Anita O'Day - R.I.P.

[John P. Cooper]

Anita O'Day R.I.P.

ANITA O'DAY

October 18, 1919-November 23, 2006

Jazz Vocal legend Anita O’Day passed this morning November 23, 2006 at 6:17AM in West Los Angeles.
The cause of death was cardiac arrest according to her manager Robbie Cavalina.

Born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago, Illinois on October 18, 1919, O’Day got her start as a teen. She eventually changed her name to O’Day and in the late 1930’s began singing in a jazz club called the Off- Beat, a popular hangout for musicians like band leader and drummer Gene Krupa.
In 1941 she joined Krupa’s band, and a few weeks later Krupa hired trumpeter Roy Eldridge. O’Day and Eldridge had great chemistry on stage and their duet “Let Me Off Uptown” became a million-dollar-seller, boosting the popularity of the Krupa band.
Also that year, “Down Beat” magazine named O’Day “New Star of the Year” and, in 1942, she was selected as one of the top five big band singers.

After her stint with, Krupa, O’Day joined Stan Kenton's band. She left the band after a year and returned to Krupa. Singer Jackie Cain remembers the first time she saw O’Day with the Krupa band. “I was really impressed,” she recalls, “She (O’Day) sang with a jazz feel, and that was kind of fresh and new at the time.”
Later, O’Day joined Stan Kenton’s band with whom she cut an album that featured the hit tune “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine”

In the late’40s, O’Day struck out on her own.
She teamed up with drummer John Poole, with whom she played for the next 32 years. Her album “Anita”, which she recorded on producer Norman Granz’s new Verve label, elevated her career to new heights. She began performing in festivals and concerts with such illustrious musicians as Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington, Georg Shearing and Thelonious Monk.
O’Day also appeared in the documentary filmed at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 called “Jazz on a Summer Day”, which made her an international star.

Throughout the ‘60s Anita continued to tour and record while addicted to heroin and in 1969 she nearly died from an overdose. O’Day eventually beat her addiction and returned to work.
In 1981 she published her autobiography “High Times, Hard Times” which, among other things, talked candidly about her drug addiction.

Her final recording was "Indestructible Anita O'Day" and featured Eddie Locke, Chip Jackson, Roswell Rudd, Lafayette Harris, Tommy Morimoto and the great Joe Wider.

A documentary, "ANITA O'DAY-THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER" will be released in 2007.

For more info visit: http://www.anitaoday.com/

[Gerardo A]

Very sorry to hear that. Her sides with Roy Eldridge and several other recordings of her are among my favorite vocal jazz ever.

[John P. Cooper]

Major loss.

And her 50s work is so good, too. All those Verve albums.

I saw her live a couple times in the late 90s.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Next to Billie, my favorite jazz singer of them all. She could bend time, and she had the expressiveness of a great actress. I've loved her work since I first heard her in the mid-50s.

R.I.P.

[Valerie]

another legend gone but not forgotten. she did, however, live her life to the fullest. party on, anita!

[patricia]

Great voice. Great Lady.

RIP Anita O'Day. By all means read "High Times Hard Times."
Another loss among so many.

[John P. Cooper]

One of a kind.

I'll always remember in the liner notes to a Gene Krupa album that included his and Anita's 1942 recording of MASSACHUSETTS - Gene was there listening to the tracks on the LP as the liner note writer listened with him.

As Anita sang a phrase and Gene just sat there shaking his head wordlessly offering his approval, delight and astonishment on just how incredible she could be by just a subtle movement of his head......as subtle as Anita could sing.

'Gene just shook his head'.

[cookie]

Absolutely one of my very favorites. As Patricia mentioned, I also highly recommend her book High Times; Hard Times. Think I will listen to her music later tonight in tribute. RIP, Anita O'Day. Thanks for all the swingin'!

[jazzfiend]

Anita is fabulous, a master of nuance, and effortless swing.

RIP Anita O'Day

[Tom Storer]

RIP. I'm ashamed to admit I have no Anita O'Day in my collection, although I've liked everything by her I've heard. Recommendations, anyone?

[stereojack]

Originally Posted by Tom Storer

RIP. I'm ashamed to admit I have no Anita O'Day in my collection, although I've liked everything by her I've heard. Recommendations, anyone?

