The Amy Winehouse Foundation has awarded $25,000 to the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music to finance scholarships for teenage jazz musicians. The parents of Amy Winehouse, Janis and Mitch Winehouse, attended a short ceremony at the nonprofit conservatory in Park Slope on Wednesday morning to hand over a giant facsimile of a check to Karen Geer, the executive director.
The money will go to defray the expenses of needy children accepted into the academy’s Teen Jazz Program, said Arlene Kriv, a spokeswoman for the conservatory. About half of the 43 students who study jazz in the Saturday program receive scholarships. (The full tuition is $2,500 for seven and a half months.)
The foundation was set up in Ms. Winehouse’s name by her family after she died of alcohol poisoning at her London apartment in July 2011, cutting short a brilliant career as a singer and songwriter. Its mission is to support music education programs for impoverished children and to finance drug-rehabilitation centers for addicts. Ms. Winehouse, whose retro-soul singing style and rough-edge lyrics attracted critical acclaim and earned her several Grammy Awards, had struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction for years before she died at the age of 27.
