AVE ANITA

Quando morre um parente nosso, a gente fica todo condoído e não titubeia em rezar um Pai-Nosso, uma Ave-Maria. Às vezes, a gente esquece que certas pessoas conviveram com a gente por uma vida embora não sejam parentes. São amigos que a gente nem conheceu pessoalmente, mas ficava alerta a cada novo disco, por um novo deleite. Assim como literalmente chorei a morte de Elis, não posso deixar de me emocionar com esta notícia.

Faço meus os comentários de David Brent Johnson da Rádio WFIU de Bloomington, Indiana:

There are singers you like, singers you respect, singers you admire, and singers that you just love beyond the boundaries of rational discussion (the rational reasons for such love are there -- you just don't need or care to discuss them). There are very, very few vocalists I've loved more than Anita O'Day. I'll be spending a lot of time revisiting the Mosaic set and other albums tonight... RIP and thanks for everything, Miss O'Day. David J. WFIU-Bloomington,IN

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ANITA O'DAYOctober 18, 1919 - November 23, 2006 Jazz vocal legend Anita O'Day passed this morning November 23, 2006 at 6:17 AM in West Los Angeles. The cause of death was cardiac arrest according to her manager Robbie Cavalina.Born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago, Illinois on October 18, 1919, O'Day got her start as a teen. She eventually changed her name to O'Day and in the late 1930's began singing in a jazz club called the Off- Beat, a popular hangout for musicians like band leader and drummer Gene Krupa. In 1941 she joined Krupa's band, and a few weeks later Krupa hired trumpeter Roy Eldridge. O'Day and Eldridge had great chemistry on stage and their duet "Let Me Off Uptown" became a million-dollar-seller, boosting the popularity of the Krupa band. Also that year, "Down Beat" magazine named O'Day "New Star of the Year" and, in 1942, she was selected as one of the top five big band singers. After her stint with, Krupa, O'Day joined Stan Kenton's band. She left the band after a year and returned to Krupa. Singer Jackie Cain remembers the first time she saw O'Day with the Krupa band. "I was really impressed," she recalls, "She (O'Day) sang with a jazz feel, and that was kind of fresh and new at the time." Later, O'Day joined Stan Kenton's band with whom she cut an album that featured the hit tune "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine" In the late'40s, O'Day struck out on her own. She teamed up with drummer John Poole, with whom she played for the next 32 years. Her album "Anita", which she recorded on producer Norman Granz's new Verve label, elevated her career to new heights. She began performing in festivals and concerts with such illustrious musicians as Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington, Georg Shearing and Thelonious Monk. O'Day also appeared in the documentary filmed at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 called "Jazz on a Summer Day", which made her an international star. Throughout the '60s Anita continued to tour and record while addicted to heroin and in 1969 she nearly died from an overdose. O'Day eventually beat her addiction and returned to work. In 1981 she published her autobiography "High Times, Hard Times" which, among other things, talked candidly about her drug addiction. Her final recording was "Indestructible Anita O'Day" and featured Eddie Locke, Chip Jackson, Roswell Rudd, Lafayette Harris, Tommy Morimoto and the great Joe Wider. A documentary, "ANITA O'DAY - THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER" will be released in 2007.

