Originally published in Jersey Jazz Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the New Jersey Jazz Society.
Baritone saxophonist Leigh Pilzer likes to recall a scene in the movie, The Godfather, "where the son (Al Pacino), who falls in love in Italy, says, 'It was like a bolt from the blue.'" That's how Pilzer felt when she first heard the Count Basie big band.
Pilzer was "either a senior in high school or I just graduated, and I was playing cello. Growing up in D.C. I had heard world class jazz ensembles like the Airmen of Note and the Navy Commodores. I'd loved all the woodwinds, that fancy stuff. But when I heard the Basie band -- just saxophones and trumpets and trombones, and a rhythm section -- that groove, that organic swing, that ensemble feel -- it was like, 'Oh, I want to do that.' Don't ask me why I didn't want to play bass. That would have made more sense. But I picked saxophone."
She started off on alto sax, but as a member of the Montgomery County College big band at a concert in Rockville, MD, led by drummer/vibraphonist Chuck Redd, she was asked to play the baritone saxophone when the bari player couldn't make it. "They handed me the bari," Pilzer said, "and it was like, 'Oh, this is the right sound.' My parents, when I graduated high school, said they would get me another cello. After about two years, I went to them and said, 'Remember that cello? I'd like the baritone saxophone instead."
On Saturday night, September 27, Pilzer will be playing baritone sax as part of the DIVA Jazz Orchestra concert at the Metuchen segment of the Middlesex County Jazz Festival. Pilzer has been part of DIVA since 2003, although her first performance with drummer Sherrie Maricle's big band was in 1997 at Penn State University when she was "first call on the sub list."
Back in the day, Pilzer recalled, "you were the only women in the band, so, for me, DIVA was about being around a bunch of women who played their asses off. We were just there to play, and nobody was the only this or the only that. It was just kind of fun to meet more women. We were a concert jazz ensemble playing super challenging music. My very first job with DIVA was on bari, but, over time, I've played all five saxophone books in the band. That was a super valuable experience to have those opportunities. I was terrified of Sherrie. If you'd have told me many years ago that she would be one of my best friends in life, I would have thought you were insane"
Are we past the biases against women instrumentalists? "I don't think we are," Pilzer said. "I think it's important for young high school women to see us. And, more importantly, why is it that men can play with their friends and colleagues and the people they've come up with together, and if they have a band, it's just a band? But, if I put a band together, with likeminded musicians and friends, and they happen to be women -- all of a sudden, it's an all-woman band. That needs to go away. That needs to stop. When do we get to just have a band?"
Pilzer's most recent album, her 2024 Strange Woman Records release, Beatin' the Odds, featured dual septets and an octet on one of the tracks. "One of the reasons I used two different bands," she explained, "was because if I had a CD of just the seven-piece band comprised of women, it was going to become an all-woman septet. Nobody was going to listen to it for the writing and the fabulous musicianship of the players. That was all going to get overshadowed."
Eight of the nine tracks on Beatin' the Odds are Pilzer's original compositions. The one exception was written by bassist Amy Shook. With the album, Pilzer went public for the first time about having had cancer. "I was hearing songs, and felt there was a way to express it or share it or gain some power over it. I just hit eight years out from my diagnosis. It's a highly recurrent cancer, so I felt I'm living with this." The first five tracks refer to Pilzer's cancer; the remaining tracks to Covid. "The Covid material," she said, came directly from being in lockdown."
Jack Bowers, reviewing the album for AllAboutJazz, called it "a series of bright and engaging songs marvelously performed by Pilzer's dual septets," adding that, "Not only has Leigh Pilzer beaten the odds, but she has also celebrated her victory by recounting the journey in the best way she can . . . SKCC, a salute to Billy Strayhorn's classic 'UMMG' (Upper Manhattan Medical Group), travels a similar melodic and harmonic path while applauding Pilzer's caregivers, the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center. The smooth and mellow 'Lin' refers to her surgeon, Dr. Jeffrey Yen Lin, the light-hearted 'Waterkress' to her oncologist, Dr. Bruce Kressel."
