Biography
The Beginnings
Emily was from a hard working household, her father a meat broker and her mother in social services. She had two older siblings, a brother who became a U.S. diplomat and was an amateur guitar player who owned the infamous Gibson ES 330 that she borrowed to never surrender and a sister who later became a lawyer and language teacher in New York City.
I’m not into sitting and crying about it, I’m into doing. I never was bitter about the fact that there are so many band leaders who have told me face to face that they couldn’t hire me because I was a woman, or that there have been so many instances where I wasn’t trusted musically and they handled me with kid gloves because they figured my time wasn’t strong. You have to believe in yourself. It never did occur to me to stay in one place and bitch about this, about how I wasn’t given a chance. I think it gives me more merit - to get really good, so good that it doesn’t matter: to get so good that you surpass it. 
From The Jazz Scene: An Informal History from New Orleans to 1990
by W. Royal Stokes comes this excerpt:
Becoming something of a household name among jazz fans here and abroad by mid-decade, Emily nevertheless had to cope with the lingering prejudice against the female instrumentalist in the art form. She expressed her feelings on the double standard she had to contend with everyday. Conceding that working conditions for women in jazz had improved over the course of the 1980’s, Emily lamented, “But there’s still a lot of things that bother me. Like people worrying about your looks when all you want to think about is the music.”
Emily was especially annoyed at a prominent critic who had objected (in print) to her habit of intermittently holding the guitar pick in her mouth whenever she switched to bare-finger playing. The critic confessed that he preferred to look away whenever she was doing this, to which Emily testily replied:
Good ! I wish he’d look away the whole time and picture me as John Coltrane !
It’s clear that preconceptions and prejudice existed for female players, especially those on non traditional instruments or roles in the music community. I think we can all agree that Emily met them head on and handled these moments with grace, humor and a determination that never let such obstacles take anything away from what mattered most, the music.
Robert Jospe, friend and performer with Emily offers the following about her confidence and how she carried herself in a man’s world…
She wasn’t born a virtuoso.
She was just 9 years old when she picked up her brother’s electric guitar and taught herself to play folk and rock songs with particular fondness of Hendrix, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Early on it’s mentioned she had formed a small folk band and Buddy Hackett’s son is named as a member, my, my what we wouldn’t give to see the home videos of that now! She loved rock and roll and referred to it like most teenagers do as “good-time partying music”
but where she left the pack in terms of development is when she began to modify the 3 chords that made up her favorite rock song and explore other ways to make it more interesting to her. She could hear something else beyond the simplified melodies and spent hours jamming out new variations of her favorite songs and playing along with her best loved Johnny Winter albums, it was her way of “leaving the planet” although like many youths she remained direction-less about her life ambitions and had more plans for a design career than a musical one.
Still there were moments, dreams of playing the Blues when she listened for hours to Winter’s and B.B. King songs and other small yet significant events along the way that kept drawing her toward the magic of music as the following story will attest, a poignant memory shared by Emily’s childhood and lifelong friend, Susan Itkin Kurshenoff:
In July 1974, the summer between high school and college, we spent a week or two at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. I took art classes and Emily took music classes, specifically learning about Indian music by playing it on her guitar and authentic Indian instruments. This was a turning point for Emily or at least part of her musical evolution. While in the evenings in our room she taught me to play “Stairway to Heaven” and “Bell Bottom Blues” (she could play Page and Clapton, not me!), she had moved on musically.
Each afternoon after her Indian music lesson, she couldn’t wait to play me what she learned and there was pure delight in her face as she played these new sound combination’s, half tones and quarter tones, different rhythms and time signatures.
Although she might not have played jazz before she began attending Berklee two months later, it’s easy to see how she “absorbed” jazz just like she did Indian music during her brief summer experience. She had incredible enthusiasm about all that music could be, every complex chord and rhythm and a determination to make those sounds come out of her and her guitar.
How easy it is now with hindsight to realize that Emily learning these “weird time signatures” and being exposed to such a diverse and rich palette of non-traditional music helped spark her interests and later mastery of polyrhythms and Brazilian jazz styles where she excelled in her playing.
I knew I would be a guitarist.
Jazz sounded “ so serious and introverted “, she immediately knew where to focus her energy and the directions she wanted to explore. It was her moment of epiphany. She had finally found her purpose.
Still, there was a lot of work and frustration.
