Friday Night at 8: “High Times, Hard Times”

Yeah, you got Lady Day and Ella and Sarah, the triumverate of jazz singers.  Don’t get better that.

But then there’s Anita O’Day.

She went out on her own at 14 years of age, during the Depression, was a dancer in the “endurathons” popular at the time, had a wild young life and fell into singing, ending up making her name with Gene Krupa, Roy Eldridge, the girl singer, sometimes wearing the usual evening gowns, other times an altered kind of suit that took better the knocks of the hard tours on bus or car.

She lived the jazz life.

If you know Anita, you probably recall her big break at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1958.  Here’s her description of it from her autobiography, High Times, Hard Times by Anita O’Day (with George Ellis):

Today there are jazz festivals all over the place, and half the performers aren’t really jazz musicians.  In those days, Newport was probably the only great one.  When you appeared there, you were among your peers.  Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Teddy Wilson, all hung around the park, making it an up thing.

I was scheduled for 5 o’clock in the afternoon and I asked myself what to wear.  “It’s teatime,’ I told the Italian lady who ran a dress shop in Greenwich Village.  She brought out this black dress, trimmed with white.  We both knew it was right, but I asked what I could wear on my head.  She went into the backroom and came out with a black cartwheel, trimmed with white feathers.  Both went with my see-through, plastic pumps and for a fun touch I added short white gloves.

Unbeknownst to me, Bert Stern, a famous advertising and fashion photographer, was there with a camera crew shooting a full-length documentary.  It had rained, and if you watch closely you can see me scrape the mud off my shoe as I start up the first step toward the stand.  Bert Block of Associated Booking asked John to get me to sign a release to allow them to film my set.  John signed it and never brought the subject up.

So to me this was just a swinging set,  not a turning point in my career.  Performing in the afternoon was a bonus, because I could sese the audience.  I spotted Chris Connor out there.  That was good, because I can make my performance the way I want it to be when I know some of the audience digs what I’m doing and I can relate to them.

I was high as a kite, but I was really functioning when we swung into the first of the nine numbers.  (Incidentally, it was John Poole on drums, not Max Roach, as is usually assumed).

And here’s the video.  Anita always called herself a “song stylist,” didn’t brag about her chops too much, said she didn’t have a uvula, you know, that little thingy at the end of your throat that allows you to warble when you sing, so her style arranged itself around that lack.  Take a listen to Miss O’Day:

Traveling back in time, here’s Anita singing Honeysuckle Rose in 1956 with the Buddy DeFranco Quartet:

Took a while to get that style but she made it her own, she was a real original.  She lived the jazz life.  Long times making little money, a break here and there, some recognition and then on the road again.  The drugs, the booze, the men, years of mad mistakes, yet she survived them all and kept singing.

Krupa took on the great trumpeter Roy Elddridge, Krupa one of the rare ones who had an integrated band.

Here’s Anita’s take on what happened:

Critics have written that the Krupa band took on a new spirit after Roy “Little Jazz” Eldridge and I joined.  That’s partly true, but if you want to know the real inside story, this is it.

I’d been on the road about five weeks and a lot of time the band just was not swinging.  Graham Young had come on only a week before I did and he was a little bit disappointed.  He thought the trouble was that Gene had got leaderitis.  Instead of staying at the drums, he’d turn them over to Graham, who didn’t pretend to be much of a drummer, and get out front waving his hands.

Anyway, about my fifth week with Gene we played a Battle of the Bands date against Jimmie Lunceford.  It was in Baltimore, I think.

Lunceford’s band started and played forty-five minutes or an hour and, man, did they swing!  Wow!  It was just too much.  They must have been out to show Gene, because when it came time for intermission, the first cat to quit was the drummer.  He stopped and left the stage and the band went on swinging without him.

Then to rub it in, the bass, the guitar and the piano left the stage and the band still swung.  Finally, they finished the number and got off.  When we took the stand, Gene was still shaking his head and the first tune he called was “Let’s Get Away From It All.”

That was the turning point.  Whenever Graham Young and I meet we recall that night.  Before that, Gene had been wanting to hire Roy Eldridge as first trumpet.  But whoever was advising him gave Gene the word that it would be too controversial, because those were the days of strict segregation.  Gene’s advisors were worried about their ability to book an integrated band.  This was not unusual.  In those days there was not a white band that had a regular black member in it.  Benny Goodman had Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson, but they didn’t sit in the band.  They came out as soloists or with the quartet or sextet.  Teddy Wilson played piano, but Benny also had Jess Stacy or whoever.  Teddy Wilson was not the band piano player.

Well, after Jimmie Lunceford drove us into the ground, I suppose Gene figured we needed all the help we could get and to heck with commercial considerations.  The band wasn’t going to make it commercially unless it could swing anyhow, so Roy joined a few days later.

I hate to stop, but I think I’ve quoted enough!  I highly recommend Anita’s autobiograpy, it swings just like her singing.

Let’s take a look at Anita and Roy Eldridge playing with the Gene Krupa band:

Yeah, it was a different time and a different rhythm.  But what I’ve seen of jazz musicians, there’s only one constant — they got to play.  They’ll play for one person or a thousand or ten thousand.    Imagine, though, saying “to heck with commercial consideration.”  Ah, what luxury.  I think our world is too uptight today for that.  Hopefully that won’t always be the case.

I love Anita O’Day.  She worked with what she had, she lived the jazz life.  She was a magnificent musician with a great ear and a great beat.

One last bit of video here, a clip from a documentary done in Anita’s later life entitled “Indestructible.”  Take a gander.

Hope you enjoyed the tunes and the talk.  It’s been a rough week with lots of bad news, but sometimes you just gotta blow, dontcha know.