Cool Heat – Anita O’Day and Her Dangerous Jazz Life

In the 1940s and especially the 1950s, Anita O’Day (1919-2006) was one of the great jazz singers. Her scatting, placement of notes, and ability to swing at every tempo put her at the top of her field. While she was often masterful on the bandstand, she was not too wise when offstage. Due to a series of bad decisions and not being too wise in general, her private life was a continuous mess.

Anita O’Day emerged with Gene Krupa’s orchestra during 1941-42 as a very hip and independent singer. Rather than being used as window dressing as many of the big band female vocalists were, she held her own with the best instrumentalists, including trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Her solo career began strong in the mid-1940s and bebop caused her no difficulty although she was essentially a swing singer.

However, after taking the fall for a musician in 1953 and being set up and arrested on a false charge of heroin possession, she decided to find out what the fuss was all about. O’Day was a heroin addict for the next 14 years and, during a period when she was earning very good money, she blew most of it on drugs. While she gave up heroin after a near-fatal overdose in 1967 and made a comeback during which she was still in her singing prime and riding high due to the publication of her partly ghostwritten memoirs High Times, Hard Times, she became a very serious alcoholic. Her voice and her career soon went straight downhill. During her last two decades, O’Day scuffled for money and gigs, often sounding terrible during her club appearances. Somehow, she lived to be 87.

James Gavin is a very good writer whose past biographies include definitive works on Chet Baker, Lena Horne, and Peggy Lee. While he included reviews of each of these artist’s recordings in the books, his biographies did not spare the subject and went into plenty of detail about their private lives, warts and all. Through interviews with their contemporaries and vigorous research, he dug deep into their stories, uncovering plenty of fresh anecdotes, both good and bad.

In the case of Anita O’Day, there is plenty to discuss, so much that I wish that this book was twice as long. Gavin’s narrative is quite colorful and detailed, making it difficult to put down even when one already knows the outline of the O’Day story. Readers learn about her childhood (although the narrative rushes through it), her early career as a marathon dancer, her two marriages, the periods singing with Krupa and Stan Kenton’s bands, her being rejected after an audition with Benny Goodman (he wanted his vocalists to stick to singing the melody), and O’Day turning down a chance to join Woody Herman.

One also learns about her nervous breakdowns, numerous abortions (she lost count), introduction to heroin, and longtime platonic friendship with drummer John Poole. At the same time that she was having her greatest musical triumphs (with her appearance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival which is in the film Jazz On A Summer’s Day being arguably the highpoint of her career), she was always on the lookout for drugs. As the title of this book says, it was a “dangerous jazz life.” Or as Joe Glaser who was her manager for a time told her, “Anita, you’ve got a million dollars-worth of talent and no class.”

Cool Heat, which has a list of the singer’s albums and includes many black and white photos, is quite absorbing even as Anita O’Day goes from one mishap to another, acting spontaneously and often irresponsibly. While that behavior could work on stage where she had complete control, often resulting in inspiring music during her prime, off the bandstand the results tended to be self-destructive. If she had stayed off drugs, saved her money, and retired when her voice began to seriously deteriorate, it would have resulted in a much easier lifestyle. But then again, she would not have been Anita O’Day.

Cool Heat – Anita O’Day
and Her Dangerous Jazz Life
by James Gavin
Hardcover, 214 pages, $40
ISBN: 978-1800503090
Equinox (www.equinoxpub.com)

Scott Yanow

Since 1975 Scott Yanow has been a regular reviewer of albums in many jazz styles. He has written for many jazz and arts magazines, including JazzTimes, Jazziz, Down Beat, Cadence, CODA, and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, and was the jazz editor for Record Review. He has written an in-depth biography on Dizzy Gillespie for AllMusic.com. He has authored 11 books on jazz, over 900 liner notes for CDs and over 20,000 reviews of jazz recordings. Yanow was a contributor to and co-editor of the third edition of the All Music Guide to Jazz. He continues to write for Downbeat, Jazziz, the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, the Jazz Rag, the New York City Jazz Record and other publications.