How These Women Brought the Guitar Into Jazz
Celebrating Jazz
How the Guitar Found Its Way Into Jazz. Spotlight on Six Women Who Made it Happen.
Jazz is worth celebrating in a big way. In just over 120 years, jazz has had a more profound influence on music than any other genre. It connects to classical, pop, spiritual, and rock and roll.
Do you know the story of the guitar in jazz? It's one of the best ones out there. It's full of creativity, and some seriously talented women who didn't wait for anyone to hand them a seat at the table. They pulled up their own chair, plugged in, and played.
We're about to introduce you to six artists who changed how jazz sounds, and honestly, how we all hear the guitar.
Mary Ford: Before the Studio, There Was Her
Before anyone had a recording studio in their phone, Mary Ford was layering tracks by hand in a garage, with nothing but talent and patience.
Born in 1924, Mary Ford grew up in a deeply musical family led by her Nazarene preacher father, singing alongside her brothers and sisters and becoming a skilled guitarist along the way. She and her partner Les Paul invented what they called the "New Sound," stacking guitar parts and vocals on top of each other using a technique called Sound on Sound recording. Mary could sing layered harmonies with herself, recording one part at a time until the result was a full, warm wall of voices. All her. Every single one. In 1951 alone, the duo sold over six million records, and their version of the jazz standard "How High the Moon" sat at number one for nine weeks.
Les Paul was the inventor and the tinkerer. But Mary Ford was the musician who made it all feel human. Her guitar playing moved easily between country, jazz, and pop, and she helped build the foundation that modern recording still stands on today.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother Who Rocked Before Rock Existed
Chuck Berry once said his entire career was basically one long Rosetta Tharpe impression. That should tell you everything.
Born in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Rosetta was performing gospel on guitar by age four. By the time she was a young woman, she was playing electric guitar with heavy distortion, mixing gospel lyrics with jazz rhythms and blues bends, doing things nobody else was doing. She performed at the Cotton Club in Harlem and at Carnegie Hall. She toured Europe starting in 1957, and her performances over the following years blew the minds of a whole generation of young British musicians, including Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Paul McCartney, who would go on to shape the sound of the 1960s.
She was a Black woman playing like a thunderstorm in an era when that was considered shocking on about five different levels. She did not care. She just played. And the whole world of popular music came from that decision.
Emily Remler: The Bebop Soul We Lost Too Soon
Emily Remler is one of the most beloved names in jazz guitar, and most people outside of jazz have never heard of her. That needs to change.
She fell in love with jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston, idolized Wes Montgomery, and by the early 1980s critics were already calling her the brightest new star in the game. Her 1988 album East to Wes is still celebrated as one of the finest albums of her career, a heartfelt tribute to Wes Montgomery that showed just how deep her musicianship ran. She died in 1990 at just 32 years old, and her loss was enormous. But her influence reaches forward through every woman who has picked up a guitar and decided to play jazz since.
Mary Halvorson: The Future Is Already Here
If the others showed us where jazz guitar has been, Mary Halvorson shows us where it is going.
She picked up guitar at age eleven after hearing Jimi Hendrix, and studied with jazz legend Anthony Braxton, who taught her that there are no rules, only music. When Mary plays, she uses pedal effects and improvised lines that go places you genuinely do not expect. Critics call her playing "jagged" and "confrontational" but also "beautiful" and "pure."
She won a MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2019 and took DownBeat's Best Guitar award three years straight, from 2017 to 2019. Her music sounds like nothing else you have heard, and that is exactly the point.
Sheryl Bailey: Bebop Fire and a Heart for Teaching
Sheryl Bailey started with rock, discovered jazz, and never looked back. She plays bebop, which is jazz at its most fast and technically demanding, and she does it with a burning energy that makes it look fun and easy (it's not).
She is a professor at Berklee College of Music, which means she is not just carrying the torch but actively handing it to the next generation. In 2010 she recorded A New Promise, a full tribute album to Emily Remler (see above). One of the most beautiful things one musician has ever done for another.
Camila Meza: Jazz Without Borders
Camila Meza grew up in Chile and discovered jazz guitar by accident, searching online for more John Scofield material when she stumbled across a 1988 Berklee performance of him playing alongside Emily Remler. She had never seen a woman playing jazz guitar before, and something clicked.
She moved to New York, built a career as both a guitarist and vocalist, and makes music that blends jazz with Latin sounds and pop warmth. Her story is a reminder that jazz belongs to everyone. If you hear it and it moves you, it is yours.
Your Jazz Era Starts Now
These six women, from Mary Ford's garage studio to Camila Meza's New York stages, each grabbed a guitar and said something true with it.
That spirit is what we celebrate here at Peace General Store. We believe in makers, artists, and people who create something beautiful and share it with the world. So this April, put on some jazz. Let it be a little new to you.
Want to discover some Jazz songs? We curated a playlist with our favourite jazz artists.
Enjoy!
Happy Jazz Month from all of us at Peace General Store.
Keep playing.
Happy Jazz Month from all of us at Peace General Store.
Keep playing.
