At her business and artistic zenith between 2003 and 2007, Amy Winehouse was undoubtedly an artist who was courageously cutting-edge in the best way she blended an array of various musical components to create her personal model and sound. However whereas she appeared new, excitingly trendy and appeared like nobody else, she was additionally a throwback to the good jazz singers of yesteryear.
For those who pay attention fastidiously to Winehouse’s music and peel again the layers of contemporary manufacturing gloss, you’ll discover it effervescent with echoes of the previous; and particularly, echoes of Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald, three of jazz’s best feminine voices.
Winehouse assimilated Washington’s smoky timbre and blues-drenched phrasing, Vaughan’s fluttery vibrato and Fitzgerald’s skill to improvise (or “scat”) and mixed these options with components drawn from hip-hop, soul and pop to create a particular musical identification. Her originality lay in the best way she filtered these influences by her personal psyche and life experiences to reach at a very genuine mode of self-expression.
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We shouldn’t be stunned by the influence that Washington et al had on Amy Winehouse as a result of jazz was in her blood. Her household, particularly on her father Mitch’s aspect, was deeply passionate in regards to the music and performed it on a regular basis. Unsurprisingly, their enthusiasm rubbed off on younger Amy, who from an early age immersed herself within the sounds of massive band swing and American jazz singers.
When she launched her debut album, Frank, in 2003, Winehouse’s jazz influences have been on full show. She channelled her inside Ella Fitzgerald on the improvised scat part featured in “Know You Now,” whereas on “October Song” she quoted the melody from the jazz commonplace “Lullaby of Birdland,” a tune indelibly related to Sarah Vaughan. (Vaughan additionally obtained a name-check in Winehouse’s new lyrics).
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However by way of her tone, the singer Amy Winehouse resembled most was Dinah Washington. In his 2016 guide Simply Getting Began, veteran crooner Tony Bennett recalled being struck by Winehouse’s similarity with the Alabama-born singer after they recorded the duet “Body & Soul” 5 years earlier. “When I told her that her voice reminded me of Dinah Washington, Amy began to gush and tell me how devoted she had been to Dinah,” he wrote.
However what Winehouse took from Washington, she made her personal, as she illustrated through her sensuous remake on Frank of the American singer’s “(There Is) No Greater Love,” which she remodeled right into a three-way dialog between her voice, saxophone and flute. Additional proof of Winehouse’s skill to take a jazz traditional and redefine it was sublimely demonstrated by her pleasant revival of James Moody’s “Moody’s Mood For Love,” which was propelled by a loping reggae-inflected groove.
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Although her jazz influences weren’t so obvious on her extra profitable second album, 2006’s Again To Black, the place her sonic panorama was R&B-tinged, Winehouse nonetheless approached her materials with the sensibility and mindset of a jazz singer, particularly on the haunting ballad, “Love Is A Losing Game.”
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Just like the American jazz singers that she sought to emulate, Amy Winehouse used her voice like a musical instrument; however it was a supple automobile of self-expression relatively than a finely-calibrated precision software and possessed an underlying soulfulness that infused it with nice emotional heft.
Though she left the world too quickly, Amy Winehouse did sufficient throughout her brief lifetime to warrant a spot within the pantheon of nice jazz vocalists, alongside a few of the American singers she so admired. Some would possibly disagree, in fact, but when Bennett regards her as “a great jazz artist” (as he described her in Simply Getting Began), then few can doubt Winehouse’s credentials. Working together with her within the studio, he acknowledged Winehouse’s skill to take dangers in her performances and improvise with rhythms and melodic phrases identical to a jazz horn participant would.
