Bill Ashton obit

Bill Ashton OBE (1936-2025) – A Tribute

 

He was not on the list.

As a young trombonist growing up in Blackpool, one of the first jazz albums I owned was The Very Best of NYJO, which was given to me as a Christmas present by my Mum and Dad. A sprawling four disc box set, I was immediately hooked. I would pore over the liner notes in the car on the way to school each morning. I heard for the first time names like Howard McGill, Mark Nightingale, Josephine Davies, Pete Long, Andy Wood, Dennis Rollins, Martin Williams – and marvelled at the sheer technical mastery and musicianship on display. They were well above and beyond anything I’d heard anywhere else at that time, and it was especially exciting to hear from a band supposedly only a few years older than I was. Each disc featured a completely different list of players, but one name remained constant: that of the band’s director, Bill Ashton.

Fast forward a few years to 2005: one summer afternoon I received a phone call out of the blue. “Callum Au, it’s Bill Ashton here from NYJO. I found out about you from Andy Wood. We’re down a trombonist for our gig at the Ruislip Manor Golf Club next Sunday, do you want to come and do it?” I was a little puzzled as I’d never actually met Andy at the time1, but I was delighted to accept anyway. Mum dropped me off at Preston station for the first train down on the Saturday morning for the rehearsal in London, where I met Bill in person for the first time. As I remember it, he cut an imposing figure in his signature red suit and straw hat, but he was nothing but welcoming, talking with me about Blackpool, where it turned out he had also grown up. I went on to play the gig the following day: naturally, with an entirely different set of music to the ones we’d rehearsed! At the time, it was the best band I’d ever played in by a mile – I was thrilled. What an amazing experience for an awkward 15 year old from the Fylde Coast! After the gig, Bill took me aside and showed me the band date sheet: “This is what we’ve got coming up. Anything you want to do, write your name down next to it and you’ll be on the gig.” For the next couple of years I did the occasional date with the band, especially when they needed someone to cover something in Lancashire or Cumbria.

I moved to Oxford to go to university. Once there, I started attending rehearsals regularly and joined NYJO properly as a member of the trombone section. At that point the band had one or two gigs a week up and down the country, during which I learned an enormous amount from sitting next to Jon Stokes & Robbie Harvey (my slightly older and much better section-mates). Through playing these gigs, I learned for the first time how to play in a ‘real’ band – how to read, how to phrase, how to listen and be heard. Thanks to Bill’s encouragement I also took my first steps in writing for big band: he commissioned the first ever arrangement I wrote for full band (of one of his own songs, ‘A Step Too Far’), and the next seventy or so too! For a young writer, I cannot imagine a better opportunity: having a world class band available each week to play whatever I happened to bring along, and the opportunity to hear what worked and, far more importantly, what didn’t.

After playing with the band throughout my university years, I moved to London to make a go of being a professional trombonist and writer. Around about this time I met clarinettist Pete Long (remember that name from the box set?) on a ‘NYJO plays Dizzy Gillespie’ gig , and as a result (I assume!) he invited me to play with a few of his myriad ensembles. It was that connection that launched my professional career as a trombonist. On the other hand, I still don’t really know exactly how I ended up working professionally as an arranger, but I’d credit the opportunities Bill gave me as a young writer with teaching me a good 87.5%2 of what I know. Now I’m working in the industry full time myself, I count all those names I first came across on that box set as trusted colleagues and friends.

I tell this story because, although it is of tremendous importance to me, it is ultimately only a tiny facet of Bill’s overwhelming legacy. I left NYJO just shy of its 50th anniversary. That’s 50 years’ worth of professional musicians, each with their own individual story, but with a single common thread in Bill. Though their details will vary, the essence of this story is replicated hundreds of times over for every single professional musician who went through the NYJO programme. So many careers have been made thanks to Bill’s tireless work in promoting the very best – and so many of us working in the business credit him with everything that we know.

As far as I’m aware, jazz education simply did not exist in Britain in 19653, and Bill built its earliest and greatest example from the ground up through sheer force of will. By his own admission, he wasn’t a great player himself – I never once saw him playing a saxophone in the 20 years I knew him – but he was a remarkable facilitator. He never interfered much during rehearsals, letting older players act as unofficial mentors for younger ones, and often calling on one of the more senior band members to run the rehearsal. But through subtle nudges here and there, and the occasional well-placed bit of arm-twisting, he always ensured that people were in exactly the places they needed to be to excel. There were always all sorts of people from all sorts of different backgrounds: from musical and muggle families; rich and poor; brass banders, choristers; music college students; and the occasional 12 year old prodigy4. Bill didn’t care one bit where you came from so long as you were capable and talented. Excellence was Bill’s sole motivating force: realising that a truly excellent band is greater than the sum of its parts, he wanted each part to be as good as it could possibly be. The result of this was that the young musicians in the band were encouraged to aim even higher, thanks to an incredibly strong peer group effect.

