The American Spectator

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Another Perspective

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O'Day led a rough life, running away from home at age 12 and getting her first taste of success in a 1930s dance marathon. By the 1940s she was the vocalist for Gene Krupa's band, crooning up-tempo melodies and combining with trumpeter Roy Eldridge to make the popular hit, "Let Me Off Uptown."

It was after the Big Band Era ended, however, that she really hit her stride. Working with small combos and arranging her own music, she put out a series of albums in the 1950s that became collectors' items. I remember spending hours listening to one of them in college. "She uses her voice just like an instrument," said my awed roommate, whose hipster older sister had passed it on to us.

O'Day finally broke through to the public in "Jazz on a Summer's Day," the documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. On Sunday afternoon, she teeters onstage in high heels, a cocktail dress, and a huge hat. The drummer begins playing a hypnotic African rhythm on the congas and O'Day starts chanting something. After about eight bars you realize it's the lyric to "Sweet Georgia Brown." After the first chorus, the quartet comes in behind her and she does a slow, rocking version to the original tune. Then after another 16 bars the tempo jumps again and she scats her way through two more choruses. What she has done is the epitome of jazz -- taking one song and turning it into three completely different tunes, all of them original and fascinating. Her second number, "Tea for Two," ends with the combo passing one-bar lines among themselves at lightning speed, with O'Day's voice the fifth instrument. Jazz was never done better.

O'Day had a tough life. She chased a few drummers, never married, never had children. She was addicted to drugs and alcohol for years and nearly died of an overdose in the 1960s before giving it up. After leaving home at 12, she never really returned. Yet her vagabond's life gave her an outsider's perspective few singers ever attain.

I saw her once in person in a club on the East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s. Chet Baker, another lost soul, was in the band. At one point, they started "Ace in the Hole," which is supposed to begin with somebody in a San Francisco saloon calling out the request. I saw what was coming so I hollered from the crowd, "Hey, Anita! Sing 'Ace in the Hole.'" She cracked up and called back, "Meet me at the bar for a drink."

Ten minutes later, as I stood in line waiting to collect my drink, some barfly had gotten ahead of me and was bending her ear with some lugubrious yarn. After a few minutes, she had had enough. "Listen man," she said, "if I'm gonna listen, you've got to talk!"

They didn't make them any tougher. Or truer.

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Law, Iran, Africa