Sax & Violins

Kansas City's celebrated ensemble, Sax & Violins, performs in Lincoln for the first time in the rustic & acoustically amazing Golden Sunset Barn at the Prairie Creek Inn.

Sax and Violins, an octet combining a string quartet with a jazz quartet, performs an incredibly wide range of music, melding classical music with jazz, pop, and rock in an exciting and dramatic melange.

"I've brought this particular group together to explore new possibilities in combining different genres of music in an improvising setting. I've gathered some of the finest musicians in Kansas City to perform this music. The strings are not just added to the jazz quartet for background but are interactive within the ensemble. There are times when the String Quartet is playing by itself or in combinations with other players, the jazz ensemble by itself and other times we all play together."
Gerald Spaits

Gerald Spaits, a native of Kansas City and founder of Sax & Violins, is one of the foremost bass players in the Kansas City area. Spaits has enjoyed an active career including playing with jazz legends Jay McShann and Claude “Fiddler” Williams and has appeared with national recording artists Herb Ellis, Rob McConnell, Marilyn Maye, Gary Foster, and The Woody Herman Orchestra. Gerald has also provided soundtracks for TV and radio commercials. He has performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival, the San Jose Jazz Festival, and the World’s Fair in Seville, Spain. Mr. Spaits was the adjunct assistant professor of jazz string bass at the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is the teacher to many young super stars in the Kansas City area.

Gerald has been inspired by the legendary playing of his friend multi-instrumentalist Charles Perkins for many years. Charles is an important link to jazz icon Charlie Parker and a devotee of his music. Charles taught at the Charlie Parker Academy alongside Ahmad Alaadeen and trumpeter Eddie Baker before moving to New York City where he became a fixture at such clubs as The Blue Note and Village Vanguard. After Charles returned to Kansas City, Gerald cooked up an idea to feature Charles in a double quartet with some of his favorite Kansas City studio recording string players. Sax and Violins was born.

The first violinist is Adam Gallium, an improvisor who studied with Matt Glaser in Boston and Claude "Fiddler" Williams, another Kansas City icon. Adam say, “A jazz quartet and a classical string quartet generally have no reason to overlap. Those are two different worlds, these eight people are playing combined quartet music, and it takes somebody who has the vision to compose and arrange the strings part for these tunes, as well as for the jazz quartet, which is really complicated. Not everyone can compose like that. It takes a lot of effort to write that kind of music. You have to sit down and make all these parts happen, and not everyone has that kind of initiative. Gerald is that person."

Gerald does most of the arranging for the group which is critically acclaimed for their eclectic versions of tunes originally written by Ellington, Monk, the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and more.