Although the band has its fair share of jazz luminaries among its alumni5, the emphasis was always more on the ‘O (for Orchestra)’ than the ‘J’. Plenty of the brass players weren’t jazz soloists at all, and it was always more important by far to suppress the ego and play well together as a band than it was to play the most beautifully constructed improvised solo (though the latter didn’t hurt). Though Bill didn’t give a huge amount of performance direction, he would never let a wrong note or a missed entry slide. He would always call a completely different programme on each gig, and with a library of thousands of charts, it would be theoretically possible to play a completely different show every night for a whole year! This decision meant that NYJO’s musicians became excellent sight-readers – a skill that set them up very well for working in a studio environment where music always arrives at the last possible moment with no time to prepare. In pretty much all the big band sessions I am involved with, there is a supermajority of NYJO graduates – Bill’s admittedly unconventional methods were just that good.

One of Bill’s greatest innovations as an educator was his regular commissioning of members of NYJO to write new music for the band to play. This served two functions: firstly, it created the band’s aforementioned enormous library, and secondly, it gave young arrangers and composers the opportunity to write for a much better band than their current skill level would usually allow. Bill’s imagination was limitless. Every other week he would ask me for a new chart of some sort, from ‘Sur Le Pont D’Avignon’ to a song he wrote about unrequited love. Once again, my experience matches that of many of my colleagues. Nobody but Bill could have come up with this; when I’ve told international musician friends about it they quite literally don’t believe me. But the results speak for themselves – former NYJO arrangers include Steve Sidwell, Guy Barker, Evan Jolly, and even Vince Mendoza!

By the time I met Bill he was approaching 70 years old, and had already been running NYJO for 40 years. But everyone who learned under his auspices had the same experience. He had an incredibly thick skin and never took offence at anything, and believe me, certain members of the orchestra tried their hardest to test this hypothesis to its limits! He had a wicked sense of humour. Following in the tradition of the great Ronnie Scott, he was always armed with a selection of one liners. Many of the best stories are unrepeatable in polite company! He never forgot a name or where someone was from, despite having worked with thousands of young musicians over the years. Most of all, he was incredibly generous and always willing to help out a young musician in need, often paying for the travel of some less fortunate band members out of his own pocket, or helping out with sourcing instruments, or offering a spare room in his house in Harrow. Long after I had left the band, I learned that he would often subsidise the band’s operating costs himself when a theatre show failed to reach a break even point, simply to keep the band running at full capacity. For decades on end he was able to operate without any sort of Arts Council grant – a true independent, working solely to his own vision.

Although I spoke to him on the phone a few times more, the last time I saw Bill in person was at a big band gig I played with Louis Dowdeswell at EarTH Hackney in late 2023. We paid tribute to him by playing Mark Nightingale’s stunning arrangement of ‘Bill’ from Show Boat. Of the band that night, all the trombones, all the trumpets, all the rhythm section, and all but one of the saxes6 were former NYJO members. This is not an unusual experience; it’s often this way in studio sessions, West End theatres and other big band gigs. Thanks to shared formative experiences over the generations, it often feels like everyone is part of the same enormous family. It would be remiss of me not to mention a few more family members: Emma Smith (who may be the first 2nd generation NYJO baby!); Mark Armstrong (who has tirelessly kept the NYJO ship sailing following Bill’s well earned retirement); Stan Sulzmann (apparently an attendee of the band’s first ever rehearsal way back in 1965); and of course some of music’s leading lights, Chris Dagley, Paul Hart and Amy Winehouse, all lost tragically young.

I met many of my closest friends and musical collaborators through NYJO; many people met their spouses. Bill must be responsible for thousands of little connections, musical or otherwise, each one of which makes the world a brighter and happier place. I will always remember Bill as the kind, generous man with the red suit and the straw hat who gave me the opportunity to learn the vast majority of what I know about music. The world should remember him as the man who single-handedly nurtured a huge proportion of the UK’s commercial music scene, and created something that we as a small country off the coast of Europe can be incredibly proud of.

My thoughts are with Bill’s family – Kay, Grant, Miles and Helen – I hope that you know how loved and respected Bill really was.

William Michael Allingham (Bill) Ashton OBE, Born 6 December 1936, Died 8 March 2025.