Growing up in Camden, Amy Winehouse’s taste was always different to her friends’. While they were listening to the chart toppers, she had her ear pushed into the wall that separated her bedroom from her brother’s, learning about jazz through the sounds that floated between them and eventually being introduced to the singer that would prove the most formative of them all.
“He started listening to jazz when he was about 18 and I was 14,” Winehouse remembered of her brother’s taste. “I just remember the first time I ever heard [Thelonious Monk’s] ‘Round Midnight’, through the wall. I was just like: what is that?” she said. It was life-changing.
Suddenly, this new musical language opened up to her, and she fell in love with the sound. It made her pay more attention when her father would sing Sinatra songs or when her Grandmother introduced her to other jazz artists through anecdotes from her own youth when she dated Ronnie Scott and buzzed around the Soho scene.
All of this would lead to the first steps towards her actual career. It would influence her to go to the Sylvia Young School for full-time arts education and eventually join the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, where her role as one of their featured female vocalists would get her noticed as a rare and special talent with incredible promise.
But among all of that, there was one vocalist that was a key to it all. Winehouse could always sing, any number of her friends and relatives can attest to that. But it was after she discovered this artist that she realised what a voice could do, blowing her mind at the capabilities of how a human voice could sound or make you feel.
It was Sarah Vaughan; the American jazz singer nicknamed ‘The Divine One’ due to her otherworldly vocal abilities. Coming up in the same crowd as other legends like Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis and more, Vaughan was part of a history-shaking pack that rewrote the rule and sound of jazz and for Winehouse, decades and countries removed, it was still deeply impactful.
How did Sarah Vaughan inspire Amy Winehouse?
“Sarah Vaughan is one of my favourite singers of all time,” Winehouse said of the singer. But her love for her came down to a specific thing and a specific reason why she became so influential to the British singer.
“She was an instrument. I’ve heard one record, it’s like a humming solo, and she sounds like a reed instrument – like a clarinet,” she recalled. It was a moment that changed a lot for her, hearing Vaughan sing but not in the typical way. Instead, she was using her voice differently, to a different effect but still with as much impact.
For Winehouse, it was a revelation, inspiring her to do the same on her own records as humming, scatting, and ad-libbed spontaneous details colour her albums, helping to solidify her legacy as one of history’s favourite vocalists and place her in the same lineage as her hero.
