Comments on: Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

By: Dan Leo

Dan Leo — Wed, 02 May 2007 21:04:42 +0000

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…

By: Kevin Wolf

Kevin Wolf — Wed, 02 May 2007 20:22:16 +0000

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.

By: bosco

bosco — Wed, 02 May 2007 16:01:58 +0000

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.

By: blue girl

blue girl — Wed, 02 May 2007 12:38:55 +0000

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.

By: blue girl

blue girl — Wed, 02 May 2007 12:37:13 +0000

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.

By: Kathleen Maher

Kathleen Maher — Wed, 02 May 2007 11:26:50 +0000

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.

By: Dan Leo

Dan Leo — Wed, 02 May 2007 08:35:11 +0000

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.