AnitaO'Day dies

[felser]

A GREAT jazz singer, and a survivor. It's a miracle that she lived to 87, and I'm thankful for her musical legacy.

[brownie]

[Durium]

Anita O'Day

She was a great singer !!

Keep swinging

Durium

[bichos]

she was one with absolutly her own style. love the airchecks with her from the royal roost from 1948.

[Durium]

she was one with absolutly her own style. love the airchecks with her from the royal roost from 1948.

Are these Royal Roost airchecks equal to my 1948 live recordings with Fats' Gang?

You can listen here

Keep swinging

Durium

[Shawn]

This one really hurts. Anita was more than a "vocalist", she was a master improviser. There should be a picture of her beside "Hip" in the dictionary.

Rest In Peace.

[vajerzy]

I just started working though the Mosaic- again.......glad I bought it.

[GA Russell]

RIP, Anita. I just gave my sister for her birthday a copy of the Anita entry in The Diva Series; so I am glad I did that during her lifetime.

Yesterday I alerted The Drudge Report on Anita s death, and today Drudge has the link to her obituary near the top of the column; so I guess that Drudge pays attention to the people who alert him to the news. Of course, I can imagine that there were many jazz fans from throughout the world who did as I did, so maybe Drudge figured that Anita was someone he should know about.

[ghost of miles]

This one really hurts. Anita was more than a "vocalist", she was a master improviser. There should be a picture of her beside "Hip" in the dictionary.

Rest In Peace.

Yeah, it's hurting even more today than it was yesterday, even though the news wasn't entirely unexpected. Listening to some of the early sides with Krupa right now.

[bichos]

she was one with absolutly her own style. love the airchecks with her from the royal roost from 1948.

Are these Royal Roost airchecks equal to my 1948 live recordings with Fats' Gang?

You can listen here

Keep swinging

Durium

yes, they are. but it was tadd dameron´s "gang". (and on anita´s recordings is unfortunately no fats navarro.)

wonderful, timeless, stylish bop vocals.

keep boppin´

marcel

[ValerieB]

A GREAT jazz singer, and a survivor. It's a miracle that she lived to 87, and I'm thankful for her musical legacy.

that's exactly what i've been thinking. given how she lived, it was definitely a miracle she was with us for so long!

[sheldonm]

That's probably one of my favorite jazz dvds....love those crowd shots.....the lady chompin' on her hot dog, the dude scratching his skeeter bites!......and Anita is hot and sounding great!!! RIP~

m~

[fomafomic65]

Joining the sadness for this bad new.

RIP unforgettableAnita.

[BruceH]

One of the great jazz singers of all time. There'll always be the music. Here's to you, Anita! R.I.P.

[catesta]

I didn't know.

R.I.P., Ms. Day.

[randissimo]

My Anita O'Day Story...

In the mid-80's I saw Anita O'Day in Detroit at Baker's.. After her set I approached Anita to get an autograph for my mother, a long time fan of her music. Anita told me to get a paper & pen and she'd be happy to give me her autograph for my mom. I come back with a bar napkin and a pen and Anita looks funny at me and says, "man,, I ain't signin' no motherfuckin' napkin,, go get me a real piece of paper" ..

She was a class act!

[B. Goren.]

R.I.P., Ms. O'Day.

[Randy Twizzle]

According to the YouTube description this is a trailer for an

[ASNL77]

Very sad news. I discovered Anita thanks to Mosaic. What a wonderful artist she was!

Thanks for the music. R.I.P.

[EKE BBB]

From The Independent:

Jazz diva with an inimitable style

Published: 25 November 2006

Anita Belle Colton (Anita O'Day), jazz singer: born Chicago, Illinois 18 October 1919; married first Don Carter (marriage annulled), second Carl Hoff (marriage dissolved); died Los Angeles 23 November 2006.

'I may disappear sometimes, but I never stop . . . I'm up when I'm up and I'm down when I'm down," Anita O'Day once said. She was the last of the instantly recognisable jazz divas from a group that included Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae. Her singing career, which lasted longer than any other in jazz - more than 60 years - was marked out by extreme highs and lows.

She begins her unusually gripping autobiography, High Times Hard Times (1981), with a ghastly account of being found in a ladies' lavatory after a heroin overdose in 1966:

Dee [her friend] panicked. She jumped up, ran over and rammed the door like a bulldozer. The door gave and she saw me crumpled on the floor with the hypodermic needle still in my arm. She pulled it out and hid the outfit in her dress . . .

. . . at one point the doctors could detect no heartbeat and were just drawing the sheet over my face - in other words I seemed to be dead - when a young doctor ran in with some contraption he used to get my heart started again.

Several times over the years O'Day came close to death from self-neglect. She had started using heroin in 1953 and remained unrepentant. "All the people from years back, they were all on dope," she claimed.

Who was that guy that played the piano? Beethoven. Everybody said "Great, great, great." Well, did you ever read his story? He was on dope! So the normal people, with the normal head and everything, never get too far.

At her best a delightful and agile singer with a unique sense of humour, she had an original and musically literate style that made her impossible for anyone else to copy. Her individuality was emphasised further when, in the early Thirties, a doctor accidentally cut off her uvula whilst taking out her tonsils. This made it difficult for her to sustain notes, and meant that she sang largely without using vibrato. It was rare to hear her hold a long note.

