Sunday, November 09, 2008
A+E, Music, In this Issue..., Movies, Reviews

The jazz singer

‘Anita O’Day’ shines spotlight on an underappreciated talent

BY DAVID LEE SIMMONS

Maybe 2008 will go down in history as the year of the underappreciated-musician documentary. There are worse things, as evidenced by the revealing (if not overly polished) films “The Wrecking Crew,” “The Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice” and “Toot Blues.” Those three previously released works chronicled, respectively, pivotal yet anonymous Los Angeles session musicians, rockabilly sweetheart Wanda Jackson and down-home, Deep South bluesmen.

The beauty of these movies lies in the filmmakers’ ability to validate careers of performers to whom only aficionados and music geeks have heretofore shown their love. The power often lies in the delicate balance of “show versus tell” that decides the fate of most films in general but music documentaries in particular. (Short version: The more music, and fewer the clichés, the better.)

It’s unfortunate that this trio remains on a tour of regional film festivals, but Atlanta viewers can take comfort in the release of yet another music doc, “Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer.” First-time filmmakers Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden trace the remarkable career of O’Day, who, despite six decades of impassioned singing, never quite received the same legendary status of jazz divas Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.

Cavolina and McCrudden completed interviews for the documentary within weeks of her death in 2006 at age 87. (She was working to the very end.) That’s just in time to make the case that O’Day belongs in such vaunted company, in the best way movies like these often do. They not only trot out a seemingly endless supply of jazz critics, musicians and arrangers/composers, they also do an amazing job of letting O’Day’s music speak for itself.

And what sweet music it is. Like Fitzgerald, O’Day had an uncanny ability to use her voice like an instrument, perfectly in sync with the improvisational rhythms of swing and bebop jazz. And like Holiday, O’Day sang with a depth of emotion that could rivet a listener to the seat; it’s as if she could take a standard and make it her own unique memoir of a story. She proves this late in the film, in an almost unrecognizable rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. That performance was captured in Bert Stern’s own music doc “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” shot in color, with O’Day captured mostly in profile in her delightful party dress and plume-fringed hat. But here, the way she alternately disappears into and assumes control of the song is the most memorable moment.

It’s one of several songs that the filmmakers were able to dig up in their archival research, and no matter how much mileage they get out of interviews with their impressive sources, “Anita O’Day” the movie and the woman prove it’s the music that matters.

Still, the filmmakers try to cover all their bases, and the interviews are revealing, if a bit redundant after a fashion. George Wein, the famous jazz festival impresario, notes her early, fiery duets in the 1950s with black trumpeter Roy Eldridge: “That in itself was a groundbreaking thing; to have a white girl to sing with a black artist like Roy Eldridge raised a lot of heads.”

O’Day’s struggles with drugs and alcohol receive their proper treatment, and in fresh and archived interviews, the singer herself proves as feisty on the subject as she was onstage. When asked about why she got hooked, she fires right back: “Curiosity killed the cat, right?”

O’Day survived these and other setbacks to remain a jazz survivor, releasing “Indestructible” just before her death. With their use of music, images and interviews, Cavolina and McCrudden pay tribute to another lost, but hopefully not forgotten, musician who sang her own tune. 3 STARS