“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.

LIVE AT SCULLERS . . . CATHERINE RUSSELL

Sometimes it’s good to be led into temptation . . . and to succumb. Last night, my wife and I couldn’t resist the lure of a new-to-us jazz singer in town, so we trekked out to Scullers jazz club to catch Catherine Russell live and in person. What a treat! We had first heard of her in a write-up in the Boston Globe last week, but a number of people in the audience seemed familiar with her already and she certainly rose to the anticipation that filled the room. A small woman with a big voice and high-energy stage presence, she delivered a wonderful performance of songs that my wife aptly described as being from “the anti-songbook.” That is, rather than perform indisputable “classics” by Gershwin, Porter, et al., she chose mostly lesser-known songs that were yet recorded by well-known leading ladies of jazz and blues whom she channeled brilliantly—Ella Fitzgerald, Alberta Hunter, Maxine Sullivan, Mary Lou Williams—while also adding her own interpretive touches. Her selections included several cuts from her latest CD, Inside This Heart of Mine—the title tune, “As Long as I Live,” “Close Your Eyes,” and “We the People”—plus a number of other obscure gems that she dusted off and polished up. On most of the tunes on the CD, she is backed by horns, but last night she had just a drummerless trio—Mark Shane on piano, Lee Hudson on bass, and the estimable Mark Munisteri on guitar and six-string banjo. They provided plenty of support for a vocalist who owned the room from the moment she stepped onto the bandstand.

DAYTRIPPERS . . .

When we pulled out of our just-south-of-Boston driveway on Saturday morning at 7:20, the GPS gave our ETA for the heart of New York City as 11:00. Not for the first time, my wife and I asked each other why we don’t make the trip more often: neither one of us had a really good answer. . . .

The trip down was remarkably easy . . . though not quite as easy as the GPS promised, as traffic on FDR Drive was crawling after we got to the edge of Manhattan. Still, we made it to the Museum of Modern Art by 11:30 . . . and we even found on-street parking! MoMA was our only goal for the day—we wanted to see the exhibit titled Picasso’s Guitars, 1912-14. As anyone knows who has scouted around in his enormous body of work across various media and various “periods” over more than half a century, Picasso had many obsessions: nude women . . . picadors . . . guitars. . . . As its title suggests, the current exhibit emphasizes his particular fixation with guitars at a particular point in his career. It is centered around two sculptures of guitars—one in cardboard, one in sheet metal—in the company of various other guitar-focused cubist-oriented collages, sketches, and paintings that the artist created in his studios in Paris and in the south of France just before the outbreak of the Great War. Comprising thirty-some pieces, the exhibit could obviously be summarized in aptly musical terms as “variations on a theme” . . . but in many respects it defies summary: this was that odd case where the whole was equal to the sum of its parts—each piece was intriguingly Picasso-esque in its own right, and the overall exhibit left this visitor staggered by the match of visual imagination and physical execution that I suppose is Picasso’s signature.

After viewing that exhibit, we wandered around MoMA for a while—standing in awe before one modern masterpiece after another . . . including Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” which I always find bigger than I expect it to be. Incidentally, on Friday night, whetting our appetite for MoMA, we went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and I was surprised (not for the first time) at the small size of John Singer Sargent’s painting of the Pasdeloup Orchestra.

Speaking of appetites being whetted, after leaving MoMA we decided on a whim to find a bite to eat . . . in Brooklyn. We had never been there before, so to remove some of the randomness from our driving around in a borough that if it were a city unto itself would be the fourth-largest in the U.S., we punched into our GPS the words Blue Bottle Coffee, the name of a sister shop to a café we had visited in San Francisco in January, and that took us to the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn. It is a funky neighborhood with lots of shops and eateries catering to its predominantly twenty-something denizens. We had a nice mid-afternoon lunch at Juliette, by far the most popular place around . . .

Then we hit the road back to Boston . . . though with a “Why not?” detour down to legendary Coney Island—which proved to be less of a “destination” than we expected. That diversion got us stuck in some really heavy traffic as we tried to make our way back toward I-95. Still, we made it back to Boston before 11:00 p.m. Not a bad daytrip. We’ll do it again . . .