Love Is a Losing Game has no chorus. Bob Dylan said that’s why it’s perfect.
In June 2000, the National Youth Jazz Orchestra Singer dropped out of a show hours before they were supposed to perform. The director called a 16-year-old girl who had barely spoken at rehearsals. She didn’t know the songs. She wasn’t phased. She performed anyway, and the people who were in that room have been talking about it ever since.
But to understand what happened at the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and why it matters to the story of Amy Winehouse, you need to start with what the orchestra actually was. Because the NYO was not a school group or a youth club hobby. It was and remains one of the most respected jazz education institutions in Britain. A full professionalcale big band made up of young musicians who had been selected through audition and who rehearsed and performed at a level that would not have embarrassed many adult orchestras.
It had been founded in 1965 by Bill Ashton who had spent decades building it into an institution that produced musicians who went on to serious professional careers. The standard was high. The atmosphere was serious. It was not the kind of place where you arrived at 16 and coasted. Ami arrived at 16 and sat in a corner.
The singing coach at the orchestra, Annabelle Williams, went to Ashton after the first rehearsal and gave him a report that was not encouraging. She said the girl had sat in the corner the whole time smoking. She had not joined in. She had watched. She had not made any attempt to participate in the rehearsal in the way that the other young musicians were participating.
She had simply been there at the edges observing. Ashton, who had been running the NJO for over three decades by that point, and who had seen enough young musicians to have developed a finely calibrated sense of what different kinds of behavior in rehearsal rooms meant, was not particularly troubled by this report.
He had learned over the years that the musicians who needed to watch before they could perform were not necessarily the ones who were going to be the problem. Sometimes the watching itself was a form of preparation, a different relationship to learning than the one that announced itself immediately. He decided to wait.
When it came time for Ami to perform the song with the full big band in front of the whole orchestra with all the weight of brass and percussion, the particular atmosphere of a room full of serious young musicians who had been rehearsing together for weeks, she got up from her corner and she did it. She had listened to the others run through at once.
She had not had a rehearsal of her own. She had the song in her ear from watching, and she had whatever it was that she carried inside her that no rehearsal could have given her. She nailed it first time. Ashton said it directly and without embellishment years later, recounting the story. Just from listening to the others do it, she got up and nailed it first time.
There was no technical term for what had happened, no pedagogical framework that quite explained how someone could absorb a performance from observation alone and reproduce it with that level of completeness. It was simply what Ami did. The same thing she would do in studios with producers and session musicians for the rest of her career.
The same quality that had made the Island Records boardroom go silent in 2002 and that had made Tony Bennett reach for his sunglasses at the O2 in 2007. She listened and then she did the thing and the thing was right. A few months after that rehearsal in June 2000, the NYO was scheduled to perform at Rainers’s Hotel in West London. The hotel was one of the regular venues on the NYJO’s London circuit, a proper performance space with an audience that had come to hear live jazz, not an informal gathering where the stakes were low. These were paying guests who
expected a professional show. The last minute withdrawal of the singer was not a minor inconvenience. It was a genuine problem, the kind that could compromise the evening entirely. Ashton made the call to Amy because she was the most talented singer he had available. He knew she did not know the repertoire.
He also knew from the rehearsal room and from the first take performance what she was capable of when the circumstances required something of her. He trusted that knowledge. He told her the situation. He asked if she could do it. She said yes without hesitation. A few months after that rehearsal in June 2000, the NYO was scheduled to perform at Rainers’s Hotel in West London.
Their singer dropped out at the last minute. A show that had been planned and rehearsed was suddenly without its central voice hours before the audience was due to arrive. Ashton called Amy. She did not know the songs they were performing that evening. He explained the situation. She was not phased. she performed. Anyway, the accounts of that night from the people who were there describe something that is difficult to convey in retrospect.
The particular quality of watching someone do something under pressure that they have never done before and do it as though pressure were not a factor. Amy had not rehearsed the set. She had not run through the songs with the band. She arrived at the venue, found out what they were playing, and then stood at the front of a full professionalcale big band and sang.
The audience, who had come to hear the NYO, and who would not have known anything about the last minute change, experienced an evening of music that gave no indication of having been assembled in an emergency. What the NYO period represented in Amy’s development was something that is easy to overlook in the larger narrative.
The focus when people discuss her musical influences and her formation tends to land on the records she listened to as a child. Her father’s Sinatra, the Dina Washington albums, the girl group records she and Juliet Ashby played at the beginning of what would eventually become Sweet and Sour. These are real and important, but the NYO gave her something that records could not give her.
It gave her the experience of performing inside a large ensemble of subordinating her own instincts to the collective discipline of the orchestra while simultaneously finding the space within that discipline to be completely herself. There is a reason that the musicians who come out of big band training tend to have a particular quality that other musicians do not always have.
The big band is one of the most demanding musical environments that exists. Not technically in the way that classical orchestral training is technically demanding, but in the specific way that jazz is demanding. It requires you to know where you are in the music at all times, to hold the formal structure in your head while simultaneously responding to what is happening around you, to make realtime decisions about phrasing and dynamics and feel that the printed arrangement cannot anticipate.
The singers who work with big bands learn something that singers who work only with backing tracks and studio productions do not learn. They learn what it sounds like when a room full of musicians is listening to them, adjusting to them, breathing with them, and they learn how to lead that room rather than simply ride on top of it.
