 Walking
I’ve been taking long walks since I was a teenager. After high school, I would routinely park the car by the Big Sioux River in my hometown of Sioux Falls and walk along the beautiful bike path, decompressing from the day and thinking about music, life, trees, birds….

I kept this up all through college. My alma mater is nestled along the shore of Lake Michigan, and I would regularly take long strolls along the lakefront on my way to school, during practice breaks, and between classes. The sound of the waves crashing against the rocky lakefront in the winter was just as fascinating to me as the sight of countless students relaxing and reading outside on a picture perfect spring afternoon. I spent as much time as possible outside during those years.

There’s something special about exploring on foot. Regardless of whether it’s the Smoky Mountains, South Side Chicago, or the Golden Gate Bridge, the pace of walking allows me be a part of the experience in a way that I don’t feel when biking or driving. I love the pace, the speed, and the opportunity for quiet contemplation if I’m alone or good conversation if I’m with a friend. I also listen to a huge amount of music and podcasts while wandering around.

Walking is good exercise, it’s good for the mind, and it’s good for the soul. I usually get in a walk of at least a couple miles even on a busy day, and on more relaxed days I frequently walk 15 or 20 miles, stopping for breakfast, coffee, lunch, and even dinner.

This hobby (or habit—I’m not sure what to call it) has also allowed me to explore places that I’ve lived in a deep and meaningful manner. I’d explored Chicago’s lakefront for years, but around 2010 I started reading John Greenfield’s inspiring blog Vote With Your Feet. John does these epic walks around Chicago and nearby regions, and following along with his journeys got me thinking more creatively about my walking destinations.

Not wanting to simply duplicate John’s walks, I began to spend a lot of time looking at Google Maps and thinking about interesting paths of exploration from my place. I had moved to Hyde Park (Obama’s neighborhood) and had the added challenge of being located on the South Side of Chicago.

As I plotted out walks, I kept asking myself if I was going to get messed with/mugged/shot in these unfamiliar areas. I had spent all of my adult years living either in suburban Evanston or on the far North Side of Chicago, and I was unfamiliar with the South Side and more than a little trepidatious about venturing out into the unknown.

I started safe, with walks from Hyde Park to downtown Chicago along the lakefront. These were about 6-7 miles long and were “safe” walks by any standard. These walks became a standard activity for my wife and me. In the five years we spent living either in downtown Chicago or in Hyde Park, I’d estimate that we did that specific walk at least 200 times. We did it in the blazing sun and in the falling snow. It was a blast.

One day, I decided to just do it. I headed right down King Drive, Cottage Grove, and Drexel.
After a couple months of the south lakefront walk, I decided to wander through the neighborhood instead of sticking to the lakefront. I’d thought about doing that a lot but had always lacked the courage due to the South Side’s unsafe reputation.

Were there beaten-down and abandoned properties? Sure. But there were also beautiful brownstones, parks I’d never seen, people walking their dogs and playing with their kids, and much more. Fascinated by the new (to me) area, I started venturing out more and more in the South Side neighborhoods.

I started to get a feel for what differentiates a good street to walk down from a bad street. Chicago changes a lot from block to block, and it can be surprising at first to see how quickly safe streets become dodgy ones. My explorations became bolder, and I started to head south, west, and north along all sorts of interesting new paths.

I quickly became familiar with almost every block of Hyde Park and Kenwood, and I started to take in large chunks of South Shore, Washington Park, Oakland, Bridgeport, Pilsen, and Little Village.

A whole new world opened up to me.
Chicago really is a city of neighborhoods, with distinct histories and characters, and I started to get curious about buildings I discovered and streets that were new to me. I began to read voraciously about these new discoveries, getting my hands on every book I could find about the history of this city. My knowledge broadened and deepened, and with it my appreciation for this multidimensional city that has played such an important part at so many key junctures in our history.

No matter how many times I do a walk, I always seem to find something new in it. Maybe I spot a building that I never really “saw” before (Chicago is full of outstanding architecture). Maybe I take a right or a left on an unfamiliar street. Maybe I stop in a store I’ve never noticed before. The possibilities are endless.

