Scott Worthington is a double bassist and composer based in Los Angeles.
As the Fall approaches, I'm tentatively hopeful that performances are coming back. At the end of this month I'll play four shows at REDCAT: Ron Athey presenting his Acephalous Monster along with music by Opera Povera (Sean Griffin). The whole run sold out rather quickly, so I hope you already have your tickets!
After that, the Redlands Symphony returns for an in-person regular season and I'm also looking forward to presenting my recent work at a few local community colleges this semester.
A longer-term plan is to put together some recordings with my Cassini project for a release. I used that system for performances on this year's Oh My Ears festival in April and for my Deep Tones for Peace performances in January and back in September 2020 (see below for the September performance links). I continue to develop and tweak the system, so not only are no two performances alike because of improvisation, but the computer program is likely not even the same between performances either.
I'm excited about my performance on the last concert of the Oh My Ears festival. Typically an in-person event in Phoenix, AZ, this year it's mostly gone online. View the whole schedule here and pick up your tickets here. Hope to “see” you there in the chat :)
An exciting bit of news is that Christopher Burns and I are starting to release some music. Another also maybe exciting part is that for fun and for experimenting (and because it might be a little funny), we're doing it as a podcast.
LV2MKRT: a weekly(ish) podcast of improvised music for double bass and electronics.
I hope you'll listen and I hope you enjoy. We are applying a veneer of silliness around the whole thing, but we do believe in the music and think it's worth sharing :) After the past year some levity about something feels ok.
Chris and I have been improvising together since the end of October 2020 over the internet. We're using [quacktrip~], software that allows real-time, high-fidelity audio to be passed directly between computers.*
It's been great fun and at some point we started recording. Then we realized maybe we should let other people listen in on these, almost like bootlegs from live shows. So that idea became LV2MKRT because we honestly do love to make art (and because the name is ridiculous).
We are on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. You can also listen on our homepage or copy the RSS feed into your favorite other podcast app. Well... unless that is Spotify! We were on Spotify for less than 11 minutes because their predatory business model regarding musicians means you can't have a podcast that's music.
The first episode is live now. Look for new episodes every Monday or so.
*For the technical people, we're getting about a 100ms round-trip delay with 48K/32-bit audio between Pennsylvania and California on home internet connections.
My goodness does January 2020 feel like an entire lifetime ago, but I was very happy to be a part of this performance. And not only was it great fun with wonderful people in January, Trevor Bača's ( H A R M O N Y ) performance on Monday Evening Concerts was named one of the notable performances of 2020 by Alex Ross in The New Yorker!
There's a link to a recording in the article (via soundcloud) but you can watch us play it below.
A recent performance for Deep Tones for Peace, a group of bassists posting videos and live streams to facebook. You can see the group (no FB account needed!) here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DeepTonesForPeace2020.
My performance video is up at this link and you can stream just the audio from the player below.
Some bassists have started a fund using Go Fund Me to commission black composers to write pieces for solo double bass. Please join me in supporting this project and performing the music when it's available.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/solo-double-bass-pieces-by-black-composers-fund
Originally a project for The Broad, I got permission to upload my complete performance of James Tenney's Beast; a performance live from my house!
You can watch The Broad's project L.A. Mavericks: John Baldessari and James Tenney here.
NEW ALBUM: works by john cage
Yesterday I performed my first virtual house concert, an idea I may continue through the COVID-19 crisis that has halted public performances around the globe. The archive of that stream is below.
Please enjoy Eva-Maria Houben's nachtstück (music starts at about 6:20), stay healthy, and stay home for now :)
I’m very happy to have played some bass on Isaac Shankler‘s record that was an I Care If You Listen Editor's Pick this year. The list has also given me some music to check out while it's still 2019 :)
Check out the album on bandcamp.