Jazz Stylings on Film: Anita O-Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

Straight Lines Music hasn't dealt much with music on celluloid, but there's more than enough to take a look at at so it's time to start. Rather than take on more obvious fare such as Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, The Last Waltz, or any of the 60's concert films such as Woodstock, we'll take a look at Anita O'Day: Life of a Jazz Singer.



A 2006 documentary, this is a very nice piece of work for jazz fans who know O'Day and her one-of-a-kind song stylings and for O'Day newcomers too. As the film makes clear through interviews with O'Day spanning her career and with interviews with her jazz sidemen, O'Day was what one might call in the parlance of the era "a tough broad." She wasn't soft or soft spoken, she had high expectations, and unlike most of the "canaries" who fronted the jazz big bands in the 1940s and 1950s, O'Day knew what she wanted and knew how to get it -- in music and in her life.

Through vintage black-and-white film O'Day is shown performing with Stan Kenton's orchestra, Gene Krupa's band, Woody Herman's Herd, and with drummer and 40-year playing partner John Poole. (It was Poole, in fact, who introduced her to heroin, a habit she maintained for almost 15 years.) A particular television clip from Art Ford's Jazz Party defines O'Day in a nutshell: While a full jazz band plays offscreen an attractive and kittenish O'Day is introduced and saunters up to make small talk with Ford. She informs him that she knows she's got a full band but she's just going to play with a trio tonight and asks the others to stop playing -- much to Ford's confusion. They stop and she nails "Body and Soul," all live and on the spur of the moment, and she just eats it up.

As the film makes clear, O'Day is right up there with Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and only a handful of other vocalists -- though she approaches her jazz from the standpoint of a musical instrument and not as a lush singer or pretty songbird. She sings on the backbeat, she can sing as fast -- maybe faster -- than her accompanists can play, and there isn't a song showcased in the film on which she doesn't put her own unique stylistic stamp. Check out this clip (also excerpted in the movie) from another documentary, Jazz on a Summer's Day filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. As she explains in the movie, she had expected to be singing at night and when she learned last minute she was singing on a Sunday afternoon she went across the street the day before and bought an afternoon "tea time" outfit complete with striking hat decked out with ostrich feathers. The resulting performance is likely the high point of her career -- and her take on "Sweet Georgia Brown/Tea for Two" is the high point of Jazz on a Summer's Day and it put her face (and hat) on magazine covers across the world. A perfect synthesis of style, visual, and vocal.

Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer has a jazz sensibility all its own, too. It clips along like a jazz piece, longish live singing accented by brief bursts of interviews that give way to restatement of the live-singing theme. And much of it is overlaid and backgrounded with floating swatches of color, patterns, and slightly off-kilter geometric shapes that echo the iconic Blue Note records album graphics. Pretty cool.