Eliot Zigmund was born on April 14, 1945, and grew up in the Bronx, close enough to the New York jazz scene of the 1950s and 1960s to be working in it early. By his own account he took his first professional jobs at fifteen, alongside an older brother who was trying to make a career as a jazz guitarist. He studied at the Mannes College of Music and at the City College of New York, took his degree from City College in 1968, and then committed to playing full time.

The first decade of that career happened on the wrong coast for a New Yorker. Zigmund moved to California and spent the early 1970s working around the Bay Area with Ron McClure, Steve Swallow, Art Lande, Mike Nock and Mel Martin, and with the San Francisco pianist Vince Guaraldi, whose trio he joined. That association is better documented on tape than it usually gets credit for: Zigmund is the drummer across nineteen cues of the It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown! soundtrack, cut over two days at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco on January 30 and March 1, 1974, and on the broadcast session taped at the same studio on February 6, 1974 that was eventually issued as Live on the Air. AllMusic still files him as a member of both the Vince Guaraldi Trio and the Bill Evans Trio. He returned to New York in 1974.

The Evans chair came the following January. The earliest documented night is January 26, 1975, at the Village Vanguard: four performances from that set, "Sugar Plum," "Turn Out the Stars," "Quiet Now" and "Waltz for Debby," close out the eight-disc Secret Sessions box, and they are the point where the trio of Bill Evans, Eddie Gomez and Zigmund starts. It ran until 1978 and it was a touring band before it was a recording one, which is why so much of its best evidence surfaced late: a Vancouver club date from June 20, 1975 released as On a Friday Evening in 2021, a Madison, Wisconsin concert from November 15, 1976 released as On a Monday Evening in 2017, and a Paris concert from November 5, 1976. The studio records came in a single concentrated year. Crosscurrents, with Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh added to the trio, was cut at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley on February 28 and March 1 and 2, 1977. I Will Say Goodbye followed at the same studio on May 11, 12 and 13, and won Evans a Grammy. You Must Believe in Spring was recorded at Capitol Studios in Hollywood on August 23, 24 and 25, and was held back until 1981, five months after Evans died. Between those dates Zigmund also went to Tokyo with Gomez for the bassist's first leader album, Down Stretch, recorded at AOI Studios on January 22 and 23, 1976.

Gomez left at the end of 1977 and Zigmund stayed on into the next edition of the band. His last record with Evans is Affinity, made at Columbia Studios in New York on October 30 and 31 and November 1 and 2, 1978, with Toots Thielemans on harmonica, Larry Schneider on reeds and a 25-year-old Marc Johnson on bass. The three-and-a-half-year tenure produced four studio albums, three posthumously issued concert recordings and a permanent association: for the rest of his career Zigmund would be hired, in Europe especially, precisely because he had sat in that chair.

What followed was not a coda. He worked with Don Friedman from 1979 to 1984, an association that outlasted the Evans one and eventually produced the trio record Half & Half with Red Mitchell in 1986. In February 1980 he went into Columbia Recording Studios in New York with Gary Peacock and Art Lande for Shift in the Wind, an ECM date credited to all three men on which Zigmund wrote two of the seven pieces, "Fractions" and "Centers." He played two nights at the Village Vanguard with Jim Hall and Harvie Swartz in July 1982, preserved on the Musica Jazz compilation Unissued 1982-1992. Then came the second long-running trio of his life: Michel Petrucciani hired him in 1984, and with Palle Danielsson on bass the group recorded Live at the Village Vanguard on March 16, 1984 and Pianism for Blue Note at RCA Studio C on December 20, 1985. A later edition of the same trio, with Dave Holland on bass, played the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz on May 11, 1987; that tape sat unissued for thirty-nine years before Elemental Music released it in April 2026 as Kuumbwa, billed to Petrucciani, Holland and Zigmund, with Zigmund interviewed for the booklet.

Zigmund began leading his own dates in the 1990s and has kept at it. Dark Street, a co-billed trio with David Berkman and Mike Richmond, was recorded in Brooklyn on December 15, 1993 for the French label Free Lance. Breeze (SteepleChase, 2008) put a quartet behind him with Gary Versace on piano, Mike Lee on saxophones and Phil Palombi on bass; six of its nine pieces are Zigmund's own. Time Was, taped in October 2011 and released on SteepleChase LookOut in 2017, has Chris Cheek on tenor and soprano. Live at Smalls was cut at the Greenwich Village club on October 21, 2017 and produced by Zigmund himself with Spike Wilner as executive producer. Golden, recorded at Teaneck Sound on November 10 and 13, 2023 and released in 2024, is his most recent. Alongside these he built a substantial second career in Italy and Scandinavia, recording with Pietro Tonolo and Aldo Zunino (Corner Brilliance, 2011), Antonio Zambrini (LongDistance, 2012), the Francesco Maccianti Quartet with Ares Tavolazzi (Passo a Due, recorded 2009), the harmonica player Giuseppe Milici, and the Danish alto saxophonist Christina von Bülow on two records. He is also the drummer on Shauli Einav's Generations (Posi-Tone, 2013), a New York quintet date with Don Friedman, Or Bareket and Itai Kriss.

He has taught at William Paterson College and New York University, lives in Teaneck, New Jersey, and was still recording as a leader in his late seventies.

Zigmund is a listener's drummer, and the compliment paid to him most often is for what he leaves out rather than what he adds. Reviewing him at Smalls, David A. Orthmann wrote in All About Jazz that "without getting in anyone's way, Zigmund was a constant presence. Virtually every stroke had a telling effect," and singled out his habit of briefly foregrounding a single component of the kit: a couple of hard snare hits punching through a lull in a bass solo, a ride cymbal picked up and held when a soloist starts to build. That instinct is what made him plausible in the two hardest piano-trio chairs of his generation. Reviewing an Evans concert, Jon Bream wrote in the Minneapolis Star that "Evans received stalwart support from drummer Eliot Zigmund, whose work was uncommonly tasteful and sensitive," and Musician magazine described the later job in almost opposite terms, saying Zigmund "gave Petrucciani's improvisations a fluid, relaxed urgency." The cymbal sound in particular became a reference point for other players: the Italian pianist Giovanni Mirabassi, hiring him in 2010 for a Paris run marking the thirtieth anniversary of Evans's death, wrote that what he heard in his head was "Eliot's cymbals, from the album You Must Believe in Spring, my bedside CD." He writes as well as plays, contributing originals to Shift in the Wind, Breeze, Live at Smalls and Golden.