Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
A friend, knowing my love for jazz, gave me two tickets to the Tribeca Film Festival for Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer. Manny and I, already exhausted - it’s only Monday night - dragged each other to the packed theater on 11th Street. Now we are back and jazzed.
What a talent and what a life. From the age of 19, Anita O’Day , until she died Thanksgiving morning, 11/26/2006, sang, swung with big bands, bebopped with Charlie Parker, and proceeded into a solo career in which she matched Ella, Billie, and Sarah in her ability to make songs her own, not to mention her brilliant vocal improvisations. Perhaps the high point in her career–which was very much her life itself–was her performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. She sang “Sweet Georgia Brown,” starting oh so slowly and then breaking out into a sexy rendition unlike any other. If you want to know why people make a fuss about Anita O’Day, watch the clip.
Her voice of course was beautiful; her stage presence as an authentic, tough, lady jazz singer was always remarkable. But what made her vocal interpretations transcendent was her unique and fluid timing. (When she was a girl, a surgeon removing her tonsils had accidentally sliced off her uvula. To replace vibrato, she relied on quick strings of eighth notes.) The documentary’s directors, Robert Cavolina and Ian McCrudden, capture Anita O’Day’s signature sound with a clever, syncopated editing style.
Other than the breathtaking songs, the high point of the movie comes in an old clip from the Today Show, maybe in the 1980s. An unctuous Bryant Gumbel interviews Anita in her late middle age, after she had kicked a fifteen-year heroin habit and written an autobiography called High Times, Hard Times.
He presses relentlessly on her life’s struggles, specifically, “rape, abortion, drug addiction…..” Apparently, he wanted her to repent or express a worn-out weariness after such a long toll. Smiling easily through his staccato questions, she says, You got to be a good loser, that’s all.
Good loser, he says, you sound bitter.
Not bitter, she says, still all smiles. Good. A good loser. But when he bemoans her acceptance of “a loser,” she turns and snaps. “Yeah, well that’s just the way it went down, Bryant.” That line got the most spontaneous applause from the movie audience, except of course until the lights went up.
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In 2004, at age 85, she sang at The Iridium to a very young audience that packed the house, laughed at her witty apologies, and danced gleefully to every song, only to scream for more.
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Stupid Bryant Gumbel. Guess he's the one who doesn't understand the real meaning of being a loser.
I'm glad you got to go! That's great.
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When she was a girl, a surgeon removing her tonsils had accidentally sliced off her uvula. To replace vibrato, she relied on quick strings of eighth notes.
*That* in and of itself is amazing.
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I love singers of her period and bemoan their loss because they had an attitude and style that is slipping away. As seen in Gumbel's thickheaded reaction to her, O'Day personified a kind of musician and a way of simply being that is becoming alien to people who expect tidy narratives and tucked corners instead of real, honest to God life.
Without a life steeped in genuine experience we wouldn't have our Anita. I'd trade 999 Bryant Gumbels for one of her.
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