I’ve been doing as much walking as possible in my new home of San Francisco. This place is a walker’s paradise, with hills upon hills to explore in all directions. I start most days by walking to Tank Hill Park and soaking in all the possibilities. I look at the mountains of the East Bay. I look at the craggy outcroppings of the Marin Headlands. I look at all the hills poking up: Buena Vista Park, Bernal Heights, Corona Heights, Twin Peaks, and many more. I can barely contain myself with all the options.

writing
Goal No. 3 – Writing
I love to write. For a few years, I wrote a lot. But for the last seven years, I haven’t written much beyond emails to parents.
I want that to change.

Writing really helps to clarify my thinking. My brain fires pretty well in verbal contexts, but writing takes me deeper. Writing is where I draw connections, synthesize experiences, and make discoveries.

Writing also takes a huge amount of time and energy, and…. well, it’s hard. To write really well is just plain hard.

I’ve found writing nearly impossible to do with the career I’ve been in these past seven years. My brain just wasn’t in a place to go there. I wanted to unplug and unwind after getting home, not think “big thoughts” and hole up with my laptop feverishly pecking away.

Getting the podcast going again was, for some reason, much easier than starting to write again. I’m not totally sure why this has been the case. Maybe it’s that doing the podcast is more similar to what I’d be regularly doing in my life—having a conversation with someone about music, teaching, their interests, and the like. There’s a lot of work involved in the podcast for sure—it takes an incredibly amount of time and energy—but it’s not necessarily deep work. In fact, most of it is fairly shallow work:

scheduling an interview
editing audio
crafting show notes
posting the audio file
sharing on social
Lots of steps, but nothing requiring depth of thought.

There’s something about a full-time job that kills my desire to think deeply. I don’t know why. I’ve been trying to rekindle that part of my brain these last few months, and it’s only now as I approach the end of full-time employment that I feel like I can get out from under it.

I started writing this post a few days ago in a public library before a gig. I’ve continued it two mornings at 4 am before heading off to work. I’m really looking forward to carving out a couple of hours each and every day to write. I’m still not sure what I will write about specifically, but I am making that a priority starting in June.

traveling
Goal No. 4 – Traveling
It seems like almost everyone, as they approach the end of their life, wishes that they traveled more. Most don’t wish that they spent more time at the office!

After years spent traveling nowhere more exotic than Des Moines, I’ve had the good fortune to take trips to Peru, Spain, and Cuba. Funny how teaching public school is what opened up new travel opportunities for me.

I plan on traveling more. Much more, hopefully. We’ll be exploring California for the rest of the year, but I’ve got my sights set on Vietnam, China, Brazil, Argentina, and many places in Europe.

The book Vagabonding by Ralph Potts has been inspiring to me when thinking about travel. Ralph shows just how easy it can be to travel long-term and make it a primary focus of your life rather that a one-week-a-year frantic “everything but the kitchen sink” approach. I love the idea of spending a month backpacking overseas or setting up shop in a small town in Vietnam for several weeks.

My wife and I are starting out with weekend trips all over California, getting to know our new home state and take in its myriad offerings. She’s never been to Oregon, so we’ll be sure to head up the coast sometime this summer as well. It has been tragically long since I’ve been back to New Mexico (where my wife is from). I see a lot of West Coast explorations in our future for sure.

I love biking as well as walking, and I’m planning on heading out to explore all that the Bay Area has two offer on two wheels. I’d also love to do some longer trips by bike. I’ve got a hankering to try biking across the country sometime really soon.

Someday, I’d love to actually try walking across the country. That might be my “Mt. Everest” moment.

reading
Goal No. 5 – Reading
I read voraciously as a kid and kept it up through my undergraduate years as well. From Infinite Jest (which I read in the mid-nineties… and actually completed!) to Frank Zappa: the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, I was never seen without at least one book.

Like many people, I seemed to fall out of the reading habit and ended up reading maybe a book a year at best for about a decade. I’d step it up in the summer months slightly, with many pleasurable hours spent reclining on my balcony in Chicago’s Loop reading Farm City and Cadillac Desert.

But around the time I re-launched the podcast, I started to get back into reading on a regular basis. Listening to some of my favorite podcasts like the Tim Ferriss Show and realizing how much people that Tim read was a big inspiration in getting back to reading.

I’ve been aiming for a book a week and hope to increase that to two or even possibly three books a week. Reading is a fantastic way for me to keep growing and developing, and I find that it’s one of the most valuable activities I can do with my time.

How am I finding the time to do this?

Good question.

Well, for one thing, I’ve decided to limit how much I check Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and even my email, text messages, etc. Those “distraction goblins” have a way of getting you hooked on the rush of new bits of data and really do become like a drug. I knew that I should probably change my patterns when I found myself unable to focus on the plot of a 25-minute TV show without my phone in front of me.

