Odds & Ends: News/Humor (with a "Who Lost the Week?" poll)

I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".

OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.

CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead.

ART NOTES — a traveling career retrospective of the works of Berthe Morisot— one of the most noted French Impressionists — just opened at the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, going through January 14th.

Just opened in Philadelphia

A CENTURY after losing its Ottoman empire Arabic colonies after World War I, the nation of Turkey is becoming a beacon to Arab emigrés (from Egypt, Syria, Yemen, et al) — since whereas we in the West see the Erdogan government as repressive, to them it offers hope they cannot have at home. 

THURSDAY's CHILD is named Missy the Cat— an English kitteh who jumped on the chest of woman so often that she went in for a check-up — and pre-cancerous cells were removed. Two years later, Missy was at it again — and this time surgery was needed, yet was detected before matters became worse.

       Missy the Cat

LAST NIGHT yours truly hosted the Top Comments diary with a look at some recent animal cruelty cases in New Hampshire — and what they portend elsewhere. (Friday’s Child  below apparently was a bystander).

THE RETAIL COFFEE BUSINESS has been consolidating the past few years, with the wide-spread use of coffee pods one reason why.

FRIDAY's CHILD is named Smittens the Cat— a New Hampshire kitteh who was taken from a home along with 52 Labrador Retrievers …. and they were sent to the local Humane Society (where I had a temp job several years ago).

    Smittens the Cat

Many of the dogs have been fostered-out, easing the financial strain: yet cannot be adopted (pending the outcome of the owner’s animal-cruelty trial later this month). Smittens, though, has settled-into the Humane Society director’s office.

BRAIN TEASER — try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC.

OLDER-YOUNGER SISTERS? — TV star Alexis Bledel (Gilmore Girls, the Handmaid’s Tale) and film star Dakota Johnson (50 Shades) who is the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson (as well as the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren).

  Alexis Bledel (born 1981)

Dakota Johnson (born 1989)

...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… while the world of blues seems to have an interstellar female blues guitarist rise to fame seemingly each year — and often at quite a young age — the jazz world has been much more difficult for a woman to become a star in. And that's why Emily Remler was so special. Although born in Manhattan, she always characterized herself as a "nice girl from New Jersey", and grew up in Englewood Cliffs: the home of Rudy Van Gelder and his legendary recording studio.

She played a variety of musical styles before entering Boston's noted Berklee College of Music in the 1970's. That set her on her career path, and after a stint in New Orleans (performing in the house band of the Fairmont-Roosevelt Hotel and other gigs) she wound up as a touring musician. Part of her career involved backing vocalists (including the Brazilian bossa nova singer Astrud Gilberto, as well as Rosemary Clooney, Robert Goulet and Nancy Wilson) .... and Emily was quite a sympathetic player, to my ears, in that genre.

Yet she seemed more comfortable in an instrumental format; with the veteran guitarist Herb Ellis representing one of her two “big breaks”. As a 20 year-old in 1977, she heard that he was to perform locally, and arranged a ruse by asking him after the show to help her repair her .... Herb Ellis model guitar. He continued:

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.

   Herb Ellis (1921 — 2010)

Herb Ellis was so blown away that he arranged a spot for her at the Concord Jazz festival that year ... along with guitar legends Charlie Byrd, Joe Pass, Tal Farlow, Barney Kessel ... and the nonpareil bassist Ray Brown. The music world took note of this young player, and he and Emily recorded an album together six years later.

All along, though, she struggled with the rigors of touring as a woman in a male-dominated world. As she told Gene Lees the Canadian jazz writer:

"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".

She married the jazz pianist Monty Alexander in 1981, but the stress of life on the road ended their marriage just a few short years later. And she also suffered from bouts of depression and loneliness, as she told one flautist. This woman worked steadily in the New York area, and was envious of Emily's success (her having just returned from a tour of Japan). Emily, by contrast, told Jan Leder just how lucky she was to have a “normal” life ..... which made Jan reconsider.  

Meanwhile, Emily's career had taken off - now with her own recording contract and leading her own band - and with her second “big break” to follow a few years later in 1985. I certainly consider it to be so: because I discovered Emily Remler when she was championed by one of my heroes — the jazz guitarist Larry Coryell who had been in the vanguard of jazz-rock, equally at home in both worlds.

They recorded the album Together which the jazz radio stations played regularly. Now she had been accepted not only by the old guard, but by the younger and more edgy musicians of the post-Beatles era (such as Pat Metheney) .... and she had a number of critically acclaimed albums through the rest of the 1980's.

Alas ... as you've noticed, the quotes about her are in the past tense - and that's because she shared one problem with many jazz greats of the 1950's: a drug problem. Her drummer Bob Moses (who first came to fame with Larry Coryell) tells this tale of the pills he saw in her car when she drove him home one night:

“I took half a pill. The thing hit just as I was going up the stairs, and it was like a knockout drop. I made it up, and I saw the bed there, and I just kinda lunged for the bed. I didn’t want to fall on the floor face first. I woke up two or three hours later and said, ‘Damn! This is from half of one?’  She was taking 10 a day.”

She had been trying to become clean when she agreed to tour in Australia in the spring of 1990 .... and seemed to have made progress.

The rest is conjecture: some stories have it that while on a difficult tour in Sydney (and feeling homesick) she sought out a heroin fix ... not knowing that the dealer she purchased it from had not 'cut' it ... and thus she took a much more potent dose than it would have appeared to her.

Either way: she died on May 4, 1990 at the age of only thirty-two (a heart attack was listed as the cause on her death certificate). Sixteen years later in 2006, the Skip Heller Band recorded The Lonesome Death of Emily Remler in tribute, and there were also two albums recorded by many of her fellow musicians. In a better world, she'd have celebrated her sixty-first birthday earlier this month.

Yet some twenty-eight years later, we still have her recordings and videos to remember her by. And the hope that other women - regardless of style - will be able to fill the void that she left.

 Emily Remler in her youth

…….. and years later as a rising star

What to choose as musical selections? Numerous choices; here is one with an ensemble playing the Sigmund Romberg/Oscar Hammerstein classic Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise and also accompanying Astrud Gilberto on "The Girl from Ipanema".

But I'd like to feature two works of hers on solo guitar: one is from one of her instruction videos, playing Afro-Blue - the Mongo Santamaria classic .…..

x xYouTube Video

... plus the classic Rodgers and Hart tune My Funny Valentine where she backs the vocalist Kim Parker - the stepchild of the legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker ...

My funny Valentine Sweet comic Valentine You make me smile with my heart Your looks are laughable Unphotographable Yet you're my favorite work of art

Is your figure less than Greek Is your mouth a little weak When you open it to speak Are you smart?

But don't change a hair for me Not if you care for me Stay little Valentine stay Each day is Valentine's Day

x xYouTube Video