If you’ve see the film Jazz On A Summer’s Day, shot at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, you are probably familiar with Anita O’Day.

Considered among the five greatest jazz singers of the Golden Age — Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sara Vaughan, Carmen McRae and O’Day — she is the only white singer in the group and perhaps the least well known.

Her artistry, singular style, virtuosity and attitude put her in this select company, which she richly deserves.

The subject of Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden’s documentary from 2007, Anita O’Day The Life Of A Jazz Singer, released on DVD in ’09, she was a fascinating personality who started with big bands in the 1940s, adapted flawlessly to bebop in the late ’40s and ’50s and was the first jazz singer on the historic Verve Records in the mid-’50s, recording a string of memorable records that sold unexpectedly well.

She also lived the life of a jazz singer to the fullest and with it came the often seen pitfalls. A heroin addict for 15 years from the mid-’50s until 1968 and an alcohol and pill abuser after that, she lived hard and cool and made no apologies as is shown in many cuts from the film with interviewers Dick Cavett, David Frost, Bryant Gumbel and segments on 60 Minutes.

But she survived, working well into the ’80s and ’90s and coming back in the early 2000s with an album, Indestructible, and performances in New York until her death in 2006 at 87.

She is also interviewed by the filmmakers for this documentary at age 84 and her insights, remembrances and anecdotes are invaluable in helping explain her extraordinary career.

She started as the singer in drummer Gene Krupa’s Big Band — during which she sang a groundbreaking duet with horn player Roy Eldridge on the tune Let Me Off Uptown, the first time a white woman and African-American musician had duetted — moved to the Stan Kenton Orchestra and others before opting for smaller groups, usually trios or quartets, and worked with some of the great arrangers of her day, Billy May and Johnny Mandel, among many others.

She always said she wasn’t a singer but a song stylist. She never felt she had the chops of the other great singers. And she often said she was never a ballad singer. But she’s described by other musicians as a jazz musician who uses her voice as an instrument.

She liked to sing songs with a lot of eighth-notes because she had no vibrato, courtesy of a botched tonsillectomy as a kid. But somehow she found a way to hold notes when she had to and some of her ballads, for instance A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square, are awe-inspiring.

O’Day was an improvisor perhaps without peer. She could take a melody and turn it inside out, traveling with it on an unconventional journey through chromatic runs and precise, pinpoint scatting, sometimes singing tunes with no lyrics but playing off other instruments. That was because she didn’t listen to other singers, although she had some favorites, she listened to the horns. That’s how she learned to work her magic with a melody.

George Wein, the impresario who started the festivals in Newport calls O’Day’s performance in ’58 of Sweet Georgia Brown “the greatest rendition of the song ever made.” And when you watch it during the film or in its complete form without interruption on the bonus disc, you see why. She takes the melody out as far as it can go, starting with only the drummer playing a rumba rhythm behind her, eventually breaking into an easy going, 4 swing feel and finally doubling the tempo. It’s a masterful piece of work. Her melody inventions are a marvel.

The filmmakers do an impeccable job of bringing O’Day’s life to the screen, including her musical accomplishments, brushes with the law and jail time, her uncompromising demeanor at times and her wonderful artistic integrity.

The bonus disc is truly a bonus. It includes two extended outtakes of interviews for the film with O’Day, in her 80s, and others interviewed in the film, including jazz singer Annie Ross, musicians and arrangers she worked with and friends. In addition, complete musical performances are presented that include Sweet Georgia Brown from Newport, specials from Tokyo, where O’Day earned quite a bit of her living after the Newport date, a ’50s U.S. television performance that has an example of her sometimes tough treatment of fellow musicians, a session in Sweden and clips from the Krupa and Kenton eras with the famous Eldridge duet.