Voice of experience: what a difference O'Day made

Rather than devote this column for a second successive week to an obituary I shall defer a longer look at the remarkable career of Anita O'Day until the release early next year of a recently completed documentary about her entitled Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer.

Her passing cannot go entirely unremarked this week, however, and she certainly did live an extraordinary jazz life. One of the great ladies, proto-feminists and survivors of the music died of pneumonia on November 23 at the age of 87, almost 40 years after finally kicking a decades-old heroin habit that was thought at the time to have near fatally weakened her heart.

A big band singer who evolved into one of the leading lights of cool jazz, she was one of the great scat performers - like Ella Fitzgerald she found the technique useful when she couldn't remember a lyric - and a fine and emotional interpreter of ballads and torch songs.

She converted a vocal limitation imposed by a botched tonsillectomy which left her unable to produce a vibrato into a trademark style that was widely imitated, and the albums she recorded for the Verve label during the 1950s are classics.

Anita O'Day Sings Jazz from 1956 was Verve's first LP release, and another notable first in her career, at least from a Hong Kong jazz fan's point of view, was that she was the opening act when the Jazz Club opened in Lan Kwai Fong in 1989. She will be missed, and this might be a good time for record companies to consider some properly remastered releases of her albums.

The back catalogue is in a state of disarray.