Emily Remler was born September 18, 1957 in Manhattan, New York and raised in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Remler began playing guitar at age ten. Her first guitar was her brother’s cherry-red Gibson ES-330, the guitar she would use for most of her professional career. She listened to pop and rock guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Winter. She learned simple folk tunes, Beatles songs, and Johnny Winter solos note-for-note, but it was just a hobby. She wasn’t serious yet and had other interests, like sculpture and drawing. Remler was sent to a private boarding school in Massachusetts to finish high school. She graduated high school early, at 16, and applied to music and art schools. She got accepted to one of each: the Berklee College of Music and the Rhode Island School of Design. She had to decide: music or art? She chose music. She told an interviewer for Down Beat magazine in 1985, “I was so frustrated with art. I couldn’t get it the way I wanted it. Music, at least you get more chances and a little more time and have the companionship of the other musicians.”
She wasn’t that good when she got to Berklee, and jazz was an alien art form to her. Miles Davis and John Coltrane were not on her radar. But Berklee was a diverse place, and jazz was more than Coltrane and Miles. She heard Paul Desmond, Pat Martino, and Wes Montgomery. That was more her speed—she loved it and became hooked.
Remler finished a two-year degree and graduated at age 18. She still wasn’t much of a guitarist (at least that’s what she said in interviews) but she’d learned a lot about music, including harmony, reading, and keeping time.
“My teacher told me that I had bad time. I rushed. I went home crying. Crying. But I bought a metronome. I worked with the metronome on two and four. I practiced with that thing and nothing else behind me,” she said in the same 1985 Down Beat interview. She worked hard at it, and eventually great time—her ability to swing—became a hallmark of her playing.
Her boyfriend at the time, guitarist Steve Masakowski, was from New Orleans, and they decided to move there. But she wanted to spend the summer practicing in New Jersey first, so she rented a room on Long Beach Island for eight weeks and worked on chord theory and soloing. She quit smoking. She lost weight. That’s where she learned how to play.
When Remler moved to New Orleans in the fall, she got to work. Reading music got her a lot of gigs: hotel shows, weddings, anniversary parties, rhythm and blues gigs, jazz gigs, and all-night jams with the old-timers on Bourbon Street. She gigged with Wynton Marsalis and Bobby McFerrin. She backed up singers. She played in blues and jazz clubs, working with bands such as Four Play and Little Queenie and the Percolators before beginning her recording career in 1981. She also supported big names when they came to town: Robert Goulet, Rosemary Clooney, Nancy Wilson. Wilson took her on the road and brought her to the Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Remler was a big fish in a small pond, and because she could play and read, she was a first-call player in New Orleans.
She put together a quartet, and worked, but she only lasted another year there before moving back to New York, but she always valued her New Orleans time—it made her into a musician and helped her find her voice. “In New York, it’s very serious. In New Orleans everybody jumps up and down,” she told Down Beat in a 1982 interview. “There’s an R&B kind of feeling. I sort of stole that rich culture and applied it to my own music. If I had stayed in Boston, I’d be playing ‘Giant Steps’ like a madman—like everybody else.”
When Herb Ellis came to town, Remler had to meet him. She had guts and ambition and was able to finagle a meeting.
“I asked her to play something for me, and when she did, I couldn’t believe what I heard,” Ellis said. A few years later Ellis told People Magazine, “I’ve been asked many times who I think is coming up on the guitar to carry on the tradition and my unqualified choice is Emily[Remler].”
He got her an engagement at California’s Concord Jazz Festival, requesting that she join him on a bill called “Guitar Explosion” that also featured such virtuosos as Barney Kessel and Tal Farlow. For Remler it was the beginning of a promising career — one that New Orleans couldn’t contain. Within a year, she had amicably ended her relationship with Masakowski and gone back to New York.
Remler’s return to New York however became a struggle; in New Orleans she was a big fish in a small pond, but like so many aspiring players, here she was a small fish in a big pond. Yet it had an additional layer of difficulty for her. “There are so many bandleaders who have told me face to face that they couldn’t hire me because I was a woman,” she remarked. “So many instances where I wasn’t trusted musically and they handled me with kid gloves.” Remler used the adversity as motivation to get so good that they’d have to hire her.
