This excellent release fully confirms that observation, and shines a huge light on the lost brilliance of Emily Remler.

Resonance Records HCD-2076

Emily Remler (guitar); Cocho Arbe (piano); Carson Smith (bass); Tom Montgomery (drums) [1984 band]
Emily Remler (guitar); Carson Smith (bass); John Pisci (drums) [1988 band]
Recorded 4 Queens Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas 28 May 1984 and 19 September 1988

Guitarist Emily Remler was like a meteor that blazed across the jazz world. In her early twenties, she was being lauded as one of jazz’s brightest, up-and-coming stars. She was a formidable talent, with the potential to become one of the most influential and best-known names in modern jazz. Sadly, that potential was never to be realised. She recorded her first album at 24, and died when she was just 32. Her death was music’s great loss. Today, she would still only be 67.

The musical career of Emily Remler hasn’t been long gone and forgotten, but it is fair to say that not enough people know her name or appreciate the depth of her talent. This release has been a particular labour of love for acclaimed producer Zev Feldman, who in the liner notes for this release, describes Remler as a ‘trailblazer’ and an ‘important artist’ who needs to be discussed more. This is her first new release in thirty-four years.

Emily Remler was born in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey in 1957. She started playing guitar seriously at 10 and acquired her older brother’s Gibson ES-330, which became her instrument of choice. At 17, she enrolled at the Berklee School of Music. Up until then, her main musical influences had been pop and rock – Hendrix, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

But at Berklee she was exposed to jazz guitar and soon became fixated on the playing of Pat Martino and Wes Montgomery. The influence of both these players – from lightning single-note runs to the tonal beauty of octaves, can be clearly heard in Remler’s playing (in an interview for this release, bassist Eddie Gomez – who played with Remler – states: ‘If you closed your eyes, you’d think you were listening to Wes Montgomery.’). But Remler was no mere Martino/Montgomery clone – she added her own voice to their inspirational forms of playing.

After graduating from Berklee, Remler moved to New Orleans, where she developed her chops, playing in local bands and at wedding events. Guitarist Herb Ellis was impressed by her playing and became her champion (he described her as: ‘The new superstar of guitar.’). He got her a gig at the 1978 Concord Jazz Festival, on an event called ‘Guitar Explosion,’ which also included Ellis, Barney Kessel and Tal Farlow.

She moved to New York, where she accompanied artists such as Nancy Wilson and Astrud Gilberto. On the recommendation of John Scofield, she played on an album with bassist John Clayton and his saxophonist brother Jeff; It’s All In The Family. Her reputation grew and she secured a recording contract with Concord Records. Remler’s first album, Firefly, was released in 1981, and included Hank Jones on piano.

In the same year, she married pianist Monty Alexander. Remler’s musical career continued to rise. Critics like Nat Hentoff and Leonard Feather (who wrote the liner notes for her second album, Take Two, released in 1982) sang her praises, and in 1985, she was awarded Guitarist of the Year in the DownBeat international poll, and in 1986, won the Distinguished Alumni award from Berklee.

But dark clouds were gathering. In 1984, her marriage to Alexander collapsed and Remler, in her own words, went on a mission of self-destruction. This took the form of heavy drug taking and she became addicted to heroin and opioid painkillers. There were many pressures on Remler. She was a woman in a man’s world, and she was a white woman at that. Remler’s best known quote is: ‘I may look like a white Jewish girl…but inside I’m a fifty year-old, heavy-set black man with a big thumb like Wes Montgomery.’ She might have felt like that, but too many people weren’t willing to perceive her like that.

Like women in all aspects of society – and especially during the Seventies and Eighties – she faced condescension, resentment and sexual harassment – and didn’t always receive the respect her talents deserved. This helps explain the negative forces pressing on her life and their role in her subsequent downward spiral. The result was a string of cancelled gigs and lacklustre performances on the bandstand.

But there were many periods of sobriety, where she continued to play, record and captivate audiences. In 1985, Remler recorded a guitar duo album with Larry Coryell – they would also play together in Las Vegas in November that year. She recorded half a dozen albums as leader. Her finest is arguably East to Wes, released in 1988, a heartfelt tribute to Wes. Her final album, This Is Me, was recorded shortly before her death and released posthumously. It signalled a shift in her musical direction, as Remler explored the guitar synthesiser and started recording with musicians from beyond the jazz world, such as Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro.

