ComfortComes

The Jezebel of Jazz

I would be horrified if the only thing I ever told you about Anita O’Day was the brief paragraph she received in my review of “Jazz on a Summer’s Day.” That is how she has often been referred to in the history of jazz: a paragraph, often overlooked. But among the community of jazz musicians she is considered to be one of the few great singers of the golden age of jazz, among the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan. It is truly amazing that Anita lived long enough to actually see the golden age of jazz, given her rough history of rape, abortion, jail, and heroin addiction. But she did live to see it and surpass it, in the end outliving Ella, Billie, Sarah and a host of other jazz musicians who were equally as talented, yet not as lucky, as she.

She was born Anita Belle Colton in 1919, technically died from an overdose on March 8, 1966, was resuscitated, and proceeded to live another forty years and release another fourteen albums. Every moment surrounding these points of life and death was filled with music. She got her big break in 1940 when she was hired to be the vocalist in Gene Krupa’s big band. It was with Krupa’s band that Anita’s talent as an entertainer emerged. “Let Me Off Uptown” featured Anita and trumpeter Roy Eldredge in a call-and-response duet (a progressive concept for the racially divided time) that left Eldredge angry over the fact that Anita was upstaging him.

After five years with Krupa, Anita left to sing in Stan Kenton’s band where her already hard-swinging life stood in apparent contrast to the other band members’. (She marveled at the lack of smoking and the fact that they would get water and read during the breaks.) Rebelling against the popular “chick singer” notion of the day, Anita insisted on wearing a regular band outfit and being considered equally as a musician. After recording forty tunes in 1944 with the Kenton band, Anita found them a replacement singer and struck out in a different direction. Lucky for Stan, Anita had an eye for talent: the new singer was Shirley Lester, who later changed her name to June Christy and achieved remarkable success in her own right.

In the new wave of bebop, Anita formed her own group and began to develop her signature sound. She was a master of rhythm and phrasing. Due to a slip of the knife during a tonsillectomy she underwent as a child, Anita’s uvula had been cut and resulted in the singer’s inability to sustain long notes. To adapt she often divided one long note into eighth notes, for example, changing the held note, “sweet,” to “swee-ee-eet.” In this and many other ways, she excelled as an innovator. She listened intently to the other musicians, continually engaging in call-and-response improvisations. One musician she worked with remembers her telling him that she used all the sounds in a room for inspiration, even the rhythmic buzz of a ceiling fan in one particular venue.

It was during this time in her life that Anita met drummer John Poole who she would work with for thirty years and whose friendship was dear but costly. Anita had previously been suspected and busted for drug use, but it was Poole who gave Anita her first taste of heroin. By 1954 the two were so deep into drugs that they would make it a point to stay at different hotels while gigging, so that one could take the heat for the other if the cops came around. A neighbor of the pair remembers hearing their connection drive every Sunday morning up to their apartment on the beach and make his delivery by ladder to their bedroom window.

As Anita’s musical style developed, it caught on with jazz fans around the nation and world. She was the unexpected star of the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, which she didn’t even know was being filmed. She was the first vocalist ever recorded by the label Verve. She found a devoted audience in Japan. She worked with musicians and arrangers of great caliber, such as Duke Ellington, Billy May, Benny Goodman, Buddy Bregman, and Oscar Peterson. Peterson notes in his autobiography that he “admired her tenacity and musical courage.” The duo complimented each other tremendously, as Peterson may be one of the few musicians who also routinely chose flying tempos and managed them with clean, crisp dexterity. (See “Them There Eyes” on the 1957 album Anita Sings the Most.)

Anita O’Day was highly regarded by fans and musicians alike, yet was caught in a downward spiral of drug abuse. She was constantly desperate for money as every dollar she earned went into her veins. In her excellent autobiography, High Times, Hard Times, Anita confesses, “Between 1961 and 1966 there is very little I can tell you for sure.” She remarkably was able to keep a pretty straight face in the public life, yet it wasn’t until her overdose in 1966 that she became clean and started anew. “I was lucky I got out,” she says in the documentary Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, “Miles couldn’t get out, Charlie Parker couldn’t get out, Billie couldn’t get out…”

She was extremely lucky. Anita continued to work as a jazz singer until her death on Thanksgiving Day of 2006. She toured Japan extensively, releasing a number of albums of her work there, and even released an album titled “Indestructible!” that was completed on her 86th birthday. Her life was hard, indeed, but that depth of experience allowed her to communicate lyrics in a way that few can. She took chances musically and changed the world of jazz. Says Johnny Mandel, “Nobody sounded like Anita O’Day. Ever! She didn’t borrow from anyone. Others borrowed from her later…” She was and is perhaps underappreciated, but those who have heard her music know what the rest are missing.