My current method of “noise control”—and I’m ever tinkering and refining these kind of workflows–is to do a “deep dive” into email/FB/Twitter twice a day and do what needs to be done. I usually end up with some to-do list takeaways, so those go into my actual to-do list in Evernote. I’ve basically lived in Inbox Zero for the past seven years, so I always get tasks out of my inbox (and all the distractions of that environment) and into my Evernote workstation.

More reading and less zombie clicking has been great for me. I feel more inspired, thoughtful, and curious, and my list of books to read is growing exponentially. Here’s a list of some of what I’ve read these past couple of months:

Deep Work by Cal Newport
The Pomodoro Technique by Tony Robson
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Tenderloin by Randy Shaw
Unmarketing by Scott Stratten
Stein on Writing by Sol Stein
Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferriss
Ignore Everybody by Hugh McLeod
Stop Stealing Dreams by Seth Godin
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
I am planning on getting some novels in here as well—I’ve got a bunch on my shortlist—but even the nonfiction above has proven to be massively educational and inspiring.

growth
Goal No. 6 – Growing and Developing
Growth is an overarching goal for me in all aspects of life. I believe that people are constantly changing, either for the better or for the worse. This is true physically, cognitively, and emotionally. Unlike my cats, who seem fairly happy to do the same thing every single day, stasis in humans isn’t really a thing.

I absolutely believe in a growth mindset. I marvel at people who seem to be carved out of stone, doing the same thing day after day and year after year. I’ve seen a lot of that in both music and education these past 20 years. I’ve also seem people in these same fields with crazy amazing growth mindsets.

I like being around the latter.

Starting to listen to podcasts back in 2005 was a major milestone in my adoption of a growth mindset. Before that point, I was a little more static and conventional in my thinking. But discovering all of these people talking about specific topics that they were passionately invested in was a revelation to me. Prior to discovering podcasts, I actually went through the entire back catalog for This American Life and burned every single episode on CDs. I’d drive around with giant stacks of CDs on the passenger seat, swapping them out at random on my endless freelance drives.

These days, I listen to a ton of podcasts. Here a list of some that really inspire me:

99% Invisible
A Musical Life
The Adam Carolla Show
Contrabass Conversations (of course!)
Curious City
Filmspotting
Fresh Air
Here’s The Thing with Alec Baldwin
Jocko Podcast
The Joe Rogan Experience
Microphone Check
Bill Burr’s Monday Morning Podcast
The Moth Podcast
The Nerdist
Pendaso’s Place
Point of Inquiry
This Week in Tech
Radiolab
Reinventure Me
Reply All
Sampler
Serial
Sound Opinions
Surprisingly Awesome
TED Radio Hour
This American Life
The Tim Ferriss Show
UnPodcast
WTF with Marc Maron
contribution
Goal No. 7 – Making a Contribution
A lot of the above goals are very inward, focusing on my own development. This seventh goal is the one that you’ve probably seen the most in practice if you have followed my blog or podcast for any length of time. I find meaning in contributing positively to the world. That is the prime motivator behind putting out the podcast, all of my various teaching, writing, arranging, and speaking projects.

I’m always searching for ways to add value to areas of my life that interest me. In the world of teaching privately, I’ve experimented with novel and helpful ways to incorporate technology into practicing. I’m always experimenting with different approaches to bow strokes, intonation, vibrato, and teaching expression. Having the blog and podcast have been wonderful as channels to deliver new ideas that I’ve discovered.

In the world of the youth orchestra, I’m constantly thinking about what motivates young people to participate in music and what their personal experience is in the ensemble. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past decade and am also constantly experimenting with different approaches to rehearsal, student leadership, and prioritization of focus (I could write for pages and pages on this topic).

I feel that the distribution channels (blog and podcast) that I’ve cultivated over the years have a lot of potential to help people. I take very seriously what I put out on these channels, and I think that there’s great potential to make a meaningful contribution with this content.

Which makes me happy.

My wife and I were taking a stroll through Golden Gate Park one sunny morning, forking back and forth on the running paths that line the hilly landscape. As we ascended a hill by Fushsia Dell, we noticed a man laying under a grove of trees. He was dressed shabbily and sprawled atop a sleeping bag.

