Considered by many to be one of the "Three Queens" of classic jazz (notably, the only white one), next to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald--the late Anita O'Day was close to 90 when the filmmakers (Cavolina was her manager) did their last interview with her. As feisty and tough as ever, O'Day survived what she called a "jazz life," which included several marriages and abortions, drug arrests, alcoholism, and 15 years of heroin addiction. Discovered by Gene Krupa in 1940, O'Day had her first hit in 1941 with "Let Me Off Uptown," which featured a daring interracial voice-and-trumpet duet with Roy Eldridge. After five years with Krupa, she spent a year with Stan Kenton. She used her voice as a jazz instrument and ascribed her nearly vibrato-free sound to a botched tonsillectomy in which her uvula was accidentally removed. "The fast-paced, enthralling film stitches pieces of interviews, including the long one shortly before her death in 2006, with excerpts from numerous performances at various phases of her career. It includes her famous turn... singing 'Sweet Georgia Brown' ... at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. At the time she was at her commercial peak, recording for Norman Granz's Verve label and earning $2,500 a week, most of it spent on drugs." (Stephen Holden, NY Times) More at anitaodaydoc.com 35mm Shown with the fabulous Oscar-nominated short, Jammin' the Blues (1944, 10 mins) by Gjon Mili, in which a group of prominent jazz musicians of the 1940s get together for a rare filming of a jam session. Marie Bryant's vocal is amazing. 16mm.
2008, color, 1 hour 33 minutes, USA