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.”
17 May 2022 – Vangelis (Greek film composer and keyboards-synthesizer for Aphrodite’s Child). Vangelis was born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou on March 29, 1943 in the Greek town of Agria. He was a self-taught musician who became a young piano prodigy. Then he moved to Paris and co-founded with 
February 19, 2017 – Larry Coryell was born Lorenz Albert Van DeLinder III on April 2, 1943 in Galveston, Texas. His biological father was a musician of German descent “who chased a lot of women”, but Larry never knew him as he was raised by his mother and stepfather Gene Coryell. His interest in music started when his mother encouraged him to learn the piano at age 4. At age 14 he became more interested in guitar and studied the works of Tal Farlow, Barney Kessel, and Johnny Smith. When he was 16 he ran off to join a rock band. The self-labeled “black sheep of the family,” he also “knocked up” his girlfriend. “It was traumatic to me.” Her parents sent the girl away, and she married someone else after giving birth to a daughter. (“I’ve never seen the kid,”) To cope with his emotions, Coryell plunged into practice sessions, copying a Wes Montgomery record until he knew every difficult lick by heart. He still regards that bit of discipline as a “minor catalyst” in his career. B
January 23, 2017 – Marvell Thomas was born in Memphis Tennessee on August 22, 1941. The Thomas family is rooted in music and especially Memphis Soul. Legendary rock and roll pioneer Rufus (Walking the Dog) was his dad. His sisters Carla and Vaneese were much noted, especially Carla (the Queen of Memphis Soul) reached superstardom.
January 13, 2017 – Richie Ingui (The Soul Survivors) was born the November 15, 1947 in Manhattan, New York. 
Feb 17, 2014 – Bob Casale Jr. aka Bob 2 -(Devo) was born Robert Edward Pizzute, Jr on July 14, 1952 in Kent, Ohio. His birth name was Pizzute because his father had legally changed his name from Robert Edward Casale to that of his foster parents.
March 7, 2013 – Peter Banks (Yes) was born Peter Brockbanks on July 15th 1947 in Barnet, North London. He learned to play the guitar on an acoustic his dad bought for him and banjo as a sidekick.
December 4, 2011 – Hubert Sumlin was born on November 16, 1931 near Greenwood, Mississippi, and grew up across the river in Hughes, Arkansas, where he took up the guitar as a child; by his teens he was playing for local functions, sometimes with the harmonica player James Cotton. The first time Sumlin saw Howlin’ Wolf in action, as he told Living Blues magazine in 1989, he was too young to get into the club, so he climbed on to some Coca-Cola boxes to peer through a window; the boxes shifted and Sumlin fell into the room, landing on Wolf’s head. After the gig, Wolf drove him home and asked his mother not to punish him. “I followed him ever since,” Sumlin said.
August 29, 2011 – David “Honeyboy” Edwards American blues guitarist and singer, born in Shaw, Mississippi on June 28th 1915. At 14 he he left home to travel with bluesman Big Joe Williams.
March 21, 2008 – Klaus Dinger (Kraftwerk) was born on March 24th 1946 in Scherfede and brought up in Düsseldorf. Influenced by UK rock acts such as The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, he formed a band in 1966 called The No. Other members were friends Norbert Körfer, Lutz Bellman and Jo Maassen.
February, 26, 2008 – George Allen ”Buddy” Miles, Jr. (Band of Gypsies) was born on September 5, 1947 in Omaha, Nebraska. Buddy’s father played upright bass for the likes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, and Dexter Gordon and by age 12, Miles Jr. had joined Miles Sr. in his touring band, The Bebops. In 1964, at the age of 16, Miles met Jimi Hendrix at a show in Montreal, Canada, where both were performing as sidemen for other artists.
December 5, 2007 – Karlheinz Stockhausen was born on August 22, 1928 near Cologne in Germany. I have hesitated celebrating him in this Ode to Rock and Roll, because strictly spoken he is a composer of music. In the end I felt in favor of inclusion because so many rock performers have admitted to be influenced by the man’s incredible body of work created in electronic music. Pink Floyd, Zappa, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Bjørk, Kraftwerk, the Beatles, all reflect his influence on their own avant-garde experiments as well as the general fame and notoriety he had achieved by that time.
March 19, 2007 – Luther Ingram was born in Jackson, Tennessee on November 30, 1937. Starting out with his brothers as The Gardenias in Alton, Ill., Ingram went on to a solo career with Koko Records, which was distributed by the famous Stax label.
