Anita O'Day at the Film Forum

If you're within the sound of my voice (as New York disc jockeys used to say), hurry to the Cinema Village (12th Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place) to catch "Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer."  O'Day was one of the all-time best, whether singing the melody (as when she swings Rodgers & Hart with Billy May's arrangements) or veering off to the farthest imaginable extent (as in her amazing rendition of "Tea for Two" at Mr. Kelly's restaurant in Chicago, April 1958). Born Anita Colton in Chicago in 1919 she named herself O'Day because it was "dough" in Pig Latin, and dough is what she wanted to make. She sang with big bands (Gene Krupa, Stan Kenton) in the 40s and did duets with trumpeter Roy Eldridge. She then reinvented herself as a solo artist recording on the Verve label. She electrified the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with her treatment of "Sweet Georgia Brown." Her outfit on that sunny afternoon -- chic hat, white gloves, black dress -- was nearly as magnificent as her performance, and when her picture appeared in newsmagazines the public began to catch on to what other musicians knew all along. She was a self-made original: independent in a love-me-or-leave-me way, opinionated, candid. Her style was unique and she refused to compromise. O'Day used her voice as if it were an instrument; her bop scatting is the jazz equivalent of action painting. She lived high and went through dough more quickly than she could make it. Arrested for marijuana use in a frame-up, she figured she might as well try what she was accused of doing, and became, for the better part of two decades, a big-time heroin addict. It didn't hurt her singing. She managed to kick the habit and kept on ticking, unrepentantly, into her eighties. (Her obituary and Betty Comden's appeared on the same page of the New York Times one sad day late in 2006.) See the movie while you can. She'll show you half a dozen ways of approaching the Harold Arlen -- Ted Koehler standard, "Let's Fall in Love." And (in the words of a different song), when you fall you fall, and you might not mind it at all.

-- DL

Comments

[Laura Orem]

If you're like me and can't get to NYC to see the whole film, you can see the "Sweet Georgia Brown/Tea for Two" clip on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1V3n1u0JI8

I love how O'Day wins over the audience, who start out looking as interested as students at a calculus lecture (when they aren't shoving hot dogs in their mouths) and end up bopping all over the place.

And what a smashing hat!

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Who took the photo of her in the hat?