In 1990, Remler accompanied McCoy Tyner onstage at the Philadelphia Jazz Festival – Remler had always wanted to play with him, and Tyner later described her performance that evening as ‘superb.’ Not long after – and against the advice of some friends, who could see that she was not in a good place physically and emotionally – she flew to Australia to play some gigs. On 3 May 1990, she played a two-hour set in a quartet at the Richmond Hotel in Adelaide. It was to be her final performance. The next day, she was in Sydney, where she died from a heart attack, suspected to have been induced by her heavy drug intake. A video of her last concert is on YouTube and it shows that even at the end, Emily Remler could still excite, energise and enthral audiences with her playing.

The genesis for this record release is jazz DJ and producer Alan Grant, a stalwart of the jazz scene. He was working in New York in the 1950s and 60s and produced live shows from the Half Note and Birdland. He also hosted Friday night shows at the Village Vanguard. He founded WABC New York’s Portraits in Jazz radio show and was on friendly terms with many in the jazz world including Ellington, Parker, Miles, Billie, Monk and Wes.

Grant moved to Las Vegas and hosted live jazz shows there for fifteen years. This included Monday Night Jazz, a programme for local radio station KNPR. The show was recorded at the French Quarter Lounge in the 4 Queens Hotel and Casino. The show was later syndicated worldwide to more than 100 radio stations, as Jazz Night

From Las Vegas. Artists who played at the 4 Queens shows included, Zoot Sims, Eddie Lockjaw Davis and Woody Shaw. The show ran from 1982 to 1996, only ending when the hotel’s owners went bankrupt, and a rival hotel started their own jazz night. Grant died in 2012, aged 93.

Emily Remler played at the 4 Queens as a band leader in 1984 and 1988 (the Coryell/Remler Vegas gig of 1985 was also at the 4 Queens). The 1988 show was recorded by Brian Sanders, who explains in the album’s liner notes how the radio shows were put together. The French Quarter lounge seated around a hundred people – the shows would later move upstairs to a pavilion with roughly four times the seating capacity. The lounge opened out to the hotel’s large casino floor, although mercifully, all recordings are free of any noise from excited gamblers and clattering slot machines. Sanders recorded each show using just twelve channels and basic mics, and he did a good job – the recording quality is impressive.

Artists played three sets during the week, and Sanders typically recorded two of them. The performances were mixed live to quarter-inch tape, running at slow speed to minimise tape costs, and edited for 55-minutes of music.

Both the 1984 and 1988 broadcasts have long been available on Youtube, but broadcast time constraints meant that not all of the set could be transmitted. As a result, there is more than an hour of previously unissued music on the album. The new material on the 1984 set are renditions of ‘Autumn Leaves,’ ‘Polka Dots And Moonbeams,’ ‘Samba De Orfeu,’ and ‘West Coast Blues.’ The unissued material from the 1998 show is ‘Cisco,’ ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ and ‘So What/Impressions.’ Compleatists should note that the original 1988 broadcast included a performance of ‘Polka Dots And Moonbeams’, which is not on this album, in order to avoid repetition. It goes without saying that the sound quality is vastly superior on this release.

Remler’s bands were local Las Vegas musicians. The 1984 show featured a quartet. Peruvian pianist Cocho Arbe still plays in Vegas today. Bassist Carson Smith (who also played in the 1988 trio) had played in Gerry Mulligan’s quartet, and also with Chet Baker, Buddy Rich and Billie Holiday. He died in 1997, aged 66. Drummer Tom Montgomery spent thirty years playing on the Vegas music scene and had played with Woody Herman. He also played piano, trumpet, guitar, bass and flute. Montgomery hated drum solos, insisting that the drummer’s job was to keep time. He died in 1996, aged 74. The 1988 trio’s drummer was John Pisci, who had worked in Vegas for more than a quarter of a century. He died in 2011, aged 64.

This release comes in two forms. Friday 29th November sees the release of a three-LP set for Record Store Day. A two-CD version is being released the following Friday on 6 December. Both versions have 17 tracks. The CD version has nine tracks from the 1984 show on Disc 1, with the last song from the first set on Disc 2. The remainder of Disc 2 has seven tracks from the 1988 show.

Before talking about the music, the superb packaging and documentation provided with this release deserves to be highlighted. The CD version comes with a thick booklet crammed with liner notes, photos, interviews and an extensive essay by the album’s co-producer Bill Milkowski, who provides lots of background information on Remler’s career and musical technique, as well as a track-by-track description. He’s one of the finest liner note writers in the business.

There’s a transcript of the short interview Emler and Grant did before the start of the 1984 set. I’d also urge you to seek out the actual recording online, because what the text doesn’t fully convey, is how relaxed and humorous Emler was, and the warm rapport between the two. The other interviewees include half a dozen women jazz guitarists – Mimi Fox, Alicyn Yafee, Jocelyn Gould, Amanda Monaco, Lolivone de la Rosa and Sheryl Bailey. Bailey fondly recalls a guitar lesson she had with Remler. Many other musicians are interviewed – many of whom jammed, played or recorded with Remler – including, Cocho Arbe, Mike Stern, the late Russell Malone, Bob Moses, Randy Brecker, Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Erskine, and David Benoit, who toured and recorded with Remler.

