Saxquest

Saxquest is a saxophone shop of a kind that barely exists any more – a specialist dealer, a nationally regarded repair bench and a free museum, all in one storefront on Cherokee Street. The business is family run and has been dealing in instruments for more than twenty-five years.

The stock is vintage and professional horns: saxophones above all, clarinets alongside them, ranging from student instruments to the rare and collectable. This is a shop where an instrument is assessed, played and argued over rather than pulled off a rack, and where a buyer is expected to want to know what they are holding.

The repair shop is the part that has drawn national attention. The bench takes on complete mechanical restorations for professional players, and the staff between them have something over seventy years of experience on instruments from flutes to tubas. Horns arrive from well outside Missouri for work that few shops will attempt.

Upstairs is the Saxquest Saxophone Museum, which is free and open to the public. The collection gathers fine, rare and historically significant saxophones together with vintage mouthpieces, accessories and memorabilia – the sort of material that would otherwise be scattered among private collections and never seen. For anyone with an interest in the instrument it is one of the more unexpected things on Cherokee Street, and one of the few museums in St. Louis that occupies the first floor above a working shop.

Saxquest sits in the Cherokee-Lemp historic district, on the antiques end of the street among the vintage dealers, restaurants and the brew pub – a neighbourhood where a shop like this makes complete sense and would be unimaginable in a mall.