The jazz world lost another great one over the Thanksgiving holiday with the passing of Anita O’Day:
Anita O’Day, 87, whose breathy voice and witty improvisation made her one of the most dazzling jazz singers of the last century and whose sex appeal and drug addiction earned her the nickname “the Jezebel of Jazz,” died of pneumonia Nov. 23 at a convalescent hospital in West Los Angeles.
Ms. O’Day led one of the roughest lives in jazz, possibly surpassed only by her idol, Billie Holiday. Impoverished and largely abandoned in childhood, she became a marathon dancer and changed her surname from Colton to O’Day, pig Latin for “dough,” slang for money.
Over a five-decade career, a mental breakdown, a rape, numerous abortions, a 14-year addiction to heroin and time in jail all contributed to her legend as a survivor. Her 1981 as-told-to autobiography was appropriately titled “High Times, Hard Times.”
However, as a singer she soared. Jazz writer Nat Hentoff declared her “the most authentically hot jazz singer of all.”
In the 1940s, when most “girl singers” were pert appendages to a featured band, Ms. O’Day was a star attraction who often enlivened the orchestra with her playful and inspired vocals. She said she saw herself as an instrumentalist and often wore a band uniform instead of an evening gown.
She was among the hippest female singers of the big-band period, lending rare emotional resonance to the relentlessly up-tempo and brassy big bands of Gene Krupa and Stan Kenton. She gave both orchestras their first million-selling hits, doing a rare interracial duet on “Let Me Off Uptown” with Krupa trumpeter Roy Eldridge and then the novelty number “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine” with Kenton’s ensemble.
As with her idol Billie Holiday, though, O’Day had a rocky career:
Her vibrant appearance in the 1959 documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” a film about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, made her an international celebrity and brought her important dates in Japan and England.
Then, in 1966, she nearly died of a heroin overdose in a bathroom in a Los Angeles office building. The experience rattled her, and she quit heroin at once. Most of her money gone, she spent the rest of her life struggling financially.
In the early 1970s, she was living in a $3-a-night hotel in Los Angeles but she revived her career over the next decade, culminating in a profile of her on the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes.”
She received her first Grammy nomination in 1990 for “In a Mellow Tone” and was given an American Jazz Masters award in 1997 by the National Endowment for the Arts.
When interviewed, her voice indicated an unyielding distress and frequent irritation. She told a reporter that alcohol provided a welcome relief for her at the end of the day. In 1996, permanent alcoholic dementia was diagnosed.
She played jazz dates until late in life–with embarrassing results as her frailties overtook her talent. But she was to be honored in March 2007 as one of the “living legends” of jazz as part of the Kennedy Center’s Jazz in Our Time festival
I’ve got a few Anita O’Day CD’s in my collection and on the iPod and she is one of my favorite female jazz singers.
