Blues For Emily
Published: Fri, 06/24/22
And then my guitar teacher, Tony Lombardozzi, suggested I get in touch with his old society-band office; I could, supposedly, get work playing wedding gigs and such while I figured out my next moves. So with this watertight scheme in place, I did my senior thesis concert, graduated like a model citizen, wasted the summer busing tables on campus and sweltering in an attic room at (I kid you not) Eco House, and landed with a crash at my sister's dirt cheap Williamsburg apartment that fall.
You can probably guess how long it took me to figure out I would be neither learning saxophone voicings from a Basie alumnus nor earning a living wage singing "Mandy" dressed in a tuxedo and a Les Paul. That's right, less than 72 hours. Which is how I found myself paging through the classifieds of the Village Voice the fourth morning of my arrival in Brooklyn, making the electrifying discovery that one of my my favorite jazz musicians, guitarist Emily Remler, was offering private lessons from her apartment in Chelsea.
At this point, I had been to whatever live jazz showed up at school, which in retrospect was far from shabby: Art Blakey, Betty Carter, Archie Shepp, Sam Rivers, Billy Taylor, Jay Hoggard. I had listened to the usual guitar suspects: Django, Joe Pass, Wes Montgomery, a little Charlie Christian, Grant Green and Oscar Moore. And I had studied jazz for my last two years of school, which meant I knew how to practice scales and how to read a chart out of the Real Book. But I couldn't play jazz for shit, and this despite having ostensibly played in a jazz trio for a year or two on campus while actual people listened or ate dinner. This is no false modesty either; I knew while it was happening that I was barely, as the parlance goes, hanging in any way whatsoever.
But I loved Emily Remler's record Transitions, which I'd gotten hip to while dj'ing at the college radio station (re: my recent newsletter, "Backwards Psychology," I did, in fact, learn to play current releases over time, to my everlasting benefit), and I'd come to New York, I still thought, to learn to play jazz, so I called her up.
I have since come to find that jazz musicians are not famous, and rarely think of themselves that way. But to me, at that age, the people I heard on records were terribly important people, and I both treated them as such and imagined they felt that way about it, too. When, a few months later, I heard Chris Flory for the first time and found the gumption to walk up to him on the break and ask if he ever gave lessons, he started with "well, I'll be at my mom's next week, but after that..." All I could think was: jazz musicians have moms?
Being relatively short on finances – in the absence of a wedding band gig, I had yet to chase down any alternative gainful employment – one of the first things I asked Emily on the phone was if I had to come every week. "Well, I'm not a Nazi about it or anything," she replied, with traces of the accent you'd expect from a middle class kid raised in deepest New Jersey. So a few days later, loath to take my 1968 Guild X-175 on the subway, a mode of transportation I assumed to be crowded with nothing but predatory individuals whose sole mission in life was to part me from my most treasured material objects in life, viz., anything with six strings, I put my $150 Les Paul copy in its case and rode into Manhattan for my first lesson.
Meeting your heroes is, of course, a potentially fraught business, but the one thing I can tell you for sure is this: Emily was awesome. Despite all the things I later learned were going on at the time – in particular, the addiction that she ultimately lost her life to – she was maybe the most positive, enthusiastic teacher I ever had. Just as importantly, she neither wasted time bitching about the music industry nor pointlessly philosphizing about the meaning of life, but got right down to it from the moment you walked in. That first day, she crowed enthusiastically as my solid-body guitar came out of the case, taught me how how to use a guide tone line on the blues and, telling me "You need some people to jam with," wrote out the names and numbers of three other students of hers to call. Two of them totally blew me off, but the third, a Brooklyn-based guitarist ten years older than me named Ed Russell, quickly became my practice buddy and gigging compadre, and remains a lifelong friend.
I came back a couple weeks later and Emily had me sit down and play few choruses of blues to see what I'd learned. "You see? You see?" She jumped up, all excited. "Two weeks ago, you sounded like B.B. King. Now, you sound like Wes!"
Ok, so both of those were an exaggeration, but I was still pretty tickled. More to the point, I felt like I'd gotten more useful, hands-on tools for sounding like I wanted to than I had in the past two years of school. At that second lesson, we went right into learning about the melodic minor scale. But Emily made a point of first distinguishing between two kinds of dominant chords, to set up why and how there were two different ways of using the melodic minor scale. "Some dominant chords are static," she explained. "They're not going anywhere. On those, you play the melodic minor scale starting on the fifth of the chord. That way, you get the sound of a 7th chord with a sharp 11." Pretty simple, and when I tried it out, it sounded really cool. "Then there are dominant chords that are in motion. They're leading somewhere else. For those, you play the melodic minor scale starting on the flat 9 of the chord, and it gives you all the altered tones."
Somewhere around the third or fourth lesson, she explained how Wes Montgomery thought about ii-Vs – how he would superimpose additional ii-Vs on top of the chords already in the tune, the way he does on "West Coast Blues," and why it works. While I didn't have anywhere near the chops or the ears to make much use of that approach yet, it certainly unlocked a lot of what I'd been hearing in an astonishingly immediate way. I had maybe six lessons in all, spread out over that first year I was in New York, and those three specific ideas alone – playing with a guide tone line, the two kinds of dominant chords with their accompanying scales, and the Wes ii-Vs – were both profoundly effective and absurdly concise and understandable, the way that Emily taught them.
I've noticed this a few times since then: there is a certain kind of more or less self-taught musician who emerges from that process with both a visceral memory of how they pieced it all together from records and other musicians, and the generosity and compassion necessary to transmit those hard-won insights along to others without condescending, moving too quickly, or glossing over the "obvious" parts. I certainly never learned to play bebop like Emily Remler, but I'd like to think I soaked up at least little of that pedagogical clarity during the time I spent learning from her.
–––
Speaking of specificity: one of the essential challenges in playing fingerstyle guitar is knowing which fingers of the picking hand to use for which strings. A lot of instructional material doesn't bother to clarify this, making things confusing for relative beginners. Even for more advanced players, those split seconds of not-even-conscious hesitation over which finger to use in a given moment can make the difference between a solid groove and one that lurches when you wish it wouldn't. In today's lesson, I zero in on a simple set of defaults to help you with this; you can find it at the link below:
Which Fingers Should You Use To Pick The Strings?
More soon,
David
P.S. I just learned from trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso about these early acetates cut by Charlie Parker with just rhythm guitar, plus a bit of drums in the background. Hearing the inventor of bebop improvising over regulation swing-era four-to-the-bar comping completely exemplifies what I was talking about a few weeks back about the relationship between bebop and swing. Plus, it feels like you're listening to a couple of guys working on tunes in the school practice room, only someone was taping it, and one of the guys was Charlie freaking Parker. Enjoy:
Charlie Parker, 1942 Acetates
For organized, ongoing weekly lessons that help you learn tunes, turn them into complete songs, and start improvising, register for the Fingerstyle Five membership at www.fretboardconfidential.com