They are about when Amy was in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and four recordings of her singing were made in 2000. The articles were written at the end of July and they say that they did find the recordings and the orchestra will decide whether to release the tracks in a week from the time the article was written.
I wonder what ever happened with this...
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'With that sort of confidence, I think you’ve got a future'
John Bungey, July 30 2011 12:01AM
Here is a 16-year-old, her name is Amy Winehouse ... the song is Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” Thus Bill Ashton, conducting the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, introduced the first public performance in Winehouse’s jazz-singing career at a pub session in northwest London on July 16, 2000.
Could there have been a more poignant choice than this 1923 blues song, which Eric Clapton would also sing when he was fighting drink and drug addictions?
Winehouse is immediately recognisable — that tough-tender tone, the supple phrasing — sounding, as she always would, like a singer of far greater age and experience. But then Winehouse had grown up with Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Unlike other teen wannabes of 2000, she had little interest in Mariah Carey or Madonna.
She tends to lard the lyrics with vibrato, something that would have gone by the time of her debut album, Frank, but it is a hugely assured display from a debutante in front of a 22-piece big band. Winehouse had apparently learnt the tunes on the way to the gig and sang without a lyric sheet.
The three other songs she performed that day were by NYJO composers. She negotiates the tricky intervals and boppish rhythms of Who’s Blue? with ease. Ashton asks Winehouse to say something to the audience. There is a coy little “Hello”, none of the chutzpah that came later. The second set of two songs is slightly less polished but still impressive.
Ashton clearly knew her potential and tells the audience: “When you’ve got that sort of confidence I think you’ve got the future in front of you.” Winehouse signs off with the swinging Another Always (“You said our always could never last / Those golden fall days would soon be in the past”). Here was a singer clearly drawn to tristesse.
But if this well-recorded set is a glimpse of Winehouse’s past it’s also a glimpse of what might have been. There are no documents of her singing the standards she so loved with a big band. This might be the closest we get.
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Winehouse’s first gig could repay youth jazz charity
- Jack Malvern, 30 July 2011.
There is a palpable awkwardness about Amy Winehouse at the beginning of the unpublished recording of her first proper gig. The singer, aged 16, is too shy to engage in banter with the band leader of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra as he introduces her to an audience of about 50 in the bar of an hotel in northwest London.
As the polite applause peters out on the recording, which The Times has been invited to hear by the founder of the orchestra, there is a tense moment when it seems doubtful that she will have the courage to sing at all.
The tension does not last beyond the first note. Winehouse’s version of Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, a 1920s blues song, has soul and a gusto that makes it clear that this was no ordinary 16-year-old girl. When Bill Ashton, the founder of the orchestra and the band leader at the gig, tells the audience that he believes Winehouse has a bright future, there is a surge of applause.
The recording captures the singer’s distinctive voice on four songs that she performed with the orchestra in the summer of 2000, when she spent about six months learning to perform big band jazz at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, northwest London.
Mr Ashton hopes to release the songs for the benefit of the orchestra, a charity that survives on a small grant from Arts Council England and the kindness of benefactors, but he first wants to make certain that there will be no problems with rights or objections from the singer’s family.
Finding the recording was a tall order. Mr Ashton has recorded almost all of the orchestra’s monthly gigs, but his labeling system is erratic. Rosie Stano, a member of the orchestra who was charged with searching through 300 minidiscs, spent four hours skipping from song to song in the hope of hearing Winehouse’s voice. Her patience was rewarded when she found two songs on an unlabeled disc. It took a further two hours to find the second pair.
The singer, who was found dead a week ago at the age of 27, was invited to perform only at the last minute, Mr Ashton said. “We didn’t have a singer for this Sunday lunchtime gig, so I rang her and said, ‘Amy, can you come and sing with us?’ She said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t know your repertoire, but I can learn them on the Tube on the way.’ So that’s what she did. She then performed them perfectly.”
Annabel Williams, a professional jazz singer who acted as Winehouse’s singing tutor for the orchestra, remembered her smoking in a corner, apparently paying little attention during the practice session. “I wasn’t sure she was taking in everything I was saying. Then we went into the room with the band playing and it was a whole different story. Her tone and her mature understanding of the music was exceptional. It was not what I was expecting at all.”
When Mr Ashton listened to the recordings for the first time in 11 years he realized that they could be good enough to release. “Considering it was a great barn of a place the quality is very good. We really don’t know quite what to do with them.”
Mike Shelton, a deputy district judge who is on the orchestra’s board, said that Mr Ashton probably owned the songs but he wanted to be certain before the charity released them. He said: “We’re not rich, so if these tracks could be to our benefit then it could be the difference between surviving and not surviving. It’s as simple as that.”
The orchestra will decide whether to release the tracks next week. It hopes to offer excerpts via thetimes.co.uk.
