Peggy Gilbert, a noted jazz saxophonist and bandleader who for decades led all-female ensembles in hot jazz, a daring venture when she began her career more than 80 years ago, died on Feb. 12 in Los Angeles. She was 102 and had lived there for many years.
The cause was complications of hip surgery, said Jeannie Pool, a friend. A musicologist and filmmaker, Dr. Pool made a documentary about Ms. Gilbert, “Peggy Gilbert and Her All-Girl Band,” narrated by Lily Tomlin and completed last year.
Long before the proliferation of women’s bands in the World War II era, and long afterward, Ms. Gilbert presided over a series of jazz groups, performing widely and appearing in Hollywood films like “The Wet Parade” (1932), “Melody for Two” (1937) and “The Great Waltz” (1938). She was also known as an advocate for women trying to make their way in jazz, a culture long hostile to female instrumentalists.
To contemporary audiences, Ms. Gilbert was best known for the Dixie Belles, a Dixieland band of older women she formed in 1974, when she was 69. (Reviewers said Ms. Gilbert blew a mean tenor sax until she was well into her 90s.) The Dixie Belles, who performed together until 1998, were featured on the “Tonight” show and on several sitcoms, among them “The Golden Girls,” “Dharma & Greg,” “The Ellen Show” and “Married With Children.”
For most of the 20th century, Ms. Gilbert toured the country by station wagon, plane, ship and even dogsled. She played on vaudeville stages and in glittering nightclubs; on military bases and in millionaires’ mansions; and once, to her dismay, in what turned out to be a circus. Along the way, she encountered incredulity, outright rejection and auditions at which band members were asked to lift their skirts to prove they had good legs.
All this Ms. Gilbert endured, because from the time she was a schoolgirl in Iowa, all she really wanted to do was play the saxophone.
When Margaret Fern Knechtges was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on Jan. 17, 1905, her parents had a piano waiting. Her father, John Darwin Knechtges, was a violinist and the conductor of the Hawkeye Symphony Orchestra, which accompanied silent films. Her mother, the former Edith Gilbert, was an opera chorister. Young Peggy dutifully learned the piano and the violin. At 7, she toured the Midwest in a Highland dance troupe with the Scottish music hall star Harry Lauder.
But by the time she was in high school, Peggy was yearning to play the jazz she heard on the radio. After the school refused her request to learn the saxophone — large wind instruments, she was told, were not suitable for young ladies — she simply taught herself.
“The first time I picked up a sax, I said, ‘This is it!’, ” Ms. Gilbert told The Los Angeles Times last year. “I loved the feel of it —free and loose.”
In 1924, the year after she graduated from high school, Ms. Gilbert started her first women’s band, the Melody Girls, which played at a Sioux City hotel and on the radio. In 1928 she moved to California, where she took her mother’s maiden name. No one could pronounce Knechtges anyway. (It was pronounced kuh-NET-chiz.)
In Los Angeles she started a band that over the years performed under various names, including Peggy Gilbert and Her Metro Goldwyn Orchestra, Peggy Gilbert and Her Symphonics and Peggy Gilbert and Her Coeds. The band toured the vaudeville circuit with stars like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante. It also played in popular Los Angeles nightclubs, sometimes sharing the bill with jazz titans like Benny Goodman and Louis Prima.
In addition, Ms. Gilbert served as an unofficial employment agency for female musicians, securing on-screen work for them in films. After the United States entered World War II, she helped find places in military bands for male musicians who had been drafted, sparing them combat.
“She just got on the phone and called every bandleader she knew who’d enlisted and said, ‘I’ve got a 19-year-old trumpet player here — can you take him?’ ” Dr. Pool, who is also writing a book about Ms. Gilbert, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
During the war, the heyday of women’s bands, Ms. Gilbert toured Alaska with a U.S.O. show starring the actress Thelma White. After the war, when men returned to the bandstand, and the demand for women’s bands dried up, she worked as a secretary for the Los Angeles local of the American Federation of Musicians, continuing to perform at night and on weekends.
Ms. Gilbert, who was divorced after an early marriage, is survived by her companion of more than 60 years, Kay Boley, a former vaudeville performer and contortionist whom she met when they appeared at the same nightclub.
With her Dixieland band, she recorded a CD, “Peggy Gilbert and the Dixie Belles,” produced by Dr. Pool for the Cambria label.
One of the very few obstacles it seemed Ms. Gilbert could not surmount was the scarcity, early on, of women (or, in fact, anyone) skilled enough to play jazz at the level she required.
“Sometimes, in a pinch, she’d have to hire a man, because she didn’t have enough women players,” Dr. Pool said. “In the ’30s, she was doing four, five and six jobs a day. The women would make fun of the guys, because they couldn’t read music. And they’d say: ‘Don’t ever hire that guy again. He’s not really a musician.’ ”
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