AnitaO'Day dies

[brownie]

Very sad day!

http://www.anitaoday.com/

[king ubu]

Very sad news. Her Mosaic was one of the biggest surprises - not that I expected it to be less than good, but it turned out to be great, and full of terrific performances, an instant love-affair! Thank you for all the music, Ms. O'Day.

[couw]

oy!

RIP

[HolyStitt]

This is sad news.

May she rest in peace.

Her Mosaic was one of the biggest surprises - not that I expected it to be less than good, but it turned out to be great, and full of terrific performances, an instant love-affair!

Same situation for me. Mosaic actually mis-shipped it to me. When I called to report it they advised me to listen to the set and if I disliked it to send it back. Well, they knew darn well I wouldn't be sending it back after hearing the wonderful music.

[Harold_Z]

Geez! Another one of the greats, RIP Anita.

You're uptown now.

[(BB)]

Not a surprise, but a sad day nonetheless.

[J.A.W.]

Another sad day for jazz...

I love her great performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (Jazz on a Summer's Day)

[ValerieB]

we've lost another legend. she lived her life to the fullest.

party on, anita!

[chris olivarez]

RIP.

[ghost of miles]

Very sad news--another one of the greats gone. I interviewed her over the phone several years ago, and it was one of the biggest thrills of my life--I had so much love & admiration for her singing and her remarkable ability to endure as a person.

[Matthew]

*Sigh* Very sad news. Such a wonderful singer.

[garthsj]

This is indeed a sad day for me personally. There are so many strong memories that I associate with her music. I am so tired (and scared) of writing in my journal that the "heroes" of my youth are no longer around. So far this morning I have worked my way through the first three CDs of the Mosiac box, and each tune evokes a memory ... I remember almost playing into vinyl dust her famous LP "Anita" with her opening tune "Honeysuckle Rose" with the great Joe Mondragon bass intro ... at least we have the music to listen to ...

Edited November 23, 2006 by garthsj

[neveronfriday]

[Herb]

RIP It seems that we have lost so many greats during our lives, and I did a little reflecting on it and posted this at another forum that I moderate. It is sad that we lose these great artists, but there is one positive aspect to it. If we are alive when they pass on; then we have been lucky enough to actually be around and experience their great talent while their light was still shining. Being born in 1950; I have seen and heard an absolutely mind boggling amount of talent in my life. I consider myself well blessed.

[Clunky]

Very sad news. Her Mosaic was one of the biggest surprises - not that I expected it to be less than good, but it turned out to be great, and full of terrific performances, an instant love-affair! Thank you for all the music, Ms. O'Day.

ditto in all respects

one helluva swinger,,,,RIP

[sidewinder]

Sad but not unexpected news. RIP.

Mosaic set playing tribute this weekend.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

Sux- will listen 2 KEY LARGO

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I'm going to play "Hop skip and jump" - Gene Krupa's band.

Then I'm going to think seriously about the Mosaic.

RIP

MG

[Stereojack]

This really hurts. She was the greatest!

No gal made has got a shade on Anita O'Day!

[gslade]

My personal favorite.

Thanks for the music. RIP.

[EKE BBB]

Rest in peace. Another great is gone. A personal favorite of mine.

Anita O'Day, 87, Dies in West Los Angeles

By Adam Bernstein

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, November 23, 2006; 2:18 PM

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 Nov.

23 in West Los Angeles, according to her Web site.

Ms. O'Day led one of the roughest lives in jazz, surpassed only by her

idol, Billie Holiday. Impoverished and largely abandoned in childhood, she

left her home in Chicago to work as a marathon walker and dancer during the

Depression. About that time, she changed her surname from Colton to

O'Day, pig Latin for "dough," slang for money.

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

over a five-decade career. She could be cantankerous in manner and dismissive

of interviewers trying to moralize about her experiences. She seemed to

live always in the present, going so far as to claim she never read her 1981

as-told-to autobiography, appropriately titled "High Times, Hard

Times."