November 23, 2006 – April Lawton (Ramatan) was born on July 30th 1948 on Long Island New York. As guitar virtuoso, singer, and composer she came to notice in the early 70s as the lead guitarist of the criminally underrated rock band Ramatam, which also included former Iron Butterfly guitarist Mike Pinera and the former Jimi Hendrix drummer Mitch Mitchell. With Jimi just dead, she was hailed as the female Jimi Hendrix by many, and her style was a mix of Jeff Beck, Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Alan Holdsworth. When Pinera and Mitchell left after the self titled debut album, she stayed with Ramatam for 
November 5, 2005 – Link Wray (Frederic Lincoln) was born in Dunn, North Carolina on May 2nd, 1929. Link’s family was very poor. As Link has said, “Elvis came from welfare, I came from below welfare.” Link’s mom was Shawnee Indian sporting his interest in music when Link was 8. He was sitting on the porch trying to play guitar when an old black guitar player named HAMBONE walked by and taught him the sound of the blues. Link has said as soon as HAMBONE started playing bottleneck slide guitar, he was hooked. He knew what he wanted to do. At age 13, Link’s family moved to Portsmouth, Virginia.
March 13, 2003 – Sammy Samwell was born Ian Ralph Sawmill on January 19th 1937.
March 26, 2002 – Joe Schermie (Three Dog Night) was born Joseph Edward Schermetzler on February 12th 1946 in Menasha near Madison, Wisconsin.
March 21, 2002 – Speedy Keen was born John David Percy Keen on March 29th 1945. Speedy became vocalist, songwriter, keyboardist and drummer for Thunderclap Newman, a band The Who’s guitarist Pete Townshend created in 1969, to play and record songs written by ‘Speedy’, who had been The Who’s roadie and chauffeur for Peter.
21 January 2002 – Peggy Lee was born Norma Deloris Engstrom on May 26th 1920 in Jamestown, North Dakota, the seventh of eight children. Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American. Her mother died when Peggy was just a four year old toddler. Afterwards, her father married her step-mother Min Schaumber, who treated her with great cruelty while her alcoholic but loving father did little to stop it. As a teenager she developed her musical talent and took several part-time jobs so that she could be away from home to escape the abuse of her step-mother.
March 18, 2001 – John Phillips (Mamas and Papas) was born on August 30th 1935 in Parris Island, South Carolina. His father, Claude Andrew Phillips, was a retired United States Marine Corps officer who won an Oklahoma bar from another Marine in a poker game on the way home from France after World War I. His mother, Edna Gertrude (née Gaines), who had English and Cherokee ancestry, met his father in Oklahoma. According to his autobiography, Papa John, Phillips’ father was a heavy drinker who suffered from poor health.
November 4, 1994 – Fred “Sonic” Smith was born on September 13, 1949 in West Virginia, but raised in Detroit.
August 4, 1993 – Randy Jo Hobbs was born on March 22nd 1948 in Winchester, Indiana.
February 18, 1993 – Patrick Waite was born on May 16, 1968 in the Birmingham area of England. His father had moved from his native Jamaica to England in 1966.
January 29, 1992 – Willie Dixon was born July 1st 1915 in Vicksburg, Mississippi. His mother Daisy often rhymed the things she said, a habit her son imitated. At the age of seven, young Dixon became an admirer of a band that featured pianist Little Brother Montgomery. He sang his first song at Springfield Baptist Church at the age of four. Dixon was first introduced to blues when he served time on prison farms in Mississippi as an early teenager.
December 6, 1988 – Roy Kelton Orbison was born on April 23, 1936, in Vernon, Texas to Nadine and Orbie Lee. He formed his first band at age 13. The singer-songwriter dropped out of college to pursue music. He signed with Monument Records and recorded such ballads as “Only the Lonely” and “It’s Over.”
February 9, 1981 – Bill Haley was born on July 6th 1925. He was born in Highland Park, Michigan, but because of the Great Depression on the Detroit area, his father moved the family to Boothwyn, Pennsylvania. For six years Bill was a musical director of Radio Station WPWA in Chester, Pennsylvania, leading his own band The Saddlemen all through this period and in 1951 they made their first recordings. They renamed themselves Bill Haley with Haley’s Comets on Labour Day 1952.
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