Doing it Again, but this Time in Tune

This gallery is a personal collection of photographs from the past 12 months that document my first year on the road as an audition candidate. As a double bassist, I’ve always considered myself a late bloomer in comparison to most of my peers simply because I didn’t receive high quality double bass lessons until my first year of college, and because I didn’t take my first professional audition until after I earned my Master’s degree.

In my first year of auditioning, I’ve traveled to Pennsylvania, California, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, usually either by car or by plane, lugging around my bass and camera. I like to think of these photographs as postcards from the audition trail — a mix of self-portraits, photos I took while walking down the street in whatever city the audition was in, and photos of the organizational parts of my practice.

Doing it Again, but this Time in Tune doesn’t showcase the most difficult moments of the audition experience (being out of tune/time in audition recordings, having a memory slip onstage, the long drive or flight home after not advancing in an audition, etc.) but, it provides a glimpse of part of my life that is incredibly important to me. Here, I’m able to establish myself as the artist I know I am but am almost never recognized as. Here I am, as both a recently-graduated musician with no professional audition experience and as a candidate who, at the end of the year, has found himself in a final round for the first time. It is proof of musical progress that has come only through the help of several mentors, family, friends, and the Sphinx Organization.