if you like jazz you must read this book...
it is just as wonderful as hearing Anita sing...
What a life, what a voice!

At 3 a.m. last night I finally read a last chapter,couldnt put it down before.Yes,Anita O'Day writting voice sounds very much like her singing self: ironic,witty,tough hip "swing chick" (her words) who didnt give a damn what others think.Her self-destructivness very much echoes another famous artist (in rock music) Marianne Faithfull,in fact this two women have much more in common than you think.Both survivors,both eventually come back and yes,both are still live preformers.Her opinion about other jazz singers are sometimes strange ("Like me,Ella never had a great voice"?) - but think that she was commercially oversahdowed by Fizgerald.As much as Anita's "Verve" albums are beautiful and timeless (I really think woman was a highest-class jazz improvisator,she grew up from Billie Holiday and made her own style) this book is sometimes painful to read.I believe there is a general curiousity about somebody's dirty linen,in this case it almost overshadow her art - at some points it reads like 50's detective story,with smokey jazz clubs,jazz musicians as a drug addicts and cops always around to "find" (read:set up) drugs in dressing room.With all beautiful music she made,its a pity that editor of the book find more interesting to emphasise her drug addiction,since her arrests,sanatoriums,jails and courts get more space than anything else.I dont think this was her intention,probably publisher wanted scandalous story,but if you dont know her music,this book can make you think that Anita O'Day was a famous junkie who had a music as a hobby.

Seems like a truly honest, candid account of the jazz life of a famous jazz singer, warts and all. Very touching in its candor in which the singer's habits brought down her considerable talents and what could have seemed like a glamorous life on the road really was far more debased than what one might imagine. Besides the sordid side, a lot of opinions about the jazz abilities of a lot of famed musicians of the forties and fifties; generally, a very honest, open and sometimes painful account of the jazz life of a great artist. I had the pleasure of meeting the aritst in person at a performance a few years ago, and she revealed that she had never read the final product herself. Highly worthwhile.