Leah Zeger & Cory Pesaturo

Violinist-vocalist Leah Zeger and accordionist Cory Pesaturo share a deep fluency across jazz, classical, and global styles, and both have built careers around improvisation and genre-crossing collaborations. Zeger is a Houston-born player and singer whose path runs from early orchestral posts to the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and major film and TV scoring sessions; she has toured or recorded with artists ranging from Hans Zimmer and Jeff Lynne’s ELO to Annie Lennox, CeeLo Green, Miley Cyrus, and Postmodern Jukebox. She’s also a Yamaha Artist and a songwriter with solo albums that spotlight her hybrid of lyrical violin writing and jazz-inflected vocals.

Cory Pesaturo (“C-Pez”) is a three-time world champion of the accordion (acoustic, digital, and jazz) and a Guinness World Record holder for marathon performance. Educated at the New England Conservatory in Contemporary Improvisation, he has appeared on four occasions at the White House, on The Late Show with David Letterman, and on international broadcasts; he also delivers talks (TED, Google, EG) on the modern accordion and its evolving role in improvising music. His official bio emphasizes his goal of expanding the instrument’s vocabulary—often performing largely improvised sets that move from bebop language to folk idioms, tangos, and club-tempo textures.

What to expect musically: an acoustic-electric palette where Zeger moves between supple, cantabile violin lines, agile scat and vocal phrasing, and rhythm-section roles (chordal figures, ostinati), while Pesaturo leverages both the expressive reeds of a traditional accordion and the timbral range of digital instruments. The duo’s sets typically traverse jazz standards and modern reharmonizations, Roma-influenced swing, tango, klezmer-to-Balkan drive, film-score themes reframed for improvisers, and originals—often stitched together with spontaneous modulations and metric shifts. Expect extended solos, real-time call-and-response, and transitions that treat the entire program as a through-composed arc rather than a sequence of isolated tunes. (For reference points: Zeger’s recent work with Zimmer and PMJ, and Pesaturo’s championship performances and talks about improvisation on the instrument.)

Artist snapshots (context for the ear):

Zeger’s background includes an opera degree alongside jazz club work; that blend shows up in her phrasing—portamento and bel canto breath shaping over harmonic language that’s closer to 1940s–60s vocal jazz. On violin, she toggles between classical articulation and swing inflection, with occasional electric-violin timbres.

Pesaturo’s sets often feature high-velocity right-hand lines, left-hand walking bass, and layered accompaniment textures that make the duo feel orchestral; he frequently programs sounds to move from reed-like warmth to synth-adjacent colors without losing the physicality of the accordion.

The evening reads as a chamber duo with the spontaneity of a small jazz group: tunes deconstruct and rebuild mid-flight, cadenzas emerge out of grooves, and stylistic borders blur in service of interaction and narrative flow.