Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer


Anita O'DayA 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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May 1st, 2007
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Viewing 9 Comments

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    I'm so looking forward to seeing this movie. She was such a great singer. Just for starters, her collaboration with Gary McFarland, the LP "All the Sad Young Men". Even if you think you don't like jazz, check her out.
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    The documentary is amazing. They start with clips of her singing and dancing when she was very young. Teamed with Roy Eldridge in Krupa's band (one of the first inter-racial musical combos on stage), she danced through his solos. In the clips, he chastises her for upstaging him. The documentary makers intersperse her younger years with talk show appearances, testimonials from musicians who admired her, and her own commentary on her career and life when she was 87, the year the film was made. At 87, having recovered a little after her throat was burned at a hospital, she continued to perform. Those shaky but famous songs, where she's apologizing for changing keys between lines are overlapped with divided screens showing her doing the same songs at different times. So you really do get a sense of this artist's consistency even as her powers waned. She was always a performing one hundred percent (doped or not--it didn't show with her). For that "Georgia Brown" performance, she admits her addiction was well-fed. Rather, what dominated her every performance was joy, jazz, creativity, and the surrender that ultimately demands to the music itself. And she kept at it until she died.
    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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    Wow, grasshopper. Great post! And I just *loved* that clip. What a doll she was. And all those people in the clip were so cool, too.

    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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    Forgot to say...

    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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    That clip is amazing. It starts out so slow--not very promising, frankly. You can just feel the muggy heat, and the hangovers of the crowd from the night before. A man scratching his arm. A lady eating half a sandwich. A priest in full collar looking awfully hot. Then, about 1:50 minutes in, something happens. Not an obvious change in tempo, but a groove kicks in that sparks this quiet, sexy energy in Anita. And it captures the crowd. Their body language changes. Then she really gets into it. The priest claps his hands spontaneously and then drops his head (guiltily?) What a cool clip.
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    Undeniably one of the greats. I love her tone, the brassiness, the swing, the musicality.

    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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    So nice to see this appreciation for this great artist; it brings a tear to the old eye. Don't get me started on Chris Connor...
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    What a super woman! Never a Diva and always a collaborator to the highest of her highest! Even without any chemical substances! What a force of Nature! Gorgeous and what a neck and profile! Documentarist knew they were in the presence of a real master! bEATRIZ
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    Nice post. Interesting to read indeed.
 

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