First as a replacement singer in a nightclub, she honed a freely

swinging singing style that led to a career with some of the top bands of the

period. Critics wrote rhapsodically about her, with Nat Hentoff declaring 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 was often seen wearing a band uniform, instead of

an evening gown, to publicly demonstrate her musicality over her striking

looks.

She was among the hippest women singers of the big-band period, lending

rare emotional resonance to the relentlessly uptempo 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.

With Verve records in the 1950s, she performed some of the most

inventive interpretations of jazz standards. Andy Razaf, who wrote the words to

Fats Waller's "Honeysuckle Rose," once said hers was the definitive version

of the tune -- even surpassing Waller's earlier recording of the song.

Ms. O'Day was sometimes compared with Holiday, with whom she shared a

tendency to project vulnerability through a calculated crack in her

tone. She also enjoyed the unpredictability of verbal improvisation and was

highly regarded for her scat singing.

As a rule, she once said, she sang the melody straight when

accompanying big bands but felt freer to mold the melody with her own ideas.

Her signature sound was to create an elasticity with words, often to

break them down to faster eight and sixteenth notes instead of the quarter

notes that were harder for her to sustain. This tendency was the result of a

childhood tonsillectomy in which the doctor had accidentally removed

her uvula, the bit of flesh that hangs from the back of the mouth and that

vibrations of which control tone.

To compensate, she would stretch single-syllable words in a playful and

often sexy manner; "you" would be "you-ew-ew-ew," love would became

"lah-uh-uh-uv." "When you haven't got that much voice, you have to use all the cracks

and crevices and the black and the white keys," she once said.

Even during her addiction to heroin in the 1950s and 1960s, Hentoff and

Leonard Feather noted her stunning vocal talents. As jazz fell out of

popular favor, she continued to sing but in smaller venues. She was not

left with much money -- much of it having gone to support her drug habit --

and she wrote in her 1981 autobiography that she lived for singing.

In 1984, Ms. O'Day told The Washington Post that she viewed herself as

a stylist grounded in rhythm more than a singer with showy technique. "I

even took vocal lessons and I tried to get all these tones going and I never

thought to look inside the throat," she said. "It was all from inside,

from the heart, desire."

Ms. O'Day was born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago, where her father was

a printer and her mother worked at a meat-packing plant.

She recalled in her autobiography her parents constantly fighting--when

her alcoholic father bothered to show up at all. She wrote that they

married only after her mother became pregnant. Her father later left the family

and married a total of 10 women.

As a child, she listened to the radio and sang in church. In the

mid-1930s, she dropped out of school and hitchhiked to Muskegon, Mich., to enter a

walkathon, one of the Depression-era crazes in which the contestants

were fed in exchange for the brutal entertainment. She claimed to have

walked 97 consecutive days upright and did not complain because "when you are 14,

you don't hurt."

She also sang at some of the events and at other clubs and burlesque

houses. By 1939, as Anita O'Day, she was performing in a downtown Chicago club

with Max Miller's band and received a positive review in Down Beat magazine.

Krupa noticed her in Chicago and hired her and Eldridge in 1941. The

jazz writer Will Friedwald once noted that the new additions "galvanized the

Krupa men and positively transformed the band into one of the most

powerful bands of the great era, putting it in a class with Ellington, Basie,

Goodman and Dorsey. The Krupa-O'Day combination also signified the first time

since Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb that a great jazz singer had been

extensively featured with a great jazz ensemble."

With her hip phrasing and sex appeal, she became a national name. She

left Krupa when he was arrested in 1943 for marijuana possession and

rejoined him in 1946 when he formed a new band. It was with that expert drummer that

she had her biggest renown in the 1940s, starting with her first

million-selling record--and best-known early recording--"Let Me Off Uptown."

That tune paired O'Day's hot and sultry vocalizing with Eldridge's

raspy voice and roaring trumpet. The sexy flirting between the white O'Day

and black Eldridge was groundbreaking. "Do you feel the heat?" she asks

Eldridge, before instructing him to "blow, Roy, blow!"