She was most unhappy with her rhythm and timing and set about to eliminate this deficiency with intense day long, closed door sessions between herself and her metronome in a rented room on the shores of Long Beach Island in NJ. This self imposed wood shedding was how she spent her first summer after school before moving down to the Big Easy of New Orleans to rejoin her boyfriend and fellow Berklee musician, Steve Masakowski. She often referred to this extremely focused summer as her most relevant in development and tried for the next five consecutive summers to replicate that intensity without success. It turned out to be a once in a lifetime experience that could not be reproduced on demand but was none-the-less a pivotal point in her musical evolution.
Once in New Orleans she dove head first into the professional life of a working musician, playing small venues like Tyler Club, hotels (she was the guitarist in the house band for the Fairmont Hotel with leader Dick Stabile), music halls, weddings and also began teaching while continuing her own private studies with renowned New Orleans instructor and performer, Hank Mackie. It was an incredible period of personal growth for her musically. Emily and Steve had a small quartet called FourPlay that kept busy with gigs and she also is mentioned to have played many times with the R&B group
Little Queenie and The Percolators.
Others that were woven into her New Orleans experience were Wynton Marsalis, Joel Grey, Ben Vereen, Robert Goulet and Nancy Wilson. It was also the entrance of Herb Ellis into her life, who would become a major influence and mentor. Emily knew his work and found out he was in town. Her foot in the door came when she contacted him for advice on repairing her Herb Ellis model guitar, so they met and ended up jamming for hours.
As Herb remembers it,
I was working in New Orleans in 1977, when this young girl, she couldn’t have been 20, came and asked me for a lesson. I asked her to play something for me, and when she did, I just couldn’t believe what I heard. Forget about “girl”, she’s going to be one of the greatest jazz guitar players who ever lived. She can do anything.
From there her career was off and running. She left New Orleans in ‘79 but credits Steve and the city as the place that added crucial jazz elements to her growth and of teaching her ” how to get up there and just do it “.
But as you can imagine it was a natural progression to move back to New York and all it’s jazz appeal. She began jamming with area musicians, forming loose trios around town and backing on many occasions with the likes of Astrud Gilberto (where her deep love and command of Brazilian Jazz steadily flourished), John Clayton (her first guest appearance on an album, It’s All In The Family), Nancy Wilson at Carnegie Hall, and Eddie Gomez. She also kept giving lessons when possible and among her students was none other than Gregory Hines, who in turn invited her to Los Angeles to be a part of his production of Sophisticated Ladies that featured songs based on Duke Ellington’s work
including Satin Doll, Mood Indigo, Take The A Train and Caravan.
All her dedication and hard work was beginning to shine.
Click image to read an interview with Emily about the show in 1982 from The Los Angeles Times.
It was a golden time, it was a time unwinding.
And the world was hers… for a while.
Transitions in 1983 marked her 3rd solo album and just as the title suggests, it signified the changing and maturity of her music and writing skills. Her own voice was beginning to emerge with great Latin overtones. Meanwhile she continued to build her reputation around the New York scene, gigging with jazz groups and touring. The high momentum career did have it’s downside on relationships, as it created too much unrelenting conflict to deal with and due to many “haphazard meetings” caused by their opposing travel schedules and other more personal issues that began to strain the young marriage, Emily and Monty divorced in ‘84.
That didn’t seem to slow her down any, Catwalk, an all original compositions effort was released the very same year. Mocha Spice came from this album and is maybe her most well known song but perhaps the most overlooked of her compositions is Pedals, a very Coltrane-esque song with haunting melodic phrases. Her writing had developed great range and complexity. She also appeared on Ray Brown’s Soular Energy for one song, then followed that with a great duo album in 1985 with longtime friend and guitarist - Larry Coryell called Together, considered by many to be a crowing achievement for a jazz guitar duo album. It’s memorable for How Insensitive and the best swing blues version of a misnamed Pat Martino tune, Cisco listed as Gerri’s Blues on the album.
It was a non stop schedule of playing and touring for the now seasoned twenty seven year old veteran and rising star. She was in high demand as a featured guest for albums with Rosemary Clooney and John Colianni as well as many live performances and festivals before her next solo album would appear and one of her most successful in ‘87, East to Wes. Such a great album from start to finish highlighted by her tribute to Herb Ellis called Blues For Herb, among other swinging bebop standards that she took to new heights like Clifford Brown’s Daahoud . Mingled in were European and Asia tours and recordings with Hank Crawford’s Quintet while in France on a much overlooked jazz jam album called Bossa International and several touring venues with Larry. More circuits and guest appearances followed in ‘87 - ‘89 (Susannah McCorkle and David Benoit are the most notable names). She had also briefly moved to Pittsburgh PA, where she was Artist in Residence with Duquesne University and flourished at the local clubs, trying still to overcome her on going personal issues with substance abuse by keeping old habits in NY at a distance and new, more positive challenges front and center but life was also becoming much more hectic and demanding.
