Anita O'day: The Life Of A Jazz Singer

Although she's generally acknowledged among jazz enthusiasts as being one of the great female jazz voices of the 20th century, the late Anita O'Day never considered herself to be a singer: In her own humble opinion, she was a song stylist. She lacked the voice of say, Sarah Vaughn -- she blamed her lack of tone on a slip of a surgeon's scalpel during a routine tonsillectomy that accidentally removed her uvula -- but she had wildly inventive phrasing and impeccable timing. She was, in short, a jazz genius and true innovator of the art form, and she also lived the kind of life one only reads about in the hardest of hardboiled novels or her own celebrated 1981 memoir, <...