I too fly by night

I had to get a magnifying glass to read the notes on the back of the Anita O’Day CD because "THIS IS A FACIMILE OF THE ORIGINAL LP BACK COVER". I know very little about Anita O’Day except that we fell in love with her in the 70s when we were kids and we saw Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day and we’ve never forgotten her. I read the back cover, not really expecting to learn anything in particular but just because I like the way these cats (a guy called Dom Cerulli, in this case) wrote about jazz on the back of album covers in 1961. So her singing “mellows and matures”, she “makes it sound all so simple”, she’s “a different Anita who has gone beyond those other Anitas” with an “uncanny sense of time”. She’s “complex and daring”…going further and further out on that limb of harmonic improvisation”. And she sings beautiful songs like “The Ballad of All the Sad Young Men”.

drinking up the night/trying not to drown…while a grimy moon/watches from above/all the sad young men/play at making love/misbegotten moon/shines for sad young men/let your gentle light/ guide them home again/all the sad young men

with “supple lyrical sense”. There’s a “bright twist”. She scats “at bright tempo” giving another song its “appropriately funky treatment” and “fitting herself to the brass section….playing rather than singing her vocal”.




I suspect it’s a kind of aspiration of mine: playing rather than singing my vocal. I too fly by night.