The Jezebel of Jazz,' Anita O'Day, Dies of Pneumonia at 87by Adam BernsteinWashington Post, November 24, 2007Anita O'Day, 87, whose breathy voice and witty improvisation made her one of the most dazzling jazz singers of the last century and whose sex appeal and drug addiction earned her the nickname "the Jezebel of Jazz," died of pneumonia Nov. 23 at a convalescent hospital in West Los Angeles.Ms. O'Day led one of the roughest lives in jazz, possibly surpassed only by her idol, Billie Holiday. Impoverished and largely abandoned in childhood, she became a marathon dancer and changed her surname from Colton to O'Day, pig Latin for "dough," slang for money.Over a five-decade career, a mental breakdown, a rape, numerous abortions, a 14-year addiction to heroin and time in jail all contributed to her legend as a survivor. Her 1981 as-told-to autobiography was appropriately titled "High Times, Hard Times."However, as a singer she soared. Jazz writer Nat Hentoff declared her "the most authentically hot jazz singer of all."In the 1940s, when most "girl singers" were pert appendages to a featured band, Ms. O'Day was a star attraction who often enlivened the orchestra with her playful and inspired vocals. She said she saw herself as an instrumentalist and often wore a band uniform instead of an evening gown.She was among the hippest female singers of the big-band period, lending rare emotional resonance to the relentlessly up-tempo and brassy big bands of Gene Krupa and Stan Kenton. She gave both orchestras their first million-selling hits, doing a rare interracial duet on "Let Me Off Uptown" with Krupa trumpeter Roy Eldridge and then the novelty number "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine" with Kenton's ensemble.For Verve records in the 1950s, she performed some of the most inventive interpretations of jazz standards. Andy Razaf, who wrote the words to Fats Waller's "Honeysuckle Rose," once said hers was the definitive version of the tune -- surpassing even Waller's recording.Ms. O'Day was sometimes compared to Holiday, with whom she shared a tendency to project vulnerability through a calculated crack in her tone. She also was highly regarded for her scat singing.Her signature sound created an elasticity with words, often breaking them into faster eighth and sixteenth notes instead of quarter notes, which were harder for her to sustain. This tendency was a result of a childhood tonsillectomy in which the doctor accidentally removed her uvula, the bit of flesh in the throat whose vibrations control tone.To compensate, she would playfully stretch single-syllable words; "you" would be "you-ew-ew-ew," love would became "lah-uh-uh-uv.""When you haven't got that much voice, you have to use all the cracks and crevices and the black and the white keys," she once said.Ms. O'Day was born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago on Oct. 18, 1919. Her father was a printer, and her mother worked at a meat-packing plant.In the mid-1930s, she dropped out of school and hitchhiked to Muskegon, Mich., to enter a walkathon, one of the Depression-era crazes in which contestants were fed in exchange for brutal entertainment.After some singing experience, she won a positive review in Down Beat magazine while performing in a downtown Chicago club with Max Miller's band. Krupa hired her and Eldridge in 1941. The jazz writer Will Friedwald noted that the new additions "galvanized the Krupa men and positively transformed the band into one of the most powerful bands of the great era, putting it in a class with Ellington, Basie, Goodman and Dorsey."Her first million-selling record -- and best-known early recording -- "Let Me Off Uptown" paired O'Day's sultry vocalizing with Eldridge's raspy voice and roaring trumpet. The flirting between the white O'Day and black Eldridge was groundbreaking. "Do you feel the heat?" she asks Eldridge before instructing him to "blow, Roy, blow!"Besides Krupa's group, she also spent shorter and less-enjoyable stints with Woody Herman and Kenton, whose intellectual, "modern" sound did not mesh with her accent on easy swing.The relentless performing on tour triggered a nervous breakdown, and over the next decade, she was jailed for marijuana and heroin possession.She downplayed her arrests, writing in her autobiography that she "looked on serving my sentences as a kind of vacation.... Rehabilitated? Hardly. Rested? Definitely."In 1956, she was signed by Norman Granz's Verve records, and the nearly 20 albums she put out during the next decade were among her most tantalizing, including "Anita" (with "Honeysuckle Rose"), "Pick Yourself Up," "Anita O'Day Swings Cole Porter," "Waiter, Make Mine Blues," "All the Sad Young Men" and "Travelin' Light."She also played with Benny Goodman (who in the early 1940s refused to hire her because she was not disciplined enough to stick to a music chart), Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Joe Williams and Oscar Peterson.She had a 32-year musical association with drummer John Poole, who she said introduced her to heroin.Her vibrant appearance in the 1959 documentary "Jazz on a Summer's Day," a film about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, made her an international celebrity and brought her important dates in Japan and England.Then, in 1966, she nearly died of a heroin overdose in a bathroom in a Los Angeles office building. The experience rattled her, and she quit heroin at once. Most of her money gone, she spent the rest of her life struggling financially.In the early 1970s, she was living in a $3-a-night hotel in Los Angeles but she revived her career over the next decade, culminating in a profile of her on the CBS newsmagazine "60 Minutes."She received her first Grammy nomination in 1990 for "In a Mellow Tone" and was given an American Jazz Masters award in 1997 by the National Endowment for the Arts.When interviewed, her voice indicated an unyielding distress and frequent irritation. She told a reporter that alcohol provided a welcome relief for her at the end of the day. In 1996, permanent alcoholic dementia was diagnosed.She played jazz dates until late in life -- with embarrassing results as her frailties overtook her talent. But she was to be honored in March 2007 as one of the "living legends" of jazz as part of the Kennedy Center's Jazz in Our Time festival.Her marriage to drummer Don Carter, which she said was never consummated, was annulled. A marriage to golfer Carl Hoff, whom she called unfaithful, ended in divorce.She said she never wanted children, telling People magazine, "Ethel Kennedy dropped 11. There are enough people in the world. I did my part by raising dogs."She dedicated her autobiography to her dog.

