Peggy Gilbert played jazz sax, pioneered all-women bands

Peggy Gilbert, a noted jazz saxophonist and bandleader who for decades led all-women ensembles in hot jazz, a daring venture when she began her career more than 80 years ago, died Feb. 12 in Los Angeles. She was 102.

The cause was complications of hip surgery, said Jeannie Pool, a friend. Pool, a musicologist and filmmaker, 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 such as "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 women 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 "Ellen" and "Married With Children."

For most of the 20th century, Ms. Gilbert toured the country by station wagon, plane, ship, 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, 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 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.

By the time she was in high school, she 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 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, she 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's 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 such as George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante. It also played in popular Los Angeles nightclubs.

In addition, Ms. Gilbert served as an unofficial employment agency for women 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.

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 nights and 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 she met when they appeared at the same nightclub.