Museum offers place for sax-lovers
Couple creates business, Web site based on classic instrument
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| Erica Burrus photo/ Mark Overton plays a saxophone at Saxquest. |
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The museum at 2114 Cherokee Street features a fully restored quartet of original and rare pre-Civil War Adolphe Sax saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor and baritone). Sax invented the instrument in 1846.
There's also a Conn-O-Sax, made by the C.G. Conn company in 1928.The fact is the museum contains more the 200 various kinds of saxophones, all of which are available for playing in a special "whisper room."
The museum will have its grand opening noon to 6:30 p.m., June 14. It will feature free performances, recitals, clinics and master classes.
The museum is on the second floor of Saxquest, which features saxophone and clarinet accessories, a repair shop and the headquarters of Saxquest.com, a nationally used Web site including sales, a trading post, a virtual museum and discussion on saxophone interests.
Saxquest is the creation of Mark and Elke Overton, who are both professional musicians and saxophonists. They met in fifth-grade band and dated in high school and at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
"I did a master's degree in conducting. I'm the classical. He's the jazz," said Elke, who was instrumental music coordinator at St. Charles Community Coordinator before she became a stay-at-home mother.
While serving as vice president of Saxquest, she stays in the background and cares for their 4-year-old daughter and 1-1/2-year-old son at their Shaw neighborhood home.
The couple married in 1993, and moved to St. Louis so Mark could attend graduate school at Washington University. Mark, who majored in biology, chemistry and jazz studies at the University of Northern Iowa, finished his doctorate in molecular genetics in 2000.
Then he embarked on two years of post doctoral work.
"I was well on my way to becoming a real scientist," Mark said.
But the lure of the saxophone was strong. He was playing with "Cool Blue," a jazz sextet formed in 1996 as an offshoot of "Hot Doc," a Washington University-affiliated band.
Then in 2001, he launched the Saxquest.com Web site.
"That just really took off," Mark said. "It became a full-time job. I had to do one or the other."
His choice, although he admits it may not be as profitable as the work at Washington University, was Saxquest.
The Overtons bought the building at 2114 Cherokee St., in January 2007 and opened it in June 2007. In his business, Overton came across a number of valuable instruments that he saved and is displaying in the museum.
Such a collection would be difficult to put together without the Internet, Overton said.
The Saxquest site receives more than 1,000 hits per day, Overton said. He counts more than 16,000 people who registered on the site while 2,000 to 3,000 registered on the discussion board and more than 1,000 people post items in the site's trading forum.
One of Overton's employees who works on the site is Jon Huff, 28, who has a bachelor's degree in music from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
"It's great. You get to work in music all day," said Huff, who started with Saxquest in January 2004. "You get to meet all the big players and talk to some great players."
Sax facts
After Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846, many people didn't like it.
"People even tried to kill him, said Mark Overton of the Saxquest saxophone store, museum and Web site.
Sax went on to make a number of other instruments, but ultimately they didn't make him rich.
"He died of course penniless like all geniuses do," Overton said.
But composers like Hector Berlioz, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss composed music for the instrument. Then it became popular in military band music, in vaudeville and jazz.
While the C.G. Conn company of Elkhart, Ind., made as many as 30,000 saxophones a year in the 1920s, none are made today in the U.S.
Most are manufactured in China and Taiwan, although the best come from smaller makers in France and Germany.
"The vintage instruments are gaining huge popularity because they were so well made," Overton said.
Overton said he likes the sound and music of a saxophone. The idea is to mimic the human voice, he said. "Each vintage horn has a unique sound," he said.
