Posted By BillHeise on May 17, 2010

Some days, when I write my weekly post on What I Am Listening To This Week, I simply want to share a private moment of joy with the public. (See my WIALTTW posts from this January 2010 for examples of this.) Other days, I want to teach. (See my recent post on Frank Zappa for an example of this.) This post is a rare example of both. I love this video, which is featured on Jazz On A Summers Day and which you can buy on Amazon.

Meet Anita O’Day, nee Anita Belle Colton, also known as “The Jezebel of Jazz” She changed her name from Colton to O’Day because she needed money and O’Day was Pig Latin for ‘dough.’ That is not the most interesting thing about her. She was one of the premiere vocalists of the jazz age. She was also a hardcore heroin addict for over 20 years. She only quit after an overdose in 1967. This means that, during the following video, she was using ‘smack’ (how do you like my use of slang lingo? I think it makes me seem like a youngster.).

Anita was listed as one of the three great jazz singers, the others being Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. She remains less well-known than the other two, partly because she was a white woman and partly because she did not have the best voice (she was more of a Britany Spears than a Christina Aguilera). But what she lacked in vocal technique she more than made up for in her approach to jazz vocals.

She used her voices as an instrument just as much as she used it to communicate the meanings of the words she was singing. This has always appealed to me, who never liked the words nearly as much as I liked the rhythms of words. Anita was a pioneer in the Big Band era for her abilities to vocalize parts written for instruments. Listen to her taking the saxophone part in Four Brothers. This means that, in the featured video this week, though she starts out singing a version of Sweet Georgia Brown, she changes it to a degree in which it is almost unrecognizable at first.

The other thing that makes Anita an interesting singer is her ability to swing a note. This is a technical term, meaning that she shifts her enunciation of her notes off the beat. This was one of the first thing I learned in my History of Jazz class. Before I knew what this meant, I would have been mystified by her rhythm right after the piano and bass kick in at 1:50. After that class, I had learned to appreciate just how difficult it is to swing.

Compare her vocals to much tamer versions of the two songs she sings here:

• Carol Burnett’s Sweet Georgia Brown also known as the theme song of the Harlem Globetrotters
• Doris Day’s Tea For Two

I love her approach to vocals much more than theirs. In this video, she gives a clinic on jazz vocalization (and don’t forget to note her heroin-induced curtsies at the end of each song):

This fragment from a documentary tells the story of how this became an iconic performance of both songs. It features an old Anita, who shows signs of having lived and played hard. Johnny Mandel pegs her as a ‘free soul.’ (1:40), and someone else points out that “There’s the jazz musician and then there’s the jazz life” (2:00). She has an okay voice, but “The crux of what she does is what she does with time.” (4:20). It is psychedelic before Timothy Leary, and that’s why I like love it. She admits to using ‘smack’ at the end of the video, right before she tells the audience how her appearance (in the video above) catapulted her to international fame.

Here’s s couple more of my favorite Anita O’Day songs. The first is the jazz standard Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby. In it, she loses her way a bit–is it her jazz improvisation, or is it heroin?; we’ll never know. All I know is that this is the best version I have ever heard.

The second is My Heart Belongs To Daddy

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