It’s interesting to note that although Remler composed a lot of her own material, there are no original compositions in either set – all the tunes are a mix of jazz classics or covers, or taken from the popular songbook. This was probably done to appeal to a wider section of the Las Vegas audiences, many of whom may not have been die-hard jazz fans.

The 1984 set opens with a brisk, 10-minute version of Bobby Timmons’ ‘Moanin’ and straight away you can hear the magic of Remler’s playing – the swing, the stupendous tone, the immaculate picking, the deeply melodic phrasing graced with octaves, and the sleek lines that flow like fresh cream. Arbe and Smith both provide solid solos, and although Montgomery hated drum solos, he energetically trades eights with both guitar and piano on quite a few tunes.

‘Autumn Leaves’ is played at a fast tempo, with Remler’s lightning runs matched by the rest of the band. Once again, lots of room is left for piano and bass solos, and there’s more fiery interaction between drums, piano and bass. The band performs a joyous cover of ‘Samba De Orfeu,’ with Arbe taking flight with an extended piano solo. It’s a tune with plenty of swing and one can imagine many audience members tapping their feet to this one.

Remler’s virtuosity is to the fore on the band’s rollicking cover of Tad Dameron’s ‘Hot House,’ with a fast, fluent solo that has notes firing off in all directions. Montgomery is so fired-up that at one point, he even comes close to playing a drum solo. The 11-minute cover of the jazz standard ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is,’ showcases another side to Remler’s prowess, as her playing artfully conveys the pain and the yearning contained in this mournful ballad.

Wes Montgomery’s ‘West Coast Blues’ is a gentle waltz which the band performs with some panache. Rollins’ ‘Tenor Madness’ is another uptempo workout with Remler again impressively playing at breakneck speed – whatever the tempo, her picking always sounds clean and precise. The set closes with a relaxed cover of the midtempo ‘Out of Nowhere.’

Four years later, Remler was back, but this time playing with a trio. Carson Smith returned on bass, but there was a new drummer, John Pisci – and he didn’t mind soloing. The first band was terrific, but from this listener’s point of view, the second is even better, partly because the trio format meant that Remler’s playing was even more inventive and harmonically richer. ‘Maha de Carnival’ begins with a long solo guitar intro and its sheer elegance makes you wish she had recorded a solo guitar album. Around the three-minute point, the rest of the band joins in on this gentle

bossa-nova piece. Remler plays a long, graceful solo in the middle section, and then comps sensitively during Carson’s muscular bass solo. Her playing at the coda is bluesy, soulful and packed with feeling.

‘Yesterdays’ is a number much-covered by jazz guitarists (including Wes and Larry Coryell), and Remler stamps her mark on it, with a blinding long solo. The cover of Pat Martino’s ‘Cisco’ is a fast, fiery rendition, with Smith laying down a brisk walking bass line as Remler tears into the song.

The 13-minute plus cover of Miles’s ‘All Blues’ has lots of swing and is one of the set’s highlights. Smith’s bass playing is especially impressive, alternating between flowing melodic lines and anchoring everything down, and his long solo is rightfully applauded by the audience. The tempo quickens a little as Remler begins playing her extended solo, which includes a section where the rest of the band drops out and she plays unaccompanied for a couple of minutes. During the solo, the music just builds and builds, and the audience claps enthusiastically at its conclusion. Pisci plays a solid drum solo, before the whole band resumes.

The beginning of ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ starts with solo guitar and Remler gently caressing the strings on her instrument. Pisci plays with brushes on this sweet waltz, which once more showcases Remler’s artistry. Another highlight is an 11-minute, pulsating modal medley, featuring Miles’s ‘So What,’ which segues into Coltrane’s ‘Impressions’ and then back to ‘So What.’ The whole piece is played at a brisk pace and the band is on fire. Remler’s rapid single-note picking is to the fore and once again, she plays a long, inventive solo, which includes an extended cadenza that just soars and soars. Pisci plays another vibrant drum solo.

For the closing number, the band plays a lush 9-minute version of Wes’s ‘D-Natural Blues,’ (in the original radio broadcast, Emler informed the audience that it is actually in B-flat). After the final song’s conclusion, Grant announces: ‘Emily Remler. One of the great guitarists in our world of music today’. This excellent release fully confirms that observation, and shines a huge light on the lost brilliance of Emily Remler.