Like Billie Holiday, she would bend lyrics and break or stretch words in a way that was very sexy. She regarded herself as a musician rather than as a singer and wanted to be respected accordingly. To that end, she usually refused to wear glamorous gowns and there were many rows with nightclub owners over the smart suits that she wore on stage.

O'Day had a fast articulation and her deep knowledge of harmony made her superior even to Ella Fitzgerald in exchanging rapid musical ideas with instrumental soloists. Scat singing, the wordless singing at which both women excelled with notable exuberance, is an unlovely form, but it did enable them to stand side by side with the great jazz horn players.

The most renowned example of O'Day's skills in this department and indeed the appearance that was to be considered the high point of her career was in the film Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960), a record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival where she sang "Tea For Two" and "Sweet Georgia Brown". There have been many failed attempts to copy her speed and vocal acrobatics of that day. Her triumph was completed by the dramatic matching hat and dress she'd bought for the occasion and they, combined with her "hip" mannerisms and beautiful looks, gave her an intense sex appeal. But she could be abrasive with fans, promoters and musicians alike.

Whilst the film brought her universal acclaim and led to an abundance of work in clubs, it was her singing in the recording studios that established her with jazz enthusiasts. A harsh self-critic, she dismissed one of her most popular albums, Anita Sings the Most (1957), recorded with the Oscar Peterson Quartet:

Songs to me are like horse races. We're off and running and if it lays real good in the back stretch you try to win. The only one I really lost was with Oscar Peterson. I lost 12 tunes consecutively.

This album, like the best of her work, was done for the entrepreneur Norman Granz, who rescued O'Day's career in the same way that he had reclaimed that of O'Day's sparring partner, the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, and indeed of many other musicians. O'Day recorded 189 songs for Granz between 1952 and 1962.

In 1941 she had formed a dazzling musical partnership with Eldridge, who, apart from being amongst the top half dozen trumpeters, was also a great jazz singer. It was, like the deep hatred between them offstage, to persist in many reunions over the years.

After a rugged childhood in Chicago which included two abortions, O'Day "was so unhappy about what I'd done with my life, I'd become a falling-down drunk." Born Anita Belle Colton, she had left home when she was 12. She began competing in dance marathons when she was 14. When she started singing at them she took the name O'Day (pig Latin for the "dough" she hoped to make). She started singing in nightclubs when she was 19 and joined the drummer Gene Krupa's big band in 1941.

Eldridge, already an established star, joined a few weeks later. The two recorded a duet, "Let Me Off Uptown" (1941) which became their biggest hit. By now O'Day was one of the foremost exploiters of the contemporary vogue for "hip" mannerisms and she used them so well that they remained a vital part of her presentation until her last performances. She liked to shock her audiences too, and, in the days when such things were considered daring, used to introduce her drummer John Poole to her audiences as "my room mate".

She left Krupa and joined Stan Kenton's band where she stayed from 1944 to 1945, creating more hits with records like "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine". She joined the Woody Herman band for four weeks when it was resident in Los Angeles and infuriated Herman by leaving him when the band went on the road. "He got really mad," she said. "I heard from someone years later that when he was seriously ill Woody was still angry and saying that I left the band without a singer." She returned to Krupa for a year in 1945.

In 1947, she was sent to jail for possession of marijuana. Then, in 1953, she was convicted of possessing heroin, although she claimed that she had been framed.

The success of the records with Krupa and Kenton encouraged her to take a solo career and this she followed until the end of her life, making exceptions for the reunions with Eldridge and an unlikely European tour as the singer with the Benny Goodman band in 1959. It was in that year that she toured in the United States as part of a bill with the Humphrey Lyttelton band. Her pianist became ill and Lyttelton generously agreed for her to use his fine pianist Ian Armit. "Did you see what they've done to me?" she wailed to Thelonious Monk, who was also on the tour. "They've given me a Dixieland pianist."

The heroin addiction lasted until she kicked the habit on her own in 1968. It was simply part of a life that had included two failed marriages, arrests and incarceration for drug offences, alcoholism, nervous breakdowns, broken bones and serious illnesses.

In November 1996, when she was 76, she fell over a dog outside her trailer home in Palm Springs and broke her arm. "The Scotch did me in," she said. "I was 86 pounds. I laid up there and drank and didn't eat. Then I fell down the steps." The arm was set badly and resulted in pneumonia, a life-threatening infection and a series of operations. She stayed in eight different nursing homes and was confined to a wheelchair.

Determined to walk again, she began a comeback at a tribute to her held in Los Angeles in May 1998 but, although she continued walking and working in clubs (including a visit to Pizza on the Park in London in 2004) and recording until last year, she travelled more in hope than likely achievement.

Steve Voce

[gmonahan]

I devoted my radio show to her on Sunday. Played a couple of the Krupa and Kenton things, then concentrated on the great Mosaic Verve set. I thought about playing something from "Indestructable," her last record, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I guess I wanted my listeners (it's a very small college station) to hear her in her prime, and frankly, that last record is pretty painful to listen to. She really was a great singer, and that Mosaic set is a prize.

[fomafomic65]

According to the YouTube description this is a trailer for an

I tried to have some detail too. This dvd seem to be on the way to be released in 2007. No better detailed data about at the moment. On O'Day "official" website they let you see some minutes long trailer of that dvd. Pretty wonderful and unknown -at least to me- b&w video footage from her golden years, interviews etc. Sure I'm looking forward to have it, since the scarcely ten minutes of her act at Newport always left me wanting for more.