Saturday, December 02, 2006

Me and Anita O'Day

Girl Singer Story
I woke up this morning in the same place, in the same old place, same old broken window, same old stubborn linoleum on the floor (and linoleum has been a heavy hitter in my world of imagination since I was a kid and crawling around on it)—I look at linoleum and I think of oil and its greasy permanence and this old stubborn linoleum is wearing down to the 125-year-old wood of the floor under the linoleum, which may be only 55 years old. Aged things don’t bother me. I’m not demanding everything I touch be new. I see importance in some old things including the life that has been lived over the decades in this old room eleven stories above the belly button of old Manhattan—old an adjective I’ve grown up with, grown up on into my own state of being old with. Everything’s old the minute it’s born. Right? “How’s old’s that baby?” “One month OLD.” “Looks OLDer than that.”

I knew Anita Belle Colton O’Day had died, but this morning on the radio this dude I like on our Pacifica station here played a half-hour of Anita at her best and got me to thinking of Anita and her time in the jazz limelight. As a young turk trying to ham my way into that jazz limelight as a showy kid piano player with heavy sexual energy I found quickly that I attracted chick singers, especially two I met in college when I played in an afternoon jazz group in the Union Building. Both chicks sang with our little sextet one afternoon, one black and one white, both slinky and gorgeous, both born into jazz same as I was, you know, as a child picking jazz as the music to which you moved best whether in dance or lifestyle. We were jazz babies deluxe;they were jazz babes deluxe.

The white girl singer was quiet and demure until she sang; the black girl singer was eagerly interactive. Both loved jazz and talking music but also both loved touching and men staring deeply into their eyes. One afternoon when the three of us were making out in a rehearsal room in the School of Music--I played the piano while they sang and then we’d stop and while they smoked cigarettes and we'd then neck awhile, like I said, they both loved being touched and having their love drawn out of their deep brown deep eyes—similar eyes—so lustrous when awaiting kisses—and then I was distracted—someone in the next rehearsal room was playing a record, a chick singer singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” differently, boppish, and I stopped making out with the white girl singer and said, :"Who’s that?” “Anita O’Day,” they both answered. “She’s the coolest,” said the white girl singer. I listened; I liked. But after the white girl singer left to go to class, I asked the black girl singer, if she dug Anita O’Day and she told me no because Anita O’Day was a white girl trying to sing like Sarah Vaughn and nobody could sing like Sarah Vaughn so why try? I didn’t say anything in defense of poor Anita; she was singing before Sarah Vaughn. I didn't correct the black girl singer; I liked her sexually better than the white girl singer, so I agreed with her in a fit of passion; yep, I thought as the subject changed in my mind, Anita O’Day was a white copycat, though I still could hear her singing and I liked what I heard. Ah, the lies we tell in love.

The black girl singer went on to get kind’a famous right after we met, a two-LP recording contract with Blue Note, by that time owned by Liberty Records, her first LP kind’a great and reviewed favorably in Downbeat—I see it on eBay occasionally selling for 20 bucks.

I ended up almost marrying the white girl singer; she was a redhead and I was enchanted by redheads at the time and besides the black girl singer just left town after her LP came out; the last time I saw her she had just gotten the album deal and she was starry eyed—actin’ like she was “Hollywood bound,” as we used to say about someone with stars in their eyes. Turned out those stars were caused by something else working on her personality internally, heroin.

The white girl was a cool, sexy, languid, liquidy singer a la Chris Connor and June Christy and she got a lot of local work and there were some cool jazz happenings going on in Dallas in those early years thanks mainly to North Texas State University being only thirty miles north of Dallas and attracting major jazz figures to the area, like Stan Kenton and Ray Charles. Brother Ray had once lived in Dallas and had a gig on Commerce Street for a few years during the fifties. Plus, Dallas had a part in the early history of blues and jazz being the home of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Whistling Alex Moore, and saxophone great Buster Smith who was Count Basie's first band partner and while in KC taught Charles Parker, Jr., how to play the sax. Dallas was also home base for pianist Red Garland, a Dallas cat, playing piano with an up and coming cat named Miles Davis. So Dallas was a cool place to be as jazz was progressing and NTSU was a great place to meet two generously beautiful girl singers, and while making out with both of them in a rehearsal room in the music department at NTSU, I first remember clearly hearing Anita O’Day, though I had heard her all my life, never just like that then and there and never again the rest of my life until this morning.

Anita O’Day never became one of my favorites. I was very stingy when it came to digging singers of any genre. I couldn’t stand Old Blue Eyes, for instance. That wasn’t jazz to me. You see, in the early days, jazz symbolized the counterculture, the Beat, the beatific, the cool, the opposite, NONCONFORMITY, which is what my generation was all about. We refused to follow Old Blue Eyes, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, those commercially successful cats; swingers, yeah, but not pure to us jazz purists. We just objected to the commercialization of anything. Dave Brubeck broke that attitude and went commercial with his jazz, some of which I find fascinating, most of which I find boringly repetitious, which, of course, everything eventually becomes, even those early jazz classics. To progress, one must leave the OLD behind or else reconceive it in your own head, a la Miles Davis in his last years, Jaki Byard, Burton Greene, Cecil Taylor, Elvin Jones, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman (I later met, worked with, and knew Bern Nix, Ornette's great guitar player in the early group--an amazing man--the coolest dude I've ever met)—these guys tried to take jazz into new ventures (Betty Carter as a singer), shying as far from the commercial as possible—just making jazz out of reach of the commercial. Have you ever noticed how television commercials have used jazz as sound beds since the fifties? Even today, I still hear mainline jazz backing a heck of a lot of commercials.

Anita O’Day was like all girl jazz singers, tough. The musical road was a hard life. You had to stay cool. Do you all understand what staying cool means? How hard you have to work at it? You had to be dressed to the nines; you had to know your lines perfectly; you had to be feline in body and voice, what male cats dig, don’t you see, because the “coolness” of jazz lovers was the coolness we attribute to the look and actions of a cat. Cool was being laid back. Always relaxed. Duke Ellington once said it was easier to play up-tempo tunes than it was slow tunes because you had to be so relaxed to play them. Slow tunes were in the mix so the musicians could rest up for the next up-tempo “wailer.” The chick singers in order to keep singing after the cooled down ballads started scatting, that form of vocalizing invented by Louis Armstrong, and by scatting they could do up-tempo things.

Anita first worked with Gene Krupa and had the hit "Let Me Off Up Town," a duet with jazz trumpeter Roy "Little Jazz" Eldridge. Gene got busted for pot in '43 and Anita worked with Woody Herman but refused to tour with him and soloed for a while before joining the Stan Kenton Band, the band that made her famous.

Anita O'Day's first LP was the first LP ever on Norman Granz's Verve label. She became considered a jazz singer in the fifties. Busted for pot herself and going to prison with her golf pro husband, she was then busted for heroin possession and off she went to prison again. I think Granz helped her get back on her feet by recording her with jazz groups.

My two girl singers. The black girl singer OD'd on heroin shortly after her album came out. The white girl singer? I have no idea. I was going to marry her at one time, too; but I lost total track of her after I married a California girl who wasn't a singer at all and went off into the blue on my own with my own.

To this day I'm still mercilessly attracted to girl singers.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

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