The problem with dying at the age of 27 is that that's what most people remember you for. That and how you died. When the news broke in July 2011 that Amy Winehouse had been found dead in her London flat, the sheer inevitability seemed enough to drown out everything else. Her drug and alcohol addiction were so well documented, her slow demise into confusion and catastrophe so public, that the end of her life came as a well-positioned full stop.
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And yet ... and yet. Five years down the track, it's hard to imagine what could have come after if Winehouse had lived. Far easier to listen to her excellent albums and reminisce about her towering busted black weave, her street antics, the husky voice so at odds with the cockney accent, and the awful tragedy that her life became.
Or, you could put on a tribute show.
Composer and saxophonist Joe McEvilly doesn't particularly like the word "tribute" to describe his new touring show, We May Never Meet Again, even though as a long-term fan, what he's doing is a tribute in the truest sense.
"A tribute show has a lot of connotations – mainly that you're trying to play the music like the original musicians did it, which is what people turn up expecting to see, whereas we're actually doing something different," he says.
"We call it a 'reimagining'." As in, what if she had got through her 20s, kept on writing music, recorded more albums and collaborated with more people? The jazz pianist Robert Glasper, for example, or Tower of Power? What if she had lived long enough to see a bunch of Australian jazz musicians reinterpret her work?
Of course we'll never know, but McEvilly, who studied saxophone at the ANU School of Music and heads a nine-piece fusion band in Melbourne, would like to think she would have approved.
The group, collaborating with singer Elly Poletti, began working on the project in 2014, three years after Winehouse's death. Although he had long been an admirer of the idiosyncratic singer, McEvilly found himself sucked irretrievably into the world of Winehouse the more he listened to her work. It was her words, as much as the music itself, that inspired him the most.
"As I got into the music really deeply to do this project, I wanted to do it justice. I just became more and more overawed by what she was able to do," he says.
"The music on the surface is really catchy and well-written, and as you go deeper and deeper into it, you start working out some of those lyrics that you were never able to decipher before, and there's so much gold just hidden in there."
Winehouse packed a lot into her 27 years, the last few of which were spent in the harshest possible spotlight, and yet she had an uncanny ability to distil a year's worth of heartbreak into one album, one song – even one line.
"What we try and do is put it in a new perspective, a new light and let some of that stuff come through a little bit," he says.
"So we take a song that's really fast and the lyrics [are] not a focus on the original recording, and we make it a ballad, and suddenly it's heartbreaking."
Similarly, singer Elly Poletti has not been tempted by the caricature that Winehouse presented of herself, especially in her last days. She has kept her own dyed red hair and dresses in simple black for the show, and steers clear of trying to recreate Winehouse's unmistakable growl. Her voice, while deep, is more smoky than dirty.
"I think I'm more myself interpreting her," she says.
"I like tribute shows, but I've been to some in the past where they've really tried to impersonate the person and done a really bad job or good job. I never really wanted to do that, I never wanted to impersonate her because she's the only Amy Winehouse in the world."
The Winehouse she sees was witty, clever and completely inimitable, with music that is well worth a second go – a reimagining.
This will be the second year that the show has toured Australia, and the Winehouse story has only gained momentum over the years. It was serendipitous that the much-lauded documentary about her life was released around the time the group was preparing for its first tour.
"It was a pleasant surprise for us that there was this synchronicity – everyone was suddenly talking about Amy Winehouse again," he said.
"And the movie was heartbreaking … You stop seeing her as a tabloid figure and it just really forces you to see her as just a young person with all these hopes and ambitions. And to see a person getting slowly destroyed is absolutely terrifying."
The movie highlights Winehouse's work as a songwriter, with subtitles under every song performance, often accompanied by the singer's own handwritten lyrics – further impetus for McEvilly to hone in on her creative process.
"It seemed so effortless for her when she sings on stage, but kind of good to know that it wasn't all effortless. She worked really hard," he says.
The show was a sell-out when it toured last year, and while it's aimed at Winehouse fans, he hopes more people will get to consider her in a different light.
"We're doing a couple of new songs, changing things around, and I'm really looking at trying to make it one journey from start to finish, and building that into a series of different songs, [to] make it a cohesive journey," he says.
"Some people come up to us and say, 'That song has never said that to me before the way it did tonight'. It's another way into Amy and what she wrote, or another way of hearing the songs you already know. It's a show just for anyone who's maybe just curious, because we've got a bunch of really, really great musicians."
We May Never Meet Again: The Music of Amy Winehouse is at the Street Theatre on Friday, February 12 at 8pm. Visit thestreet.org.au for more information.
