In 1941, 21-year-old Anita took to the road for the first time, as the chick singer with the nationally known Gene Krupa and His Orchestra. At that time, "chirps," as they were affectionately if condescendingly named, were essentially a kind of window dressing for a big band. O'Day was one of the first band singers to declare emphatically that she was, in fact, a genuine musician, a real soloist, comparable to Roy Eldridge, the trumpet god who would shortly join her in the Krupa band.

In O'Day's music the emphasis isn't on voice or melody, it's about taking a song and styling it: swinging it, improvising on it. Yet, as her improvising shows, she knew her harmonies: Her scat solo on "Night and Day" (1959) is a typically brilliant O'Day invention, with the singer leaping over Cole Porter's chromaticisms like Tarzan swinging through the trees.

The essence of her singing, the sonic quality of her voice, is about pure essentials: When O'Day hits a note, you just get the pure note and no vibrato. She claimed that when she first began singing professionally (around 1936), she discovered that some years earlier a careless doctor had sliced off her uvula while removing her tonsils. This made it difficult for her to sustain notes, which she did only very rarely: When she holds a note at the end of "Travelin' Light," it works because it's such a departure for her. "I can't get a sound with the air back there because there's nothing to vibrate it," she wrote. "That's the reason I got into singing eighth and sixteenth rather than quarter notes. Instead of singing 'laaaaa' I'd sing 'la-la-la-la' to keep it moving." She used syncopation to break up long laaaaas into short la-la-la-las in a way that's sublimely rhythmic and swinging.

Her greatest period, recording-wise, is the decade or so in which she worked with producer Norman Granz (and, briefly, with his successors at Verve). You can hear her applying this technique on practically every song, as when she turns "who will buy" into "who-oo-oo will buy" in the last eight bars of "Love for Sale" or "Speak Low" into "Speak lo-ho-ho" and likewise in the coda ("myself to you-hoo-hoo . . . ") of "Body and Soul." She once said that in order to get the most out of her relatively narrow vocal range, she had to break the scale up into her own microtones within the scale—to create new notes in places where there never were any notes before.

In matters of keys, chord changes, and tempos, O'Day knew way more about music than your average horn player. But at the same time, much of what she did communicates that she wasn't of the same breed as ordinary musicians—that she does, in fact, belong to another group entirely.

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Miles: The Autobiography Purchase at Amazon

The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit. It might have been me playing around with the stove. I don't remember who it was. Anyway, I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it. That's as far back as I can remember; any further back than this is just fog, you know, just mystery. But that stove flame is as clear as music is in my mind. I was three years old.

I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn't been before. To some frontier, the edge, maybe, of everything possible. I don't know; I never tried to analyze it before. The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about.

That's where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started, with that moment. I don't know, but I think it might be true. Who knows? What the fuck did I know about anything back then? In my mind I have always believed and thought since then that my motion had to be forward, away from the heat of that flame.

Looking back, I don't remember much of my first years—I never liked to look back much anyway.
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…You got to remember that the people in a band, the quality of the musicians, is what makes a band great. If you have talented, quality musicians who are willing to work hard, play hard, and do it to¬gether, then you can make a great band. In the last years that Trane was with my group, he started playing for himself, especially during the last year. When that happens the magic is gone out of a band and people who used to love to play together start not caring any¬more. And that's when a band falls apart, and all the music gets stale.

I knew that Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams were great musicians, and that they would work as a group, as a musical unit. To have a great band requires sacrifice and compromise from everyone; without it, nothing happens. I thought they could do it and they did. You get the right guys to play the right things at the right time and you got a motherfucker; you got every¬thing you need.

If I was the inspiration and wisdom and the link for this band, Tony was the fire, the creative spark; Wayne was the idea person, the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did; and Ron and Herbie were the anchors. I was just the leader who put us all together. Those were all young guys and although they were learning from me, I was learning from them, too, about the new thing, the free thing. Because to be and stay a great musician you've got to always be open to what's new, what's happening at the moment. You have to be able to absorb it if you're going to continue to grow and communicate your music. And creativity and genius in any kind of artistic expression don't know nothing about age; either you got it or you don't, and being old is not going to help you get it. I understood that we had to do something different. I knew that I was playing with some great young musicians that had their fingers on a different pulse.

At first Wayne had been known as free-form player, but playing with Art Blakey for those years and being the band's musical director had brought him back in somewhat. He wanted to play freer than he could in Art's band, but he didn't want to be all the way out, either. Wayne has always been someone who experimented with form in¬stead of someone who did it without form. That's why I thought he was perfect for where I wanted to see the music I played go.

Wayne was the only person that I knew then who wrote something like the way Bird wrote, the only one. It was the way he notated on the beat. Lucky Thompson used to hear us and say, "Goddamn, that boy can write music!" When he came into the band it started to grow a lot more and a whole lot faster, because Wayne is a real composer. He writes scores, writes the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound. It worked exactly like that except when I changed some things. He doesn't trust many people's interpretations of his music, so he would bring out the whole score and everyone would just copy their parts from that, rather than go through the melody and changes and pick our way through the music like that.

Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didn't work, then he broke them, but with a musical sense; he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your satisfaction and taste. Wayne was always out there on his own plane, orbiting around his own planet. Everybody else in the band was walking down here on earth. He couldn't do in Art Blakey's band what he did in mine; he just seemed to bloom as a composer when he was in my band. That's why I say he was the intellectual musical catalyst for the band in his arrangement of his musical compositions that we recorded.

I was learning something new every night with that group. One reason was that Tony Williams was such a progressive drummer. He would listen to a record and memorize the whole record, all the solos, the whole thing. He was the only guy in my band who ever told me, "Man, why don't you practice!" I was missing notes and shit trying to keep up with his young ass. So he started me to practicing again because I had stopped and didn't even know it. But man, I can tell you this: there ain't but one Tony Williams when it comes to playing the drums. There was nobody like him before or since. He's just a motherfucker. Tony played on top of the beat, just a fraction above, and it gave everything a little edge because it had a little edge. Tony played polyrhythms all the time. He was a cross between Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones, Roy Haynes and Max Roach. Those were his idols, and he had a little bit of all their shit. But his shit was definitely his own.

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Three Chords For Beauty Sake by Tom Nolan
Purchase at Amazon

Preface (Excerpt) In the exuberant decade between 1935 and 1945, when America’s indigenous art form -jazz- was also the nation’s popular music, no musical performer was more famous, controversial, admired, and reviled than Artie Shaw: the brilliant, handsome, outspoken, and unpredictable clarinetist and bandleader whose hit recordings (“Begin the Beguine,” “Frenesi,” “Star Dust,” “Summit Ridge Drive”) sold millions, whose marriages to several beautiful women (including movie stars Lana Turner and Ava Gardner) made headlines, who risked alienating his public by calling a large chunk of them “morons,” and whose frequent abdications from the kingdom of swing earned him a reputation as jazz’s Hamlet.

With no formal training, Artie Shaw became a virtuoso musician almost without peer: a clarinet player influenced as much by trumpeters, violinists, pianists, and even painters as by fellow reedmen. His lyrical solos seemed to evoke visual images: a bird in flight, a tree moved by wind, a sailboat in the moonlight. On a ballad, his harmonically adventurous playing explored every gorgeous nook and cranny of a melody; on a rousing swing tune, his euphoric horn soared high and joyous enough to raise the roof.

He grew up as a player in the 1920s jazz age of Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong; reigned in the 1930s and ‘40s swing era alongside Benny Goodman Duke Ellington, and Tommy Dorsey; navigated past the ‘40s bebop revolution of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (who both admired his playing) to make beautiful and remarkable chamber jazz in the early 1950s.

Chapter 25 (Excerpt) Was there nothing this crackerjack outfit of Shaw’s couldn’t play? By the time the band reached Philadelphia in mid-November, it was as loose as a goose and as tight as a drum.

Then without warning came the sort of magical live set Shaw had experienced once or twice before with his 1938 band. This 1941orchestra’s unforgettable night took place in the Midwest. Ray Coniff remembered, “I think it was Kansas. . . .The places we used to play sometimes - they were Quonset-huts, these metal barracks-type things. . . .The temperature in the day in the sun must have been up to one fifteen or one twenty. . . .And you can imagine this metal barracks at eight p.m. when we were going to start; it was like a furnace in there. It was absolutely stifling- and the place was packed. The temperature was so high that all the brass instruments were sharp because of the change in the size of the metal; we couldn’t get tuned to the piano. Artie didn’t even come up on the stand; he was down in the dressing-room somewhere in the basement.”

Shaw thought Coniff’s “Just Foolin’ Around” was the number the band was into when the magic struck. As Coniff recalled,

“Hot Lips Page was the first to play a solo. I don’t know what happened, but something he played just suddenly inspired the whole band. . . .It was an electrifying thing: The band started to swing like I’ve never heard a band swing before or since. The people all stopped dancing and got as close to the stands as they could. As each guy played, he just played way over his head. I remember when I played it was like I wasn’t moving the [trombone] slide myself ; everything went automatically by itself.

“Artie . . .grabbed his clarinet and came up on the stand and joined in. When we got to the end of the arrangement- he gave the signal with one finger up, and we all went back to the top again; we didn’t even stop. We just went back to the top of the whole arrangement and played it down through again; we all played solos again. That was one of the most memorable experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life in the music-business.”

“Hot Lips Page was playing,” Art said in awe, over sixty years later, “and the band caught fire. The god-damn thing- Suddenly, there was a thing in the air. this band was blowing up a storm. The tempo, and the time- everything just came together. We all stared at each other. What’s happening?

“Many many years later -only recently- Ray said, “You remember that night?’ I said, ‘I know exactly the night you’re talking about. Low ceiling-’ He said, ‘That’s right. Hot Lips was playing-’ And the band-went crazy. Everyone! Everybody- staring at each other. . . .That’s somethin’ you never get over,” Shaw said at ninety-three.