“GIRLS” AND THEIR GUITARS

A few weeks ago I found myself seated at a dinner beside a woman who, in the course of our casual conversation, revealed that several decades ago she had been a serious guitar student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Doing the math in my head, I wondered—and then I asked—whether she had attended Berklee around the same time as the somewhat legendary Emily Remler, whose promising career ended with her early death, in 1990 (she was 32 years old), from a drug overdose. The woman I was seated next to had indeed known Remler personally and was pleased that I knew of her . . . and was surprised to learn that I even have one of her CDs, East to Wes. It is a fine recording altogether, showing off Remler’s impressive chops on tunes like “Daahoud,” “Hot House,” and the Wes Montgomery-inflected “Blues for Herb.” Here’s a great video of her playing “Tenor Madness” in Australia the year before her death.

In her time Remler was something of an iconoclast, a rare female axe-slinger in the very male world of jazz guitar. Her mentor Herb Ellis predicted that she would be “the new superstar of guitar.” Remler herself hoped that her legacy would include “memorable guitar playing and my contributions as a woman in music,” though she added: “the music is everything, and it has nothing to do with politics or the women’s liberation movement.” Ultimately, she was right: her playing did not break down any barriers (for some reason there are still very few women making noise on jazz guitar), but her music lives on.

Ditto—in part—for a woman guitar player who preceded Remler onto the bandstand by about 40 years. Mary Osborne resented being cast as mainly a “woman guitarist”: inspired by seeing Charlie Christian play with Al Trent’s band in Bismarck, ND (a year or so before he joined Benny Goodman’s band and became a legend), she committed herself to swinging in his wake (quite literally—for a while she even played a Gibson ES-150 guitar identical to Christian’s). Eventually moving to New York, she recorded with true jazz giants Dizzy Gillespie and Coleman Hawkins . . . but during the prime of her career she recorded only one album under her own name, A Girl and Her Guitar, in 1959. While the title might have a novelty ring to it, the music on board could not be farther from a commercial sell-out: in fact, it is one of the most satisfyingly swinging albums I’ve heard in a long, long time. Backed by Tommy Flanagan on piano, Jo Jones on drums, Tommy Potter on bass and Daniel Barker on rhythm guitar, Osborne soars through 10 jazz classics (including “I Love Paris,” “How High the Moon,” “I Found a New Baby” and “These Foolish Things”) and one original blues. Her playing is striking—she is wielding a beautiful Gretsch “White Falcon”—and the album is a classic, which makes it that much more a pity that it has never been released as a CD (I paid big bucks on eBay for a copy of the original vinyl recording).

Odds and ends of recordings by Osborne are available on jazz guitar compilations like Hittin’ on All Six and Swing To Bop Guitar: Guitars In Flight 1939- 1947. And there’s a terrific, albeit blurry, video clip of her playing on a television program, Art Ford’s Jazz Party. Maybe someday A Girl and Her Guitar will be reissued and her playing will live on for a wider audience like Emily Remler’s does.