Bill Ashton: 6 December 1936 – 8 March 2025

Bill Ashton, the founding father and driving force behind the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, has died. He was 88 and had been in poor health. Bill’s legacy is multi-faceted: it endures in the extraordinary success of the many jazz musicians who spent their formative years with NYJO, and in the band’s substantial discography as well as in the numerous publications and charts offered by Stanza Music, all overseen by Bill.

William Michael Allingham ‘Bill’ Ashton was born in Blackpool, and began to play saxophone and clarinet while at Rossall School in nearby Fleetwood from 1950-55, and continued to perform during his RAF service. While at Oxford’s St Peter’s College where he read French, Bill founded the University Dance Band, the Modern Jazz Club and the Oxford University Big Band. Thus establishing a process that continued thereafter: wherever Bill went a big band was sure to follow.

After graduation, he taught in France for a while, played gigs and returned to Oxford where he won an award in the Inter-University Jazz Band Competition in 1962. After again touring in France, he moved to London a year later, worked in a blues band and taught French locally, co-founding the London Schools Jazz Band (with Pat Evans) which after a minor name change, morphed into its permanent title as the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. From then on, NYJO became a beacon for others to follow and a point of arrival and consolidation for an army of aspiring young jazz players.

Bill stood aside from teaching in 1973 to take on NYJO as its full-time Musical Director, setting in train a mini-industry of jazz activity, with concerts, school workshops, overseas tours, and rewarding associations with visiting artists like trumpeter Shorty Rogers. He wrote songs and lyrics, edited NYJO’s house magazine, found sponsors, commissioned arrangements, and saw to it (via the NYJO label) that the band’s recordings were widely known.  He and his wife Kay, kept open house at their home in Harrow, with an ever-changing flow of young musicians passing through and a band bus parked ready to go. They played regular seasons at Ronnie Scott’s to great acclaim, with Bill out front, calling the tunes and identifying each soloist in turn, with a name-check for their home town, and clearly having the time of his life.

Sometimes obdurate yet indefatigable, always driven and inordinately proud of his players, Bill gave his heart and soul to NYJO, supported in full by Kay.  Brilliant young musicians became fully-fledged professionals as Bill led them on: think Guy Barker, Mark Nightingale, Gerard Presencer, Sammy Mayne, Pete Long, Martin Shaw or Mark Armstrong (who succeeded Bill as MD) and briefly, Amy Winehouse. Skills were honed, solo confidence built, flexibility understood and writing encouraged, each NYJO member eventually propelled into the big, wide musical world, properly prepared and ready, at just 25, their chair made over to the next eager young player. Bill was awarded the MBE in 1978 for his services to jazz; this raised to OBE in 2010. He received the Silver Medal of the Worshipful Company of Musician and was made a Fellow of Leeds College of Music in 1995. He retired from NYJO in 2009 as a new top team took over and became its Life President. Happily, for the future of British jazz, NYJO plays on.

Thanks, Bill for all that you’ve done for British jazz here and abroad. Our condolences go out to Kay, to their son Miles and to daughter Helen. RIP Bill.