Anything on Verve. It's all good! My favorites - Anita, Pick Yourself Up, All the Sad Young Men.

A very big loss - one of the real giants.

[Gerardo A]

The one with Jimmy Giuffre that Steve posted earlier in the thread is pretty good too. My favorite Anita is her work with Roy Eldridge in the Krupa band, there's one called "Uptown" on Columbia that has the classic tunes.

[Rob Damen]

Don't have much by her, but I enjoy this one.

Her "Love for Sale" was on par with Miles' version.

Cheers,

Rob

[stevebop]

'The Jezebel of Jazz,' Anita O'Day, Dies of Pneumonia at 87

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 24, 2007;


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.

For 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 -- surpassing even Waller's recording.

Ms. O'Day was sometimes compared to Holiday, with whom she shared a tendency to project vulnerability through a calculated crack in her tone. She also was highly regarded for her scat singing.

Her signature sound created an elasticity with words, often breaking them into faster eighth and sixteenth notes instead of quarter notes, which were harder for her to sustain. This tendency was a result of a childhood tonsillectomy in which the doctor accidentally removed her uvula, the bit of flesh in the throat whose vibrations control tone.

To compensate, she would playfully stretch single-syllable words; "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.

Ms. O'Day was born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago on Oct 18., 1919. Her father was a printer, and her mother worked at a meat-packing plant.

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 contestants were fed in exchange for brutal entertainment.

After some singing experience, she won a positive review in Down Beat magazine while performing in a downtown Chicago club with Max Miller's band. Krupa hired her and Eldridge in 1941. The jazz writer Will Friedwald 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."

Her first million-selling record -- and best-known early recording--"Let Me Off Uptown" paired O'Day's sultry vocalizing with Eldridge's raspy voice and roaring trumpet. The 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!"

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.

The relentless performing on tour triggered a nervous breakdown, and over the next decade, she was jailed for marijuana and heroin possession.

She downplayed her arrests, writing in her autobiography that she "looked on serving my sentences as a kind of vacation. . . . Rehabilitated? Hardly. Rested? Definitely."

In 1956, she was signed by Norman Granz's Verve records, and the nearly 20 albums she put out 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 had a 32-year musical association with drummer John Poole, who she said introduced her to heroin.

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.

Her marriage to drummer Don Carter, which she said was never consummated, was annulled. A marriage to 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.

[JazzAt52ndStreet]

wow, i didn't realize she was still alive actually. a great singer, rip.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Tom Storer

RIP. I'm ashamed to admit I have no Anita O'Day in my collection, although I've liked everything by her I've heard. Recommendations, anyone?

I would recommend a Verve compilation CD called Pick Yourself Up.
It has 21 tracks, although Love For Sale isn't one of them. Marvelous style.

[Pete C]

I think she & Carmen McRae had the 2 most amazing, fluid, hip rhythmic approaches of all jazz singers. I never saw her live because I had heard about her physical limitations of recent years and wanted to only know the greatness.

She's the highlight of "Jazz on a Summer's Day." The hat & gloves were the icing on the cake! (see post #4)

[Pete C]

see the thread in news.

[Gordon B]

Originally Posted by Pete C

see the thread in news.

WHen I saw "Anita" without a last name in the thread title, I thought maybe that Anita Bryant died and somebody was upset.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

If I were to recommend a couple to start with I'd suggest two compilations: Jazz Masters 49 & And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine.


These are my favorites of my 20 albums by Anita.

Pre-Verve:

Let Me Off Uptown is best compilation of the early stuff with Krupa, highlighted by some great and racially groundbreaking duets with Roy Eldridge plus an absolutely delicious pre-bop, slow scat entitled That's What You Think. The same material with poorer fidelity is also available on a Krupa album called That's Drummer's Band (sic), which also includes some interesting early work by Dave Lambert.

And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine on Living Era is an excellent comp of her early work with Krupa, Nat King Cole, Stan Kenton and some other bands, pre-Verve. Highly recommended.

Another noteworthy pre-Verve collection is the Complete Signature and London Recordings (2 CDs).

And a wonderful curiosity from that period is Count Basie featuring Anita O'Day & The Tadd Dameron Trio, 10 cuts with Basie and two with Dameron, all from the same date in '48.