Time was flying, but time was grinding.
Jan Leder, a jazz flutist in the NY area shares this remembrance:
I met Emily at DeFemeo’s in Yonkers one night at a jam session. She was an amazing player. She had just returned from a trip to Japan and had not slept, but here she was jamming away. We somehow got to talking, and talked for quite a while. Here was someone who I thought had everything I’d ever wanted, namely a “successful” jazz career and recognition, not to mention real facility on her instrument. After a while chatting she told me she envied me for my more “normal” life, and that made me reconsider the way I was looking at things at the time. She was clearly hurting, and yet she played so incredibly well. I will always remember her for how beautifully she played that night, and also for setting me straight in terms of appreciating what I had and was not seeing.
In this clear break from her earlier approaches Emily was branching out on the electronic side of jazz, incorporating the sounds of a Casio Synth guitar into her new mix of music that was still heavily influenced by her continued love and devotion of Brazilian melodies, evident in “Carenia” and “Simplicidaje”, as well as chord melody showcase songs like “You Know What I’m Sayin’ and “Second Childhood”. With the exception of one title, it was another album full of her unique evolving sound and dreams.
Robert Jospe recalls how Emily envisioned her future.
All along she kept winning respect and acknowledgment for her ever growing presence and dedication to jazz. She was no longer the novelty woman jazz guitarist but simply a great guitar player in her own right. She was becoming comfortable with her own voice and vision in music and stronger in her attitude about style and substance.
She was making lesson videos, taping live performances on The Jazz Master’s series of television shows, still finding some time for teaching and her own personal studies. It seemed to be another good year.
” I was unprepared for the sheer strength of her playing. She was an extraordinarily daring player, edging close to the avant-garde, and she swung ferociously. There was also a deeply lyrical quality to her playing. She was a guitarist of unusual authority and individuality , a talented player who was one of the brightest happenings in the jazz guitar world of her decade. Harmonically, melodically and rhythmically, she had it all. ”
Gene Lees
We are lucky to have had the time and pleasure of her company at all.
~ Emily Remler died suddenly on tour, in Sydney, Australia on May 4th, 1990,
officially listed as heart failure. She was 32 years young. ~
There’s no refuting the drug issues attached to Emily’s name. It may have been a contributing factor in her death, many rumors exist about what happened that last day and the days leading up to it but there is no evidence or statements released from official sources to conclusively document the event. This part of her history is merely a footnote in a few books or articles available about her private life. It was not considered or treated as a public topic by any of her family and friends, then or now.
There are of course many threads and links on the internet that swirl with talk of her known drug problems although the information offered is mostly unverified. This website does not wish to linger on the subject because any of our opinions would be purely speculative.
Emily’s official memoir is for someone else to write.
What I am sure of is that there is much more to Emily than her addiction and why my focus remains strong on other positive aspects. While the matter is debatable and even discussed in articles and links provided on the site, further incorporation into this unlicensed biography will be limited. Additional information can be found on the Library page (see side menu) where books available about Emily’s life story can provide greater insight and authority than available here.
That said, the audio below is an excellent and revealing interview conducted by David Brent Johnson host of Night Lights Jazz program with one of Emily’s fellow musicians and friend Robert Jospe, who gives us one point of view dealing with this delicate matter from someone closer to the situation as it was happening then.
Click anywhere on this sentence and listen to the entire NPR program
Night Lights presenting “Emily Remler: a Musical Remembrance”
in it’s uncut one hour format from Indiana public radio affiliate, WFIU.
It requires real audio player for it’s streaming format.
David also posted an insightful blog giving his opinion of how the memory of Emily was handled, as well as his considerable collective thoughts regarding this issue that so many jazz musicians have battled. David is a devoted researcher and is well versed in Jazz music, especially the legendary players, a powerful passion for him that induced suddenly while listening to a recording of Count Basie in his college years. We are both from the same school of thought on the matter and I couldn’t have summarized this “issue” any better. Worth your time to check out.
Click this title to read: ” Emily Remler, Artist Sites and That Issue.”
No matter what your thoughts are concerning Emily’s substance abuse there’s no denying her incredible spirit, talent and dedication to music, to her fans and to her students. Her influences and indelible impact on the world of Jazz and the people affected so deeply from her contributions even to this day are the most important things to keep center stage as we go forward.