Anita O'Day, 87, Big Voice from Big-Band Era, Diesby Dennis McLellanLos Angeles Times, November 24, 2006Anita O'Day, who shot to fame as a singer with drummer Gene Krupa's swing band in the early 1940s and became one of the most distinctive voices in the history of jazz, died Thursday. She was 87.O'Day died of cardiac arrest in a convalescent hospital in West Los Angeles, according to her manager, Robbie Cavalina. She had been in declining health battling Alzheimer's and had a recent bout with pneumonia.Known as hip-talking, blunt and feisty, O'Day launched her career as a teenager while competing on the Depression-era Walkathon circuit. She was still a relatively unknown singer in jazz joints in her native Chicago when Krupa hired her as his $40-a-week vocalist in 1941.She was born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago on Dec. 18, 1919. Her father left when she was 1 year old; her mother, whom O'Day portrayed in her book as cold and indifferent, worked in a meat-packing plant.An only child, O'Day began singing as a young girl in church during summer visits to her grandparents in Kansas City.She left home at 14 and, with her mother's approval, hitchhiked to Muskegon, Mich., to enter a Walkathon, a 24-hour-a-day endurance contest similar to the dance marathons that were the rage with out-of-work Americans during the Depression.O'Day then began traveling in the Midwest as a professional Walkathon contestant. "I got fed seven times a day and I was having a ball," she told People magazine in 1989. "When you are 14, you don't hurt."She made extra money singing, dancing and selling pictures of her and her partner. During this time she changed her name to "O'Day," which she later explained was pig Latin for the "dough" she hoped to make.O'Day, who once logged 97 straight days walking, spent two years on the circuit before a truant officer caught up with her and forced her to return home to finish school.She went to school during the day, but nights she began singing in taverns in the Uptown area of Chicago's North Side. In 1939, she was hired to sing at the Off-Beat Club in downtown Chicago. At the end of her debut five-song set, she received a standing ovation."People shouted, stamped, applauded, whistled, stood on their chairs and cheered," she wrote in her autobiography. "It was the response you dream about... I was a success beyond my wildest expectations... I wasn't just the toast of Chicago nightlife; I was the toast of all the hep... musicians and hepcats in the city."Billed as the "Jezebel of Jazz" a decade later, O'Day titled her 1981 autobiography "High Times, Hard Times." In it, she described a life that included back-room abortions, a nervous breakdown, two failed marriages, jail time for drug possession and more than a decade-long addiction to heroin that nearly killed her with an overdose in 1966."She was a wild chick, all right, but how she could sing!" Krupa once said.O'Day sang with what jazz critic Leonard Feather described as a "note-breaking, horn-like style and hip, husky sound."As a result of having her uvula (the small, fleshy part of the soft palate that hangs down above the back of the tongue) accidentally cut off by a doctor during a tonsillectomy at age 7, O'Day had no vibrato and was unable to hold notes."I'm not a singer; I'm a song stylist," O'Day said in a 1989 interview with The New York Times. "I'm not a singer because I have no vibrato.... If I want one, I have to shake my head to get it. That's why I sing so many notes -- so you won't hear that I haven't got one. It's how I got my style."O'Day scored