Artist: Emily Remler

Emily Remler was an American jazz guitarist, active from the late 1970s until her death in 1990. 

At the Berklee College of Music in the 1970s, she was influenced by jazz guitarists  Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, Herb Ellis, Pat Martino, and Joe Pass. 

Remler settled in New Orleans, where 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 was praised by jazz guitarist Herb Ellis, who referred to her as "the new superstar of guitar" and introduced her at the Concord Jazz Festival in 1978. 

In a 1982 interview with People magazine, she said: "I may look like a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey, but inside I'm a 50-year-old, heavy-set black man with a big thumb, like Wes Montgomery." 

Her first album as a band leader, Firefly, gained positive reviews, as did Take Two and Catwalk. She recorded Together with guitarist Larry Coryell. She participated in the Los Angeles version of Sophisticated Ladies from 1981 to 1982 and toured for several years with Astrud Gilberto. She also made two guitar instruction videos. 

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. In 1988, she was artist in residence at Duquesne University and the next year received the Distinguished Alumni award from Berklee. Bob Moses, the drummer on Transitions and Catwalk, said, "Emily had that loose, relaxed feel. She swung harder and simpler. She didn't have to let you know that she was a virtuoso in the first five seconds." 

Further information about Emily Remler is found here and here.

Photography credit: Brianmcmillen, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Remler, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).