JIM KNOX (alto/tenor sax) — Jim joined the band in 1966 and was a big part of what the Gateway City Big Band is today.

Jim began playing the clarinet at the age of 9. When he was in high school, a group of friends formed a band they called the “Metropolitans.” To join the band, Jim paid $107 for a new Conn saxophone and taught himself how to play it. Later he went to Kansas University, paying his expenses by playing the saxophone. He graduated in 1942 with a degree in Chemical Engineering and was immediately sent to Oak Ridge to work on the top secret atom bomb project. He sent his girlfriend a ring and after they were married, she joined him.

Jim put the saxophone away, busy with his career and his two daughters, Marcia and Melissa (Missy). He worked for Monsanto for 35 years.In 1966 a group of his musician friends decided to start their own big band for fun. They called themselves the “Friends of Music” and Jim was back on the sax. In 1975 the group renamed themselves “The Gateway City Big Band”. One by one Jim’s fellow founders left, but he stayed and watched the band grow and evolve.

Jim and his wife, Jacqueline, were married for almost 30 years when she passed away and he has two grandsons, Nathan and Jay. Jim sponsored a jazz scholarship at Meramec Community College and had a large collection of saxophone player figurines that was once displayed at a museum in Kansas.

Jim loved to travel but his greatest loves were family and the Gateway City Big Band. He was hugely responsible for the accumulation and organization of hundreds of tunes in the band’s library and served as its librarian until 2001. He also did a fair amount of arranging of tunes to fit the band’s instrumentation and directed the vocal quartet formed within the group, “The Dreamers”.

Jim retired from the band in 2000 and passed away in 2006.

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