Coming to Screenland: Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
If you’ve passed the original Screenland this week and wondered how it managed to book a dead singing legend to play the Crossroads — the marquee now reads simply “Anita O’Day” — the answer turns out to be simple.
Friday, the theater opens the documentary Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, which hit the festival circuit last year. O’Day, known as “the Jezebel of Jazz,” lived harder than Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker put together. She was pronounced legally dead after a late-’60s heroin overdose but managed to wake up and live almost four more decades. She died in 2006 at age 87. Oh, and she kind of kicked ass. The best of her albums blow away the torch-song smoke and set mean little fires of rhythm and lust.
About the movie, Village Voice film critic Jim Ridley writes:
A good deal livelier than the usual music-doc embalming, this worshipful tribute to jazz singer Anita O’Day — completed shortly before her death in 2006 by her then manager, Robbie Cavolina, and co-director Ian McCrudden — is rescued from its own adoration (and too-busy faux-’50s graphics) by its subject: a tough cookie, racetrack devotee and brassy raconteur who may be the least self-pitying reformed addict in the history of pop biographies. Whether in film clips dating back to her 1940s emergence in Gene Krupa’s big band, or in interviews taken near the end of her life, the mercurial O’Day remains a voracious, vivacious presence who resists being filed away, even as the directors cull hall-of-fame testimony from her many admirers — from Margaret Whiting and Billy Taylor to actor-director John Cameron Mitchell, who compares her spontaneity to that of John Cassavetes. As opposed to her scandalous autobiography, High Times Hard Times, the movie is downright reticent on subjects such as a backstage rape and subsequent abortion. The directors prefer to secure O’Day’s due as, in the words of critic Will Friedwald, the only white jazz singer who belongs in the company of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. To watch her landmark tea-dress slink through “Sweet Georgia Brown” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival is to hear every syllable expressed as if at the spark of conception, fully formed and felt.
Here she is in that clip:
