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 GERALD SPAITS: Never Off Bass © 1995 John Leisenring
The old road ran into a dead end in the 1950s and '60s. Clubs closed, bands folded, dance halls went broke, and juke boxes and radio, both of which had once promoted an appreciation for jazz, became part of the problem. But the big problem was television. People were staying home to watch the tube rather than going out to dance and listen to music. That, coupled with the fact that jazz had become a kind of art music in the 1940s, caused the loss of a huge segment of the music's following. For the next generation of jazz musicians, the new path ran through the schools. Aspiring young players had to find encouragement and challenge someplace else, and with the old after-hours apprenticeships disappearing, school jazz programs became the new scene. Different, too, was the hook. Most of the young lions of the 1970s and '80s grew up not with Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Stan Kenton and Lester Young, but with rock 'n roll. The Beatles, the Stones, Cream, Led Zepplin and Jimi Hendrix caught those young ears first, and only a few young rockers found their way into the jazz mainstream. And even then, the sounds that inspired them were those of jazz-rock or "fusion," including the music of Chick Corea, Weather Report and a reinvented Miles Davis. Gerald Spaits was just such a young musician. Born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1958, he was six in September of 1964 when his mother took him to KC's old Municipal Stadium to hear the Beatles. "From that moment on all I wanted to be was a musician," says Gerald. "So I started on guitar, and by the time I got to junior high school, I was heavily into the rock scene." Jim Smith, currently a faculty member at Johnson County Community College, was then teaching at Highland Junior High School where Gerald was a student. Smith's jazz band needed a bass player as his group had been invited to perform at the 1971 Kansas City Jazz Festival. He discovered Spaits, who at that time was a long-haired, freaky, rock guitar player and he convinced him to join the group. Gerald took a bass home for the weekend, learned to read bass clef, practiced the four or five tunes the group was working on, and was in the band by the following Monday. "I never touched the guitar again," Gerald remembers. "Playing bass seemed more 'right' to me; all of the sudden I felt that the bass was what I should be playing." Gerald reflects further on his days as a rocker. Days that didn't end with that jazz festival. "I played with some really bad rock bands (back then). We listened to and played the pop stuff of the day, ZZ Top and all that; but we were awful. If I had been a halfway decent singer, things might have turned out differently, but I couldn't sing. Nobody could. And the bass lines were pretty boring." It was later that the first jazz bug bit. "It was in high school that I saw Chick Corea and Return to Forever with Stanley Clarke, Lenny White and Al DiMeola. They were fast, really fast, with chops to last for weeks. I was completely blown away." By those high school years, Spaits had been listening seriously to music for some time. He'd always liked the Beatles, Grand Funk, the James Gang, Cream, the Jeff Beck Group and the Allman Brothers. Jazz fusion was therefore not a stretch, and much of the jazz of the mid to late '70s he studied with enthusiasm. After graduating from Turner High School in 1976, Gerald enrolled in Johnson County Community College where his mentor Jim Smith had recently joined the faculty. There he met drummer Sam Johnson Jr. and guitarist Steve Cardenas. The serious push toward jazz had begun. Listening with intensity to pre-fusion Miles Davis (with Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter), his musical horizons expanded dramatically. Gerald and his new musical friends listened and played at every opportunity, getting together with the best musicians they could find. At JCCC, Spaits earned his associates degree and made many lasting friendships. He then enrolled at Wichita State University, but that was to last for only one year as the profession of a fulltime player was to beckon almost immediately. Gerald remembers some good musicians from his Wichita days, especially guitarists Glenn Alexander and Jerry Hahn. Hahn was teaching in the music department at the college, and at one of his master classes he asked if the young bassist knew Charlie Parker's "Donna Lee." "Sure," said Gerald, and off they went at breakneck speed. Alexander happened to be in the room and hired Spaits on the spot to play in his small band, a group that played mostly jazz-rock with some straight ahead tunes mixed in. Unfortunately, Wichita was not much of a jazz town then; there were simply no places to play. Alexander broke up the band and went to New York, and Gerald felt it was time to head back to Kansas City. Within a year he got a call from trumpeter Stan Kessler to join a new band called The Flat Five, a quintet that featured Kessler, Dave Brandom on saxes, Paul Smith on piano and Ron Vincent on drums. It was an offshoot of The Flat Five, "The Stan Kessler Quartet," that ended up playing at The Point for more than a year in 1981-82. "Those were the first truly outstanding bands I'd played with," says Gerald of Kessler's two groups. "I wish they both could have gone on longer than they did."