She landed a job accompanying vocalist Brazilian Bossa nova phenomenon Astrud Gilberto, and began introducing herself to guitarists she heard around town. One was John Scofield, who in 1980 introduced Remler to Clayton, in town from L.A. They jammed together. “She knocked me out,” Clayton says. “I said, ‘Are you gonna be around in a couple months? Because we’re gonna do a Clayton Brothers recording, and it’d be great if you could join us!’ And her eyes widened, and she said, ‘Yeah!’” Remler flew out to California that June to play on the album It’s All in the Family. On the date she again met the president of Concord Jazz Records, Carl Jefferson, whom she’d impressed two years earlier at the Concord Jazz Festival. He signed her to record an album of her own for what was at the time a guitar-centric label. Back in New York she founded the Emily Remler Trio and recorded her first album as a band leader. Firefly gained positive reviews, as did Take Two and Catwalk. She participated in the Los Angeles version of Sophisticated Ladies from 1981 to 1982 and toured for 3 years with Brazilian jazz phenomenon Astrud Gilberto.
From there things moved quickly. The album, Firefly, placed her in the august company of pianist Hank Jones, along with bassist Bob Maize and drummer Jake Hanna. On the strength of Firefly, Jefferson extended her contract for three additional albums. Remler was a headliner at the Berlin and Newport Jazz Festivals, and on a Hawaiian jazz cruise. In a column for the Los Angeles Times, jazz critic Leonard Feather named her 1981’s “Woman of the Year.
She was featured in the music trade magazines, and in the spring of 1982, Remler crossed over into People magazine, where she uttered her most famous quote: “I may look like a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey. But inside I’m a 50-year-old, heavyset black man with a big thumb, like Wes Montgomery.”
“The pieces are rapidly falling into place for Emily Remler,” Feather wrote, and this was true for her both professionally and personally: Remler met and married the Jamaican jazz pianist Monty Alexander in ’81.
In New York, she had been leading her own trio. When it came time to make her third record for Concord, she had enough clout and confidence to insist that the full quartet make the date. The result was 1983’s acclaimed Transition, which marked an increasing focus on her own compositions and a step away from bebop conservatism.
That progress continued with Catwalk, released in early 1985. It was Remler’s first collection of entirely original compositions, many of them flavored with Latin, Brazilian, Indian and African polyrhythms. “This is the best thing I’ve ever done,” she pronounced in an interview shortly after its release.
Critics agreed. So did guitar great Larry Coryell, who heard Catwalk upon its release. “I … was impressed,” Coryell wrote in his 2007 memoir, Improvising: My Life in Music. “Emily was creative, smart, swung like crazy and had a time feel that was just about the best I had ever heard from any guitarist, male or female.”
Coryell and Remler would soon record a duets album, Together. They hit the touring circuits, playing international festivals as well as clubs and guitar workshops. They also had a brief romance—a new partnership augmented by the dissolution of another. After two and a half years, her marriage to Monty Alexander had ended in divorce. It was, perhaps, a harbinger of more difficult times to come.
In 1985 she won Guitarist of the Year in Down Beat magazine’s international poll, and performed in that year’s guitar festival at Carnegie Hall.
When asked how she wanted to be remembered she remarked, “Good compositions, memorable guitar playing and my contributions as a woman in music…but the music is everything, and it has nothing to do with politics or the women’s liberation movement.”
But by the end of 1986, Remler had had enough. She quit New York and moved to Pittsburgh, becoming an artist-in-residence at Duquesne University and studying at the University of Pittsburgh with Bob Brookmeyer. At night she worked the local clubs. She continued playing festivals and freelancing on records. But as she kept honing her craft, she also went into drug rehab therapy, hoping to beat not only her addiction but the demons that hid behind it.
It seemed to be working. In the spring of 1988, she even moved back to New York, taking an apartment in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She made a bebop record, East to Wes, with Hank Jones, bassist Buster Williams and drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith, and took some straight-ahead gigs recording behind pianist David Benoit and vocalist Susannah McCorkle.
She had some less conventional ideas brewing as well. Remler began experimenting with the cutting-edge electronics of the day, including a guitar synth—less Montgomery than Metheny. In 1989, she signed a deal with Houston-based Justice Records to release her newly recorded This Is Me, an album that included her passions for the jazz-guitar tradition and for Brazilian and African rhythms, but pushed hard in the direction of crossover jazz-pop.
She never got to see where the new direction would take her. Remler was on a tour of Australia when she was found dead in her Sydney hotel room. The official cause of death was heart failure, with no mention of drug involvement. The jazz world knew better.
Remler bore the scars of her longstanding opioid use disorder, which is believed to have contributed to her death. On May 4, 1990, she died of heart failure at the age of 32 while on tour in Australia.
She took something with her besides her musical gift. “She always had a weakness for the party life, and maybe overdoing it with substances and things like that,” former boyfriend Masakowski said. “When we were first together, it was a very healthy lifestyle. I even got her to quit smoking. But then I think she started playing with the more party-oriented types of groups, and it started to deteriorate.”
