A jazzy dame

Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer turned into an unexpected treat. I didn't know anything about O'Day going in--but I always try to watch music documentaries at Tribeca, they're usually very good.

This one started out pretty unevenly--the filmmakers choose a very disruptive editing style, with lots of random graphics and distracting transitions. Maybe they feared otherwise it'd be just another Ken Burns talking head documentary--there are worse things than that style, and one of them is going MTV on a subject that requires gazing.

Plus some of the interviews were shot in an amateurish fashion, with bad lighting and awful backgrounds. There's one extended interview with O'Day, intercut throughout, that seems like she shot it herself in one of those 4-photos-for-a-buck booth. She's constantly out-of-frame or too close to the camera--if it weren't for a bad zoom at one point of the interview I'd have believed that she did just film herself.

But try forget all that, and just listen to her O'Day's voice. Oh, my, gosh. I had no idea. I've never seen facial expressions like O'Day; never seen songs performed like she does, with arm movements and shoulders and body positioning--not over-the-top, just totally apt. Her voice isn't unbelievable, but it suited the songs she chose and her persona so well.

All I really knew about her was that line from Let Me Off Uptown, where (a famous black trumpeter, Roy Eldridge it turns out) wails "A-nniiii-ta, oh A-nniiii-ta... say, I feel somethin'". There's a clip of it, via YouTube.

It turns out the back story is Anita doing that duet with Roy was a pretty risky thing in 1941; I hadn't realized she was white, and obviously all the back-and-forth of the song between Anita and Roy would've riled up people back in the day.

O'Day was just like that--she did her thing, and let the chips fall where they may. There's a lot in the documentary about her drug problems; initially, she was jailed for marijuana--which she says just made her say if people think I'm like that, then I'll become like that (to the point of clubs advertising her as the 'Jezebel of Song').

Then later in life O'Day was on heroin for like 15 years, in a very serious way--to the point that she really should've died, except for luck and some of her many devoted friends (including Carroll O'Connor) helping her quit.

Aside from the drugs and a lot of sleeping around, she also spent a lot of years in Japan when jazz in the 60s fell out of favor in the States; and also seemed to love horse racing, and talking people's ear off.

But in the end, the documentary's memorable because of her music, more so than her story. As one of the many interesting jazz commentators said, she did "wonderful things with time"--and that's it, she had a great sense of when to speed, when to slow, when to play with a phrase, when to let it out rat-a-tat-tat, when to scat, when to go silent.

The filmmakers said afterwards her personality--which totally comes across in the film--was uninhibited; she spoke her mind and let it all out. There's a hilarious interview with a younger Bryant Gumbel, who's actually being a good journalist in repeatedly asking in different ways why she did drugs; she keeps putting him off, until saying in a tart tone: "That's just the way it went down... Bryant."

There's also interesting interviews with Dick Cavett, and Harry Reasoner. In one of them, displaying her wonderful cadence, the interviewer asks, "How could you ever get involved with all that junk?"

Her pitch-perfect 'response' which isn't done justice by type: "How could ya."

If she were a different type of person you could say she was vulgar, even low-class based on some of her life experiences; but in the package she was it wasn't true at all, the opposite actually.

As one of the commentators says, "there was a lot going on under the surface that catches you unaware because it's mysterious, restrained--it's kind of secret."

O'Day died about a month after the filmmakers showed her one of the final cuts; we're lucky some of her performances were caught on film in her lifetime. My favorite:

-Sweet Georgia Brown, in Newport Jazz Fest 1958 (from the very idiosyncratic documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day)


The drawn-out junglish opening and snycopated timing works perfectly for the song; it's funny watching the (very white) audience in the first part, before the camerman focuses more on her. (The second song, Tea for Two, has a shot of the famed 'ice cream lady.')

And oh that outfit, in combination with that saucy voice punching it out; she's totally in her element. This is one of the greatest performances I've ever seen on film; it's so interesting.

And she alludes in the film to being high at the time.

Uncredited Anita O'Day photo at Newport from Time magazine in various places online. She tells the story in the film of how she pulled together the outfit at the last second.