From Waltham to the world’s jazz stages: Remembering Rebecca Kilgore

A Waltham native whose voice delighted jazz connoisseurs for decades with a technique described as flawless has died.

Rebecca Kilgore, born Sept. 24, 1949, was a 1967 graduate of Waltham High School. She died Jan. 7 in Portland, Oregon, where she had long resided. She was one of two daughters in an artistically inclined family, according to an obituary in the New York Times. Her father, George M. Kilgore, did sales work for a rivet company and was a Unitarian Church choir director; her mother, Jean (Schaufus) Kilgore, managed the home and took on redecorating projects.

A note in the Waltham High yearbook said her hobby was guitar and she participated in the folk club. 

 “When I was in high school,” she said in a 2024 profile by Christopher Loudon in Jazz Times, “I was into Joan Baez and Judy Collins and people like that. I got a guitar and strummed along. Then I discovered a disc jockey in the area who played classic jazz. I got acquainted with Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O’Day and just flipped. Those singers took me on a complete musical detour. They were my teachers, because I never had any formal training. I consider myself so fortunate to be a torchbearer for that style of singing.”

Kilgore’s musical career didn’t take off until 1981 when, while working as a secretary at Reed College in Portland, she was hired to replace a friend in a swing-revival quintet called Wholly Cats. She sang with jazz, folk and country-swing bands, culminating in a long stint at the Heathman Hotel bar in Portland, where she performed with pianist and song writer Dave Frishberg.

She helped to reinvigorate the Great American Songbook, according to the Times. Michael Feinstein, a leading performer of American Songbook standards, recorded a video interview with her in 2014, in which he described her as a “musical detective” who loved to revive obscure songs.

Feinstein praised her ability to create “something completely fresh that makes so many songs that I’ve never heard anybody sing in the last several decades fresh and new and viable again. That’s the hallmark of a great artist.”

In a 1995 interview with The Oregonian, Kilgore said her goal “is that when someone hears me sing a song, they say, ‘Wow, what a beautiful song,’ rather than, ‘Wow, what a great singer.’”

Her fans included the cartoonist Gary Larson, who enlisted her to sing the swing-era ballad “I’ll Be Seeing You” on the soundtrack of his animated TV special “Tales From the Far Side” in 1994.

Kilgore came of age during a time of cultural and political upheaval in the United States when rock ‘n’ roll dominated the radio airwaves. But in her interview with The Oregonian she explained why jazz classics held so much appeal for her.

“The old music’s not saying, ‘I want to sleep with you, I want to have your baby.’ It’s saying, ‘Your eyes are like starlight,’” she said. “I prefer that.”