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‘WENN’ SHE FELL IN LOVE
    As it turned out, it was a good thing that Sylvia Young stayed in touch with Amy after she left the school, because it was Sylvia who inadvertently sent Amy’s career in a whole new direction.
    Towards the end of 1999, when Amy was sixteen, Sylvia called Bill Ashton, the founder, MD and life president of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO), to try to arrange an audition for Amy. Bill told Sylvia that they didn’t audition. ‘Just send her along,’ he said. ‘She can join in if she wants to.’
    So Amy went along, and after a few weeks, she was asked to sing with the orchestra. One Sunday morning a month or so later, they asked Amy to sing four songs with the orchestra that night because one of their singers couldn’t make it. She didn’t know the songs very well but that didn’t faze her – water off a duck’s back for Amy. One quick rehearsal and she’d nailed them all.
    Amy sang with the NYJO for a while, and did one of her first real recordings with them. They put together a CD and Amy sang on it. When Jane and I heard it, I nearly fainted – I couldn’t believe how fantastic she sounded. My favourite song on that CD has always been ‘The Nearness Of You’. I’ve heard Sinatra sing it, I’ve heard Ella Fitzgerald sing it, I’ve heard Sarah Vaughan sing it, I’ve heard Billie Holiday sing it, I’ve heard Dinah Washington sing it and I’ve heard Tony Bennett sing it. But I have never heard it sung the way Amy sang it. It was and remains beautiful.
    There was no doubt that the NYJO and Amy’s other performances pushed her voice further, but it was a friend of Amy’s, Tyler James, who really set the ball rolling for her. Amy and Tyler had met at Sylvia Young’s and they remained best friends to the end of Amy’s life. At Sylvia Young’s, Amy was in the academic year below Tyler, so when they were doing academic work they were in different classes. But on the singing and dancing days they were in the same class, as Amy had been promoted a year, so they rehearsed and did auditions together. They met when their singing teacher, Ray Lamb, asked four students to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ on a tape he was making for his grandma’s birthday. Tyler was knocked out when he heard this little girl singing ‘like some jazz queen’. His voice hadn’t broken and he was singing like a young Michael Jackson. Tyler says he recognized the type of person Amy was as soon as he spotted her nose-ring and heard that she’d pierced it herself, using a piece of ice to numb the pain.
    They grew closer after Amy had left Sylvia Young, when Tyler would meet up regularly with her, Juliette and their other girlfriends. Tyler and Amy talked a lot about the downs that most teenagers have. Every Friday night they would speak on the phone and every conversation ended with Amy singing to him or him to her. They were incredibly close, but Tyler and Amy weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, more like brother and sister; he was one of the few boys Amy ever brought along to my mum’s Friday-night dinners.
    After leaving Sylvia Young’s, Tyler had become a soul singer, and while Amy was singing with the NYJO, Tyler was singing in pubs, clubs and bars. He’d started working with a guy named Nick Shymansky, who was with a PR agency called Brilliant!. Tyler was Nick’s first artist, and he was soon hounding Amy for a tape of her singing that he could give to Nick. Eventually Amy gave him a tape of jazz standards she had sung with the NYJO. Tyler was blown away by it, and encouraged her to record a few more tracks before he sent the tape to Nick.
    Now Tyler had been talking about Amy to Nick for months, but Nick, who was only a couple of years older than Tyler and used to hearing exaggerated talk about singers, wasn’t expecting anything life-changing. But that, of