Amy had been singing since she was a child. She had been singing in pub sets and small venues and over records played in her bedroom. What the NJO bit of her was the first experience of singing with and against a large live ensemble, of finding out what her voice did when it had to compete with and compliment 20 odd musicians playing together in a room.
The answer, as Ashton had discovered at that first rehearsal, was that it rose to the occasion in a way that left everyone who heard it slightly recalibrated about what was possible. Jazz education is distinct from other forms of musical training in a specific way. It requires the student to internalize two things simultaneously. The formal structure of the music with its harmonic language and its rhythmic conventions and the particular demands of reading and performing arrangements with other musicians and the individual freedom within that structure. That is
what jazz actually is. A musician who has only the formal structure is technically competent but musically inert. A musician who has only the freedom is expressive but uncontrollable. The NYO at its best was a place where young musicians learned to have both where the discipline of the big band tradition was the container inside which genuine improvisation and genuine personal expression could develop.
Amy had arrived at the NYO with the personal expression already fully formed. The voice was already there. The instinct for emotional truth was already there. What the orchestra gave her was the container, the experience of existing inside a formal musical structure and finding her way through it rather than around it.
of learning what it felt like to stand in front of a big band and make it work rather than just singing into a microphone and hoping for the best. The jazz world Amy was entering through the NYO was not for her an unfamiliar world. It was a world she had been adjacent to since childhood in ways that most of the other young musicians at the orchestra had not.
Her maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians, not hobbyists or enthusiasts, but working musicians who had spent their careers inside the tradition who understood from the inside what it meant to be a jazz performer in Britain in the second half of the 20th century. Amy had grown up around them.
She had heard at family gatherings and in ordinary conversation the kind of talk about music that only happens when music is a profession rather than a pastime. The specific technical experience-based talk of people who know something from the inside. Her paternal grandmother, Cynthia, had dated Ronnie Scott, the saxoponist who had opened Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho in 1959.
The venue that became the most important jazz club in Britain, and that was still running when Amy was a teenager. The connection was not a distant or formal one. It was part of the texture of the family, part of who her grandmother had been, part of the history that she carried. When Amy walked into the NYJO, she was not encountering jazz for the first time.
She was returning to something familiar from a different angle, finding it in an institutional form rather than the family form she had always known. She was also influenced during this period by the musicians she heard and met through the NYO world. Many of her maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians, a detail that tends to get mentioned in passing in biographies and then passed over.
But that meant Amy had grown up around people for whom jazz was not a historical category, but a living practice, something you could still be inside rather than looking back at. Her paternal grandmother, Cynthia, had dated the jazz saxoponist Ronnie Scott. The music that Bill Ashton was running his orchestra in the tradition of was not for Amy the music of a distant era.
It was family. By July 2000, she was the featured female vocalist with the NYJO. The girl who had sat in the corner smoking had within a few months of her first appearance become the person standing at the front of the band. The orchestra performed at venues around the country. She sang standards and arrangements in front of audiences that were far more demanding than the Camden bar crowds she had been performing for as a teenager.
She was 17 years old and she was a professional. The jazz education Amy received at the NYO left traces in everything she made afterward. Frank, her debut album, was not a pop record that happened to include jazz influences. It was a jazz record made by someone who understood the tradition from the inside.
Who knew what the harmonic language was and how to move through it. Who understood phrasing in the jazz sense rather than the pop sense. Who could inhabit a chord progression the way a jazz musician inhabits it rather than simply singing over it. The musicians who heard Frank in 2003 and reached for comparisons to Sarah Vaughn and Nina Simone were not reaching for them arbitrarily.
They were hearing someone who had done the work, who had sat in a corner of a rehearsal room and watched, and then had stood in front of a big band and performed, and had spent a year learning what it felt like to be inside the music rather than on top of it. Back to Black retained that quality even as it moved towards soul and R&B.
The phrasing on rehab, on love is a losing game, on back to black itself, the way Amy placed notes inside the rhythm rather than on top of it. The way she allowed herself space within the arrangement rather than filling every available moment was the phrasing of someone who had been trained in a tradition where space and silence were as important as the notes.
You could hear the Nyjo in it. You could hear Ashton’s rehearsal room in it. You could hear the 17-year-old girl in the corner watching. The NYO period lasted only a year or so before Amy’s career moved in a different direction. The demo tape that Tyler James sent without telling her. The phone call from Nick Shymansky, the Island Records deal that followed.
The jazz orchestra became part of the background rather than the foreground. One chapter in a story that was accelerating rapidly towards something else. Bill Ashton watched her career from a distance with the particular pride and the particular beusement of someone who had given an extraordinary person their first professional platform and then watched the world catch up to what he had known in that rehearsal room in 2000.
He said in interviews after her death that she was the most talented young musician he had ever worked with. He said this having run the NYO for over four decades and having worked with hundreds of musicians who had gone on to significant careers. He was not being polite. He was reporting a fact. The same fact that the singing coach had reported after the corner sitting rehearsal that the people at the hotel had reported after the last minute show that the Island Records boardroom would report 2 years later.
The fact was always the same. Just from listening to the others do it. She got up and nailed it first time. That was Amy Winehouse at 16. That was who she was before any of it. Before the Beehive and the Grammys and the tabloids and the five albums that would eventually be called her catalog. A girl in a corner of a rehearsal room watching, saying nothing.
Ready.
