Jazz bassist — and composer — Gerald Spaits tries out some new strings

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You expect Gerald Spaits to hear things the rest of us do not. He has been a jazz musician for more than 30 years and has spent 15 years teaching at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, under Bobby Watson. But sometimes those carefully calibrated ears do him no favors. The music playing overhead at the Sprint store, where he went before we met, is “just awful,” he says.

“But people hear the same thing every day and they blank it out,” Spaits says as he adjusts the volume on his new phone. “I listen to that more than the average person would. It’s a curse.”

So are the baseball games, he says with a laugh. We’re speaking a few hours before the third game of the World Series, the only time the Royals would lose to the Mets. Spaits, playing later at Louie’s Wine Dive, knows he’ll lose to both teams, yielding what would typically be a bigger audience for the Gerald Spaits Trio’s monthly gig in the basement lounge there. His trio, he fears, will become little more than background music against the sports chatter.

When I arrive at Louie’s later that night — 15 minutes after the first pitch, at the onset of Spaits’ four-hour set — only two tables are seated in the spacious room. The occupants of both are facing the glowing screen, their backs to the band. But Spaits plays as though he has a rapt audience, anchoring his body against his upright bass, moving his shoulders to the rhythm of the songs. Saxophonist Charles Perkins and keyboardist Roger Wilder share his smile.

These are just standards, Spaits tells me during the break. “You call tunes as you go for a gig like this, whatever you feel like. These are the basics.”

“I live for standards,” Perkins says. “Those are pure sounds.”

But standards are off the table for Spaits’ next outing: a new show, called Sax and Violins, Wednesday, November 18, at the Westport Coffee House Theater.

For years, Spaits has written original music and rearranged the music of others — including that of legends Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington — centering his compositions on eight voices: jazz quartet plus string quartet. Some of his pieces are more than a decade old — he did a Monk show about 12 years ago — but Wednesday’s music, for the most part, will be fresh. (And it will include at least one Beatles tune: “I Am the Walrus.”)

“This mash-up or whatever you want to call it — two styles, two genres — that’s always appealed to me,” Spaits says, “to try and do different disciplines, with classical and jazz or whatever it might be. I’ve written a lot for a string quartet and a couple different combinations — sometimes with strings and bass and drums, some with just bass — and we’ll be doing that when we play.”

A jazz quartet and a classical string quartet generally have no reason to overlap, violinist Adam Galblum says.

“Those are two different worlds,” he tells me over the phone. I hear him playing scales on his violin. “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.”

Spaits approached Galblum in the summer for help assembling the string quartet to carry out his vision. Galblum, a Kansas City native who recently returned home after a decade spent in the Denver bluegrass-music scene, said yes right away. On Wednesday, he’ll sit alongside violinist Matthew Bennett, cellist Justin Coward and Kansas City Symphony principal violist Christine Grossman.

“I get to play with classical string players, which I don’t get to do all that often,” Galblum says. “And on the other side of it, there are these seasoned jazz musicians. For me, this hits a lot of sweet spots.”

Drummer Brian Steever is one of those seasoned jazz musicians — and Spaits’ former student. He plays nearly every night of the week in one group or another, including Hermon Mehari’s Tuesday residency at the Majestic. But this project, he says, is special.

“When Gerald asked me to do this gig, there was no question in my mind about it,” Steever tells me. “He called me to do a rehearsal at his house a couple months ago, and it was my first time hearing the arrangements. I was struck with the instrumentation — it’s so unique. I had never been a part of a sound like that.”

In addition to Spaits and Steever, the jazz quartet features Perkins on alto sax and bass clarinet, and Rich Wheeler on soprano sax and tenor sax. The rich billing for Sax and Violins aside, Steever is plain curious, he says, to know where Spaits will guide the group.

“He has tendencies toward the avant-garde that don’t necessarily get to shine when he’s in other groups,” he says. “But when he’s the leader, it’s always very interesting because there’s a certain freedom about it. There’s an openness. He allows whatever is going to happen to happen.”

If all goes well Wednesday, Spaits plans to remount Sax and Violins and perhaps make it a recurring event. He’s humble, quietly hopeful, as he tells me this. When I ask him if he ever doubts himself, he replies, “Yes, but only every 20 minutes or so.”

He goes on: “I think, like any artist that plays music, I question what I do a lot. Something like this is really putting a lot on the line because it’s all my compositions or arrangements — that’s all me, really. I just hope that people show up.” He pauses, then gives a modest smile. “And like it.”