By 1982, Ida McBeth was beginning to work fairly regularly at The Point, and Flat Five gigs started to thin out. It was that year that Spaits signed on with the Russ Long trio. "Boy, what a learning experience that was," Gerald exclaims. "At the time, I didn't really know what I was getting into. I went with it because it was steady work, and because I had heard good things about Russ. The first venue we played was the Top of the Crown (at Crown Center); we were there for three and a half years. "Russ was truly a joy to work with. He had been doing shows at the Lake Geneva (Wisconsin) Playboy Club for a number of years, and he really knew the business. His rehearsals were extremely organized and fast. He used to come over -- I had a piano at my place -- and Russ, (drummer) Ray DeMarchi and I would rehearse the whole book in short order. He was, and is, the consummate professional. (On the gig) Russ simply never played the same thing twice. Ever. We played different tunes every night, and he kept the music as fresh as he could while still keeping the dancers and the management happy." The Russ Long Trio played six nights a week at the Top of the Crown. And the last six months of the engagement, saxophonist Kim Park and guitarist Brian Harman occasionally augmented the group. The experience as a whole goes down as one of Gerald's favorites. "Crown Center was a great place to play and they really took care of the musicians. We had a private room where we could relax between sets, and we could leave early if the crowd was gone. The piano was good and the room had really good acoustics. It was a wonderful few years." The next stop for Long, Spaits and the band was at the Vista Hotel (now the Allis Plaza), managed by Jan Oudendijk, himself a big jazz fan. The club, then called the "Twelfth Street Rag," hired the quartet of Russ Long on piano, Ray DeMarchi on drums, Spaits on bass, and Kim Park on woodwinds. The group was there for a year. By the early 1990s, Gerald Spaits had become an established player on the Kansas City jazz scene as well as one of the top bassists in the midwest. He organized his own group in 1989, initially calling it "What Does This Mean?" Today it is known as the Gerald Spaits Quartet and features drummer Arny Young (who replaced charter member Keith Kavanaugh in 1993), trumpeter Jack Lightfoot, and an old friend from Gerald's JCCC days, saxophonist Charles Perkins. Because Gerald's freelance work is mostly straight ahead, this group has allowed him to branch out a bit by writing and arranging for a quartet in which there is no harmonic instrument. It has also facilitated a multi-media element, integrating poets, painters and other artists into a jazz format. Gerald notes how much the Kansas City jazz scene has changed in the last five to ten years. "There are more jazz venues up and running now then I can remember from the earlier days, but now the venues are clubs, where they used to be in the hotels. The Vista, Crown Center, the Hyatt, the old Alameda, the Phillips House have all gone the way of the after hours joints of the '40s. Jazz clubs have risen to take their place." This is the busiest summer that Gerald Spaits can remember, and he says that many of the city's best musicians echo this sentiment. But, just as it was when he was coming up in the '70s, there are very few places for young players to learn their craft. Luckily the jazz programs in many of the high schools today are strong, and the area colleges are doing a good job of teaching the idiom. Otherwise learning environments would be practically non-existent, save for people's garages and basements. "The best advice I have for the young players of today," says Gerald, "is to play and then play some more. It's especially important to play with a great time feel. Russ Long used to tell me to simply put the beat in the center and swing there. Put it where you think it is and then lock it up. If you are playing with good players, you don't even think about it, you just do it. It's like Charlie Parker once said, 'you should learn all this stuff, then forget it and just play.'" The best advice I have for the young players of today is to play and then play some more. ...It's like Charlie Parker once said, 'you should learn all (the) stuff, then forget it and just play.'" -- Gerald Spaits Gerald practices melodies. He believes that if one doesn't know the melody of the composition being played, then something will be lacking. He works on his time feel by practicing the blues in all twelve keys, setting the metronome at various speeds. And he listens. He listens to everything. He always has. There is a fine line between young lion and established player, and Gerald Spaits has long since crossed it. He is proud to be one of the "first calls" in Kansas City for concerts around the midwest and has recently performed with Rob McConnell and Scott Hamilton, Herb Ellis, Gary Foster, Karrin Allyson, and the Woody Herman Band led by Frank Tiberi. Before crossing that line, Gerald found teachers where he could, mainly in public schools and in colleges; he found colleagues to learn from and jam with wherever he could, mainly in school bands; and he used all such influences as reference points while branching out into the professional world, learning, listening and practicing as he went along. Gerald still continues to practice, compose, arrange, front his own band and learn. He continues to be the best musician he can be, serving as an inspiration and a joy to those around him, musician and listener alike. He has taken his place among so many others living and working in this historic town who have rightfully become known as jazz masters from Kansas City. RETURN TO OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1995 MAIN INDEX ------------------------------------------------------------------------ © Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors 1996-2001. All rights reserved. |
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