After switching from cello to baritone saxophone, Pilzer earned her Bachelor of Music in Jazz Composition and Arranging from Berklee College of Music; Masters Degrees in Jazz Studies and Saxophone Performance from the University of Maryland; and a Doctorate in Saxophone Performance with Jazz Emphasis from George Mason University.
Her dissertation for the doctorate was titled, "Gerry Mulligan, Soloist: Transcription and Analysis of His Small-Group Solos on 'Line For Lyons', 'Curtains', and 'The Flying Dutchman'".
When I interviewed Pilzer in 2014 for my book, Jeru's Journey: The Life and Music of Gerry Mulligan (Hal Leonard Books: 2015), she told me she was more influenced as a player by Pepper Adams than Mulligan. But Mulligan's impact on her would be "counterpoint and real awareness of what another instrumental player is doing. I really appreciate Mulligan's sensibility and interactivity."
She explained why she selected Mulligan as the subject of her dissertation. "Yes, he had the Concert Jazz Ensemble," she said. "Yes, he wrote in The Birth of the Cool. But this is a guy who traveled the world in his own small groups. This, to me, was the lion's share of his output and his impact. Yet, when I looked at what they call scholarly work that had been done on Mulligan -- the four dissertations were mostly about his writing, although one drifts heavily into biography. There was material out there about his writing but not so much about him as an improvising jazz musician. I thought, 'This is weird. This is work that needs to be out there.' I thought it was important to focus on that aspect of his musicianship.
"His improvisation," she explained, "is really compositional. He returns to a melodic fragment, expanding on it, turning it upside down. I look at an overall line of his solo and say, 'Oh, my God, there's this arc of melodic activity. He's telling a whole melodic story over the course of these two choruses. It has a logical start and continuation and ending. It's astounding. It's subtle. It's not brassy. It's not like he's playing so fast or so high and superimposing these chords. Holy cow, what he just did with these five notes over the space of 12 bars -- it's insane."
People see Mulligan, she added, "as a collaborator. I'm going to go out on a limb here about Mulligan and Chet Baker. Baker was just doing his thing. Mulligan was making up the counterpoint, and he was the support instrument when Baker was soloing." Conversely, "I feel like the Mulligan/Bob Brookmeyer combination was just exquisite because they both brought that compositional brain to it. There really was a mutual effort, playing behind one another. Even if they didn't play a tune the same way every time, they had a concept about the tune that was beautiful."
In addition to her participation in DIVA and her own bands, Pilzer is a member of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. That, she said, has been "an incredible experience." Her bands include the Leigh Pilzer Startet, a quartet or quintet; an organ group called Leigh Pilzer’s Low Standards; a septet known as Leigh Pilzer’s Seven Pointed Star; PALS, a duo with bassist Amy Shook, and JLQ, a quintet co-led with trombonist Jen Krupa.
Pilzer is beginning work on a new album with Paul Bratcher on Hammond B3 organ and Greg Holloway on drums. There will also be contributions on "a tune or two" by trumpeters Hany Albrecht and Kenny Rittenhouse. "I was gonna call it 'Low Standards', she said, "but I realized I have some of my own tunes that I haven't recorded. But I'm still going to call it 'Low Standards'. All the tunes sound like something that was written in 1952." Pilzer is on baritone sax in DIVA's recently released album, Tappin' Thru Life, music from the theatrical production celebrating the life and legacy of the late dancer/singer/choreographer Maurice Hines. Reviewing it for Jersey Jazz, Joe Lang wrote: "The album captures the magic that made the show such a success."
On the day of our interview, Pilzer was preparing for a Saturday night gig at the Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, PA, in a sextet called DIVA SnyxNyx with Shook on bass, Maricle on drums, Amy Bormet on piano, Jaime Dauber on trumpet, and Krupa on trombone. "We're going to play some standards and originals and swing and have fun," she said.
The New Jersey Jazz Society is a non-profit organization of business and professional people, musicians, teachers, students and listeners working together for the purpose of advancing jazz music. Their mission is to promote and preserve America’s original art form – jazz. The Society seeks to ensure continuity of the jazz art form through its commitment to nurture and champion local talent, along with showcasing outstanding national and international artists providing for the younger generation via arts education programs.
PHOTO BY SUZETTE NIESS
