Anita O`Day-Let Me Off Uptown

[KiwiCoromandel]

Anita O`Day was always the greatest, the coolest, the hippest, the swingin'est-even at the very start of her nearly 60 years in the music business, when she completely changed the definition of what it meant to be a big band singer. Even early in her career, O'Day, like Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey, was always at her zenith. The two periods (194142 and 1945) with Gene Krupa's big band represent not merely the beginning, but one of the high points in one of the greatest careers in music.

O'Day joined the Krupa krew in March 1941 and almost immediately revolutionized the craft of band singing. In the years before O'Day, "canaries," as they were called, had a very specific purpose. The best of them, like Benny Goodman's Helen Ward and Bob Chester's Dolores O'Neill, were thoroughly musical: they could take even a lesser product of Tin Pan Alley and invest it with energy and life. Helen Forrest, who sang with Artie Shaw, Goodman and James, was better than anyone (except Sinatra) at animating a love song, while Marion Hutton had a convincing way with an uptempo swing song. Count Basie's Helen Humes and Jimmy Rushing were each, in their own way, masters of the blues, while Duke Ellington's Ivie Anderson could pretty much do all of the above.

But there was no one who could do what Anita did. Even the magnificent Ella Fitzgerald never achieved anything in her dance band days that compared with O'Day's output. (Most of her Chick Webb years were spent swinging nursery rhymes rather than the ambitious scat epics that would start arriving in the mid'40s.) Up to that point, if, say, Benny Goodman wanted to play one of his super-fast rhythmic numbers, or "flagwavers," as the jitterbugs called them then, that was exclusively an instrumental domain. With the arrival of O'Day, for the first time a vocalist had a real place in even the fastest and most intricate or even unsingable of flagwavers. The band could play it as fast, as tricky, as loud, as rhythmically supercharged as they wanted, and they would never lose O'Day: if it were a race, she'd be standing there at the finish line waiting for the rest of the ensemble to show up. And not even breathing hard.

As Krupa himself wrote in 1955, 1 always got a boot out of Anita. She started a style for girl vocalists which is still going today. I would say that it grew out of Billie Holiday's way of singing, but is still mostly Anita." Born Anita Colton, in Kansas City, Missouri on October 18, 1919, it was with telling wise-guy attitude that she changed her surname to the pig Latin word for dough, because, as she put it, she wanted to get some. As a child she moved to Chicago, and grew up a product of that city's "toddlin"' jazz scene of the '20s and '30s. Long before she joined fellow Chicagoan Gene Krupa at the age of 21, O'Day was a hardened showbiz veteran who had already experienced both the glamour and the seemy underside of that industry, having done everything from fighting to stay alive at a series of dance marathons (depression "entertainment" at its most

brutal), to tentative auditions and eventually gigs with big bandleaders like Benny Goodman and Raymond Scott. Most importantly, she had earned a local reputation at several Chi-town hot spots, such as the Ball of Fire (where Bud Jacobsen reigned on clarinet) and the Three Deuces (where she held forth with pianist Max Miller).

The great majority of O'Day's recordings with the band can be described in the vocabulary of the day as 11 rhythm numbers." "Kick It," from early in the relationship (June 1941), is fairly typical: the melody is a series of phrases the likes of which musicians might improvise in a jam session; the lyrics generally are slang phrases of the day. When O'Day sings "Kick It," she's at once exhorting the musicians to play harder and faster and the dancers on the floor to do likewise. "Thanks For The Boogie Ride" is a veritable patchwork quilt of riffs and slang, while "Stop! The Red Light's On"" is one of the swingier pieces in the Krupa kanon, with the band chanting the first note and O'Day personally cuing leader "Mr. G" and Eldridge, already known as "Little Jazz," to solo.

Which brings us to Roy Eldridge. From the git-go, Eldridge's presence provides the final piece of the puzzle, the missing element that galvanizes the Krupa band into one of the hardest swinging organizations of all time. The title "Little Jazz" had long since been conferred on him because of his height, or lack thereof, but it falls far short, you should forgive the expression, of doing justice to Eldridge's abilities. Everything he plays is big jazz, every solo you'll hear with Krupa is nothing less than a powerhouse statement of the most compelling kind. It all culminates in "Let Me Off Uptown." O'Day's chorus, which describes Harlem charms to Eldridge (feigning ignorance), is bookended by two passages of spoken dialogue between the two stars. Now fully possessed by "that uptown rhythm" and inspired by O'Day's exhortation to "Blow, Roy, blow!" Eldridge gives out with a trumpet solo that's sensational even by L.J.'s own elevated standards. When he finishes, the band gives out with a cheer that could have been taped at Yankee Stadium when Joe DiMaggio hit a homer.

Krupa and O'Day's most successful forays into the world of "real" song start with writers with genuine jazz experience of their own, like Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia On My Mind," from the singer's first-ever session, and "Skylark." On the second, it's even money as to whose treatment of the Hoagmeister's lushly ornithological melody soars to greater heights: Eldridge's, as he introduces the tune over Krupa's saxes, or O'Day's, when she coos it in cool contrast to the life of drugs, sex and spontaneity she writes about, showing a great deal of restraint-a quality rarely associated with O'Day personally or professionally.

From 1941 to 1943, the Krupa-O'Day-Eldridge unit reigned as one of the most sensationally swinging outfits in big band history; unfortunately, Columbia was denied the chance to record the last year of the combination's already-too-brief existence by the AFM ban that started in August 1942. In mid-13, an even worse disaster struck, when Gene Krupa was falsely arrested on a trumped-up narcotics charge. America's ace drummer man was found innocent, but had to give up the greatest band he would ever lead in the process. O'Day would briefly rejoin Krupa in 1945 (resulting in several classics, among thern "Opus One," "Tea For Two," and "Boogie Blues," (a driving concoction of blues phrases, both melodically and lyrically, along the lines of Count Basie's "Sent For You Yesterday," which she continues to sing today).

It was in those two brief years that the threesome made American music history, hoisting the high-jump mark for all other bandleader-singer-superstar sideman combinations-the swing era's most charismatic drummer, who pushed the band as much with his personality as with his traps, a powerhouse trumpeter who eventually came to symbolize the best of what the swing era had to offer, and a trendsetting singer who gave new meaning to the word hip. The "ickies" may wonder what it's about, but it sure works for me.

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