They also had hits with "Boogie Blues" and "Just a Little Bit South of

North Carolina."

Ms. O'Day worked with some of the loudest, brassiest and

hardest-swinging of mainstream big bands. Besides Krupa's group, she also spent shorter and

less-enjoyable stints with Woody Herman and Kenton, whose intellectual,

"modern" sound did not mesh with her accent on easy swing. She did,

however,

credit Kenton with helping her better understand chord structure.

The relentless performing on tour triggered a nervous breakdown. She

decided

in 1946 to settle in the Los Angeles area and work alone.

In 1947, she received her first jail sentence, for marijuana

possession. In 1953, she was convicted for heroin possession, although she told

interviewers she was framed.

She downplayed her arrests, writing in her autobiography that she

"looked on serving my sentences as a kind of vacation. . . . Rehabilitated?

Hardly. Rested? Definitely."

Despite a period of recording less than scintillating songs, such as

"The Tennessee Waltz," her drug notoriety enhanced her career. Her handlers

dubbed her "the Jezebel of Jazz."

In Chicago, she, her second husband and a third partner opened a

downtown jazz club, the Hi Note, where she was the star attraction. Guest

performers included singer Carmen McRae and trumpeter Miles Davis.

In 1956, she was signed by Verve records. The nearly 20 albums she put

out on Verve during the next decade were among her most tantalizing,

including "Anita" (with "Honeysuckle Rose"), "Pick Yourself Up," "Anita O'Day

Swings Cole Porter," "Make Mine Blues," "All the Sad Young Men" and "Travelin'

Light."

She also played with Benny Goodman (who in the early 1940s refused to

hire her because she was not disciplined enough to stick to a music chart),

Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Joe

Williams and Oscar Peterson. She also had a 32-year musical association

with drummer John Poole, who she credited with introduced her to heroin. She

said the drug helped her off alcohol but also kept her financially insolvent

for many years.

Her vibrant appearance in the 1959 documentary "Jazz on a Summer's

Day," a film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, made her a celebrity on an

international level and brought her important musical dates in Japan

and England.

Then, in 1966, she nearly died from 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 to

put herself together.

In the early 1970s, she was living in a $3-a-night hotel in Los Angeles. But

by the end of the decade she had her own record label, Emily Records

(named after her dog), a series of enormously successful club dates with rave

reviews and a resurgence in popularity following her autobiography's

publication. The CBS newsmagazine "60 Minutes" broadcast a segment on

her.

She alternated between seclusion--she was hesitant to appear before

crowds who came to gawk--and going abroad on well-publicized engagements. She

received her first Grammy nomination in 1990 for "In a Mellow Tone" and

in 1997 was given an American Jazz Masters award by the National Endowment

for the Arts.

When interviewed, her voice indicated an unyielding distress and

frequent irritation. She told one reporter that alcohol provided a welcome

relief for her at the end of the day. In 1996, she was diagnosed with permanent

alcoholic dementia.

She played jazz dates until late in life--with embarrassing results as

her frailties overtook her talent--and ended her autobiography by saying

that was all she had left. "It's a different world when the music stops,"

she wrote.

But she was to be one of the "living legends" of jazz to be honored in

March 2007 at the Kennedy Center as part of its "Jazz in Our Time" festival.

Her marriages to drummer Don Carter, which she said was never

consummated, and golfer Carl Hoff, whom she called unfaithful, ended in divorce.

She said she never wanted children, telling People magazine, "Ethel

Kennedy dropped 11. There are enough people in the world. I did my part by

raising dogs."

She dedicated her autobiography to her dog.

[mikeweil]

R.I.P., and "Thanks For The Memories" (the opening track from her Verve album with Cla Tjader, which forever implanted her voice in my inner ear).

[Clunky]

This really hurts. She was the greatest!

No gal made has got a shade on Anita O'Day!

Sweet...

[Teasing the Korean]

I am one of the sad young men. Say hi to Gary for me, Anita.

Edited November 24, 2006 by Teasing the Korean

[LAL]

:(

Thank you for the wonderful music.