Homeless people are a common sight in San Francisco, especially in Golden Gate Park, so I thought nothing of it, until my wife exclaimed in my ear:

“Jason… that’s a dead body!”

My heart jumped into my throat, and I looked more closely at the human figure. Looking more closely (we were a good 20 feet away), I noticed certain… things about the body (I’ll spare the exact details for the faint of heart) that indicated that he was, in fact, most likely dead. Not least of which was the swarm of flies buzzing around the grove of trees.

My wife’s a doctor, and I watched from the sidelines as her instincts kicked in. She called out to him.

“Sir! Can you hear me?”

No response.

She approached, getting close enough to discern that, yes, this was most certainly a dead body.

Emergency Response
She called 911, and we watched in amazement as the San Francisco emergency response wheels were set in motion. Trying to explain precisely where we were in the park was a challenge, but we flagged down the approaching cruiser and within five minutes a cop was taking my wife’s statement. Nobody seemed to want to get too close to the body.

“Did you attempt to rouse him?” asked the cop.

“I got close and called out to him,” said my wife. “He is dead, isn’t he?”

“Well,” said the cop. “We’ve seen people that look as bad as he does that are still alive.”

That was an astonishing statement given the condition of the body.

The medical examiner arrived shortly thereafter, briskly dispelling our concerns that maybe this poor guy was still alive.

“That’s obviously a dead body,” said the ME. “He’s probably been out here for a few days.”

Yellow tape went up around the site and we were allowed to take off and resume what had suddenly become a much more somber morning.

The Homeless All Around Us
I’m no expert, but this certainly didn’t look like an act of violence. The body looked quite frail, with gray hair and stubbly beard, though it’s hard to tell age on a dead body that’s been exposed to the elements for several days.

At first, I thought it amazing that this body could be laying out in this park for a few days without anyone noticing. After all, it was only a few feet off of a heavily traveled running path in a popular park. But then I started to think about how many homeless people I “see but don’t see” on any given day. I’ve lived in urban ares with significant homeless populations for decades, and street people kind of fade into the fabric of the city for me.

This wasn’t always the case—I clearly remember the extreme discomfort and embarrassment 18-year-old Jason felt when first encountering people asking for money on the streets of Chicago. How could all these people have ended up at this point in their lives? I didn’t get it and it troubled me. Probably a good thing. Over the years, that reaction got cauterized out of my brain and I started to see street people more like an obstacle to wheel my bass around, like a lamp pole or bench.

He looked like he died peacefully. Overdose? Cancer? Who knows. But if it’s time for your card to be punched, leaving this world under a grove of trees in Golden Gate Park is not a bad way to go. It’s got to be better than dying in the subzero temperatures under a bridge in Chicago.

Shocking the Doctors
You’d expect that, given their profession, doctors would be the least likely people to be squeamish about someone finding a dead body. It was surprising just how shocking us finding that body was to my wife’s doctor colleagues—they all seemed scandalized upon hearing the story. I suppose there’s a difference between encountering death in a medical setting and finding a body in the park, but the reaction was still surprising.

Shocking the Kids
There’s an absurdist part of my personality that enjoys saying strange things (within reason) to large groups of teenagers and observing their reaction. It’s a good way to break up rehearsals, and it can make you seem quite mysterious if applied judiciously. I’ve told many a crazy gig story in orchestra rehearsals, which results in a lot of laughter and quizzical looks.

So… I had to decide… do I talk about the dead body with my orchestra?

The next day, I found myself up on the podium in front of one of my orchestras (about 60 students), and they were merrily playing, tuning, chatting, and settling into rehearsal. I couldn’t help myself.

“Hey guys, guess what? I found a dead body!“

Note to self: if you ever want the total, rapt attention of a large group of high schoolers, just say the words “dead body.” Never have I heard a room fall so eerily silent. I had their complete, rapt attention. If only I could get that attention when trying to give them a new bowing!

I related the story, they asked some questions, and we proceeded with a very somber rehearsal.

Dead Body Club
Coincidentally, my orchestra director colleague at my school has also found a dead body. He was in Laos on vacation and was chilling out on the beach when the lower half of a body (no upper half in site) washed ashore. It had obviously been in the water for quite some time. He found the manager of the property, who shrugged and said that he’d heard about that body bouncing around in the surf. He said he’d take care of it sometime soon. A little bit of a different response than the San Francisco authorities, huh?

What are the odds that two orchestra directors working together would have independently found dead bodies?