Monnette Sudler Obituary

A jazz guitarist from Philadelphia, Monnette Sudler was an American. She was born Monnette Goldman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Lea Goldman, married Truman W. Sudler in 1957.

Her first exposure to jazz was listening to her great-uncle play the piano. When she was fifteen, she took lessons on guitar at the Wharton Center in Philadelphia.

She could play drums and piano, and she also composed, arranged, sang, and wrote poetry. Early in her career, she worked with vibraphonist Khan Jamal in the Sounds of Liberation.

In the 1970s she studied at Berklee School of Music in Boston and in the 1980s at Temple University.

Monnette Sudler Obituary

Monnette Sudler, a virtuoso guitarist who straddled the post-bop mainstream and searching yet rooted avant-garde, earning an exalted stature in her native Philadelphia, died on August 21, 2022, at her home in the city’s Germantown – Penn Knox neighborhood. She was 70.

Her son Erik Honesty said the cause was cancer. Sudler had also suffered from a serious lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which led to a double lung transplant in 2013.