Film

Anita O’Day lived the jazz life, for better or worse. Adored by jazz aficionados (she’s regularly ranked with Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald), she achieved only limited fame in the wider world. Watching some of her amazing performances from the 1940s through the 1990s in this solid doc, you are likely to wonder why. (Was it her penchant for turning even the simplest songs into complex rhythmic riffs? Did she blow her big chances because of her 15-year heroin addiction?)

O’Day’s life story has enough twists to fill several docs. She sang with big bands in the 1940s but made the transition into jazz in the 1950s before her long (but astonishingly productive) heroin phase. Then she got famous in Japan and continued recording into her eighties. O’Day reveals that her tendency to focus on rhythmic and rapid-fire interpretations of songs is due in part to the fact that her uvula was sliced off in a botched tonsillectomy, leaving her with virtually no vibrato. She turned that weakness into an asset, making a space for herself in jazz singing.

We could have lived with a little less of Cavolina and McCrudden’s fondness for using graphic design elements (floating blocks of color) borrowed from Blue Note album covers to “liven up” the film, but Anita can’t be obscured, even by excessive graphics.