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JIM
MOORE (alto sax) — Every group has one - the person that
seems to define everything good and important about that group; its heart
and soul. For the Gateway City Big Band,
that person is our most senior member, Jim Moore.
When he isn't on the phone promoting the band, he's busy traveling the
world and playing his saxophone. Jim loves to tell jokes, arrange
get-togethers with other musicians, and promote the Big Band. Music is his
life, he says.
He began playing saxophone in 1939 and played in high school. Although he
was a gunner in a B-17 during the war, afterwards he played with the 521st
Army Air Force Jazz Band. The group performed all over the United States at
hospitals and officers clubs.
Then it was off to college at Westminster College and performing with
groups around Missouri. A coed at nearby William Woods College caught his
eye, and Jim and Pat were married while still in college. After graduating,
he started a business, Moore Research, in St. Louis. Three children came
along and Jim stopped playing his sax for a few years. He now also has six
grandchildren, several of them musicians also, plus two great
granddaughters.
In 1971, musician friend Will Dyer found Jim and asked him to join the
Friends of Music, later to be renamed the Gateway
City Big Band. Almost forty years later, Jim is still playing the music he
loves with the group who has become like family.
"To me, the Gateway City Big Band is
one of the loves of my life, " Jim says. "How wonderful, what we
are doing for charity and our own satisfaction." And how wonderful
what Jim does for our band, too!
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