Verve and post-Verve:

The two great Verve comps are Jazz Masters 49 and Anita O'Day's Finest Hour, only one overlapping song. I prefer the JM49 -- with my three favorite songs by Anita: Easy Come Easy Go, Ten Cents A Dance, and That Old Feeling -- but both comps are absolutely great!

As mentioned above, all the Verves are terrific. Cool Heat with Jimmy Giuffre and his group is my single favorite vocal album. Some of the albums -- like Anita Sings The Winners and Pick Yourself Up -- include so many bonus tracks they're almost double albums, and I recommend them both highly. But Anita, Swings Cole Porter, Swings Rogers and Hart, Swings The Most... there's not a dud in the bunch

And Live at The City, San Francisco 1979 is a fine sample of her stage work and manner, which is as loose and lively as you would expect.

[John P. Cooper]

'The Jezebel of Jazz,' Anita O'Day, Dies of Pneumonia at 87

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 24, 2007;


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.

For 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 -- surpassing even Waller's recording.

Ms. O'Day was sometimes compared to Holiday, with whom she shared a tendency to project vulnerability through a calculated crack in her tone. She also was highly regarded for her scat singing.

Her signature sound created an elasticity with words, often breaking them into faster eighth and sixteenth notes instead of quarter notes, which were harder for her to sustain. This tendency was a result of a childhood tonsillectomy in which the doctor accidentally removed her uvula, the bit of flesh in the throat whose vibrations control tone.

To compensate, she would playfully stretch single-syllable words; "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.

Ms. O'Day was born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago on Oct 18., 1919. Her father was a printer, and her mother worked at a meat-packing plant.

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 contestants were fed in exchange for brutal entertainment.

After some singing experience, she won a positive review in Down Beat magazine while performing in a downtown Chicago club with Max Miller's band. Krupa hired her and Eldridge in 1941. The jazz writer Will Friedwald 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."

Her first million-selling record -- and best-known early recording--"Let Me Off Uptown" paired O'Day's sultry vocalizing with Eldridge's raspy voice and roaring trumpet. The 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!"

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.

The relentless performing on tour triggered a nervous breakdown, and over the next decade, she was jailed for marijuana and heroin possession.

She downplayed her arrests, writing in her autobiography that she "looked on serving my sentences as a kind of vacation. . . . Rehabilitated? Hardly. Rested? Definitely."

In 1956, she was signed by Norman Granz's Verve records, and the nearly 20 albums she put out 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 had a 32-year musical association with drummer John Poole, who she said introduced her to heroin.

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.

Her marriage to drummer Don Carter, which she said was never consummated, was annulled. A marriage to 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.

[John P. Cooper]

Her "You're the Top" on one of her Verve albums is wonderful, with added lyrics mentioning many Jazz musicians. Who wrote them?

'You're a Tatum left hand,
a Goodman Swing band
A Lena Horne who won't stop
But, baby, I'm the bottom
You're the top!.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

That's a great version, indeed, John! Opening cut on her first Verve album, "(This Is) Anita!", followed by the "Honeysuckle Rose" that the lyricist above mentions as the definitive version.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Originally Posted by John P. Cooper

Who wrote them?

According to the liner notes "... the second chorus in which Anita supplies her own up-to-date but nonetheless appropriate words."

[bicho]

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

[hornplayer]

Originally Posted by Gordon B

WHen I saw "Anita" without a last name in the thread title, I thought maybe that Anita Bryant died and somebody was upset.

??? on Jazz Corner?

and wasn't that 60 Minutes piece one of Ed Bradley's???

[hornplayer]

I was lucky to get to hear her in the 50's at the old Blue Note in Chicago... I think she was with Jimmy Giuffre.

What a voice! I agree with you, Pete, about her and Carmen being the most expressive Jazz singers.

Party hearty up there, Anita!

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by hornplayer

I agree with you, Pete, about her and Carmen being the most expressive Jazz singers.

Except I didn't say that. I was talking about rhythmic agility. Once we get into expressive both of them have strong competition from Billie & Dinah.

[Valerie]

i heard her in person about 10 years ago. she wasn't in the greatest voice but she was still swinging.

[Pete C]

I suspect Sheila Jordan learned a lot from Anita.