one of the Krupa's band's greatest hits with "Let Me Off Uptown," with trumpeter Roy Eldridge, in 1941. It featured Eldridge's memorable plea, "Anita, oh Anita!... say, I feel somethin'!" before he launched into an electrifying solo passage.Named "New Star of the Year" by Down Beat magazine, O'Day went on to amass other hits with the Krupa band, including "Alreet," "Kick It," and "Bolero at the Savoy."In his book "The Big Bands," George T. Simon wrote that O'Day's "rhythmic, gutty, illegitimate style first confused but soon converted many listeners. Whereas most band girl singers had projected a very feminine or at least cute girl image, Anita came across strictly as a hip jazz musician."Indeed, O'Day even set a style for female band singers by wearing a band jacket, skirt and shirt instead of a gown on stage during long road trips.After leaving Krupa, O'Day was a vocalist with Stan Kenton's band from 1944 to '45; her most popular recording with Kenton was the million-selling "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine."In 1945, Down Beat named O'Day "Top Girl Band Vocalist," and 22 jazz critics voted her "Outstanding New Star" in an Esquire magazine poll.In the early '50s, she recorded on jazz impresario Norman Granz's Clef and Norgran labels and, beginning in the mid-1950s, she recorded a series of well-received albums for Granz's Verve label, including "Anita" (1955), "Pick Yourself Up" (1956), "Anita O'Day Sings the Winners" (1958), "Cool Heat" (1959) and "All the Sad Young Men" (1961).A memorable appearance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, in which she sang nine songs, was captured in photographer Bert Stern's documentary "Jazz on a Summer's Day." The documentary, which spotlighted O'Day singing "Tea for Two" as a fast tune and also "Sweet Georgia Brown," added to her stature as a jazz legend, made her a star in Japan and paved the way for international tours.At the time of her triumphant Newport Jazz Festival appearance, O'Day was well into her 14-year addiction to heroin.As a band singer, she said in a 1973 Los Angeles Times interview, "The narcotics thing was just there. It was what was happening. Kept me in and out of trouble for 20 years; cost me a couple of very nice houses, the Jaguar, the self-respect, everything. I got busted the first time for marijuana and served 45 days. Next time was for pot again -- I got 90 days, but they gave me 45 off for good behavior. These were misdemeanors."But the third time around, I got busted for heroin. That was a bum rap -- a musician set me up for it. He was able to keep out of trouble by turning someone else in every so often. They put me in jail for six months. Well, I figured I had the name, I might as well play the game. So when I got out, I decided to try it. It's like quicksand -- you never get out."After a near-fatal overdose in Los Angeles in 1966, she kicked her heroin habit cold-turkey, although she turned to alcohol.O'Day, who continued singing into her 80s, was married in her early years to musician Don Carter and golfer and businessman Carl Hoff. The marriage to Carter was annulled, and the marriage to Hoff ended in divorce.She leaves no immediate survivors.

Here are four mp3 audio files that you can download of Anita's appearance on Art Ford's Jazz Party. Taped during the week of an engagement at the Village Vanguard in 1958, this is prime Anita, and is the complete broadcast that is excerpted on the Sunday Night clip on YouTube. Anita sings Body And Soul, Tea For Two, and Let's Fall In Love.

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