The disc: "Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer."
The details: In Bert Stern's great documentary "Jazz on a Summer's Day," shot at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, Anita O'Day comes on in a beautiful hat, white gloves and a smile and proceeds to slay the audience with a killer set including "Tea for Two" and "Sweet Georgia Brown." She makes you realize that there are great singers but very few who also embody immense sexual possibility.
Unfortunately, it wasn't just an act. "Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer" is alternately harrowing and gorgeous. Harrowing is when O'Day — she died in 2006 at age 87 — is talking about her husband's and her heroin addiction. (Unmentioned in the film but fairly obvious are addictions to alcohol, prescription cough syrup and pretty much anything else that's available.)
Gorgeous is when directors Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden dig up some amazing clips of O'Day in her prime, the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. At that point, she was up there with Ella Fitzgerald and nobody else. She was a great jazz musician, using her voice like a cornet or a saxophone, except no horn ever gave off the vibe she did.
"Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer" comes in two versions: just the film itself, or packaged with a commemorative hardcover book and a second DVD of outtakes and complete performances. In either version, it's essential if you're interested in jazz or the capacious human capacity for self-destruction.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.