Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

Just why O'Day is ranked in such stellar company is on ample view in the worshipful film. Historians (including Phil Schaap of WKCR-FM, a great place to listen to jazz), friends and jazz contemporaries sing O'Day's praises. ... Full Review

Anita O'Day: The Life Of A Jazz Singer succeeds admirably in the first instance The material that these filmmakers have garnered provides a rich tapestry of O'Day's evolution, and the development of a profoundly expressive and charismatic jazz artist who explored the enormous range of her vocal gifts across the many decades with an astonishing imaginative subversion of any musical status quo. ... Full Review

By Sheri Linden, Special to The Times The great Anita O'Day, tough cookie and sublime jazz vocalist, receives a fitting tribute in this exuberant documentary, completed shortly before her death in 2006 at 87. Throughout, O'Day's resilience, humor, smarts and mystery shine bright. ... Full Review

This documentary, directed by O'Day's manager, Robbie Cavolina, and filmmaker Ian McCrudden, is a gentle, swinging film that pieces together her extraordinary life story from vintage performance clips and various interviews done over the years, where she is self-effacing and dismissive of her self-destructive behavior that included 16 years of heroin addiction and four failed marriages. ... Full Review

Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer" tells the tale in documentary form, enabling the self-destructive diva to give voice to her own story, in word and song. Still, a few of the film's observers offer valuable insights, most notably critic Will Friedwald referencing O'Day's "rhythmic exhibitionism" (great phrase) and composer-arranger Johnny Mandel, who aptly and poetically dubs O'Day, simply, a "free soul. ... Full Review

Unrated (thematic material, references to drugs); 91 min.Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer begins with a bang.An elderly O'Day briefly rehearses a version of Yesterdays (an apt retrospective choice). ... Full Article

As a work of cinema, the film is merely passable. Co-directors Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden play with color fields and segment the screen like a less outr The Tracey Fragments Life of a Jazz Singer isn't noticeably different from... ... Full Article

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Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer . "The great jazz singer Anita O'Day operated in some far-out be-bop realm of her own, a small kingdom of dingy nightclubs and brute-force trios where she flashed her sharp, pretty teeth ... Full Article