Pianist Bob Pilsbury celebrated his 90th birthday on Dec. 28. A founding member of the New Black Eagle Jazz Band, and for more than four decades a major force in the band's rhythm section, Bob has for the last couple of years been taking it easy at his home outside Boston with wife Cora.
As a high school student, Bob was not only an accomplished pianist, but was also proficient on clarinet and sax. At Dartmouth College, he played lead sax with the Barbary Coast band and was leader of the Original Sultans Jazz Band. During WWII, he led a 58-member US Army band in the Philippines. After service in Korea, Bob studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, played intermission piano at Jimmy Ryan's jazz club in New York City and sat in with many of the jazz greats at the Stuyvesant Casino.
Back in Boston in the 1950s, Bob had a long stint with the Excalibur Jazz Band and recorded with the Dick Creeden Jazz Band. He attended grad school at Harvard University and became a practicing and teaching psychologist, a profession he maintained well into his 80s.
Bob cites as his chief influences the pop music of the '40s, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Joe Sull
