Anita O'Day - 'Sweet Georgia Brown' & 'Tea for Two'

I'll begin at the beginning, as the King advised Alice gravely, with the very epitome of style and cool. Anita O'Day stepped out of the pages of Vogue and onto the Newport stage in her white gloves, hip-hugging sleeveless frock and majestic picture-hat, to be immortalised in the 1959 film Jazz On A Summer's Day. As one of the co-directors, fashion photographer Bert Stern must have drooled over Ms. O'Day's iconic attire and her supremely elegant performance. He certainly seemed to get a kick out of letting the camera linger over the more fashion-conscious of the audience on that warm, sleepy July day. The irony is, however, that she refused to turn out like this for her first big-band employer, drummer Gene Krupa, at a time when it was de rigueur. She insisted instead on regular band jacket and short skirt so she could appear more like one of the boys.

 

There's a lot more to this performance than merely meets the eye, though. The way Anita interprets the two old chestnuts – cutting up, caressing, stretching and eliding the lyrics, playing with the time signatures, using pauses to playful and dramatic effect (I love the way in 'Sweet Georgia Brown', for example, that she qualifies the claim that she 'don't lie...' with that throwaway 'much' after a heavily pregnant pause) – she transforms both pieces from something so familiar as to be almost hackneyed into fresh and wonderful new creations. In actual fact, she sings the first two verses of 'Georgia Brown' reasonably straight while accompanied by her drummer beating out the beat by hand on his tom-tom, and it's only when the bass and piano enter the fray that she really lets rip with the twists and turns, swoops and dives, and her whole trick-bag of vocal idiosyncrasies. 'Tea for Two' on the other hand is an Ella-like tour de force including scat dialogue with her drummer, a staccato sprint for the finishing line in a headlong attempt to keep pace with her rhythm section.

Much as I enjoy the cinematic asides as the camera turns to focus on the (very snow-white) audience, it's a shame that we don't get to see a little more of the band. Drummer John Poole is not someone I know, but bassist Red Mitchell was an ever-present on West Coast 'cool jazz' dates, while pianist Jimmy Jones was a trusted accompanist of Sarah Vaughan. 'Sassy', with her perfect pitch and classic phrasing, was in some respects the very antithesis of Anita O'Day as a jazz singer. Much as I like Sarah Vaughan as in 'admire', give me the quirky, imperfect stylist any day of the week.

Despite her appearance on this particular summer's day, Anita was certainly in many ways flawed. Her autobiography, High Times, Hard Times, and the splendid 2007 documentary, Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, reveal just what a tough, tenacious cookie she was. Probably only Billie Holiday of her female contemporaries had a harder time of it. As the documentary's publicity proclaims: She survived it all to become one of the world's great jazz singers. That suave and soigné appearance belies a lifetime of hard-knocks: an unhappy childhood during the Great Depression; three of her teenage years spent as a dancer in the kind of marathon dance contests portrayed in the film They Shoot Horses, Don't They; arrests and imprisonments on narcotics charges; a long-term addiction to heroin; and a life-threatening fall downs some stairs. Although she changed her given name of Colton to O'Day, an obscure permutation of 'dough' as in money, a long career of gigging and hustling didn't make her much of that. But she certainly survived – and she left quite a musical legacy: not just this memorable performance, but also a wealth of records, particularly those deriving from her heyday, either with the Stan Kenton Orchestra or as a freelance singer, in the 1950s.

What makes the singer's turn at Newport such infectious viewing is her evident enjoyment in what she's doing. According to Ms. O'Day, she was probably high on heroin. Given her habit, it may well be true. On the other hand, she always liked to tease and shock a little, so it may not be true. In any case, this is a performance that warrants that tired old adjective 'iconic'. Anita O'Day didn't need no dope to be this dope.