Movie review: 'Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer'

3 1/2 stars (out of four)

Anita O’Day sang like an angel, lived like the devil and produced enough great music to fill a couple of lifetimes.

Actually, she did live twice, considering that a heroin overdose killed her briefly in 1966, before  revival with a then-experimental electric-shock device.   It’s practically a miracle O’Day lived to age 87, singing nearly until the time of her death in 2006.

  “Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer”   tells the tale in documentary form, enabling the self-destructive diva to give voice to her own story, in word and song. True, the results aren’t as searing as O’Day’s harrowing autobiography, “High Times, Hard Times,”  which ranks among the most revealing of jazz memoirs. But the film offers—in glorious abundance—something that no book can: music.

Listen to O’Day swinging exuberantly in her first big hit, “Let Me Off Uptown” or scatting feverishly as the Les Brown Band  roars behind her. Behold her applying a torch to the ballad “Angel Eyes” or partnering with piano super-virtuoso Oscar Peterson (a feat only fearless singers would dare). These clips, and others, attest to the technical brilliance of O’Day’s work, as well as its sensual appeal.
But O’Day proves every bit as engaging when speaking as singing. In one of the film’s interviews, she describes the sensation of trying heroin for the first time. “Hey, that’s better than a martini,” she recalls herself thinking at the time. “Hey, that’s better than sex. Hey, I kinda like that.”
 
To its credit, the film sketches the arc of O’Day’s biography without becoming encumbered by chronology. Instead,  the documentary addresses the driving forces in O’Day’s remarkable life one by one: music, vice, the record business, old age. Some viewers may be annoyed by the quick-take editing, but it does captures the explosive energy of O’Day’s music, forged in the combustive big-band era. A much worse distraction comes from the film’s over abundant talking heads, who often slow the momentum of  O’Day’s words and music . Still, a few of the film’s observers offer valuable insights, most notably critic Will Friedwald  referencing O’Day’s “rhythmic exhibitionism” (great phrase) and composer-arranger Johnny Mandel, who aptly and poetically dubs O’Day, simply, a “free soul.”

And then there’s the film’s inclusion of a sequence from the classic documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” which showed O’Day in full vocal glory, ingeniously reinventing the pulpy old “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Swinging gleefully on a sun-soaked afternoon, crafting strangely intoxicating phrases, O’Day could do no wrong on that afternoon at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in 1958.

hreich@tribune.com

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