High Times Hard Times - by Anita O'Day (Paperback)

About the Book

Celebrating the One Hundredth Anniversary of Anita O'Day's Birth. Filled with vivid characters, including Gene Krupa, Stan Kenton, Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, and other jazz legends, this candid, classic memoir is a must-read for anyone interested in the real details of jazz's golden age.

Book Synopsis

Celebrating the One Hundredth Anniversary of Anita O'Day's Birth.

Filled with vivid characters, including Gene Krupa, Stan Kenton, Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, and other jazz legends, this candid, classic memoir is a must-read for anyone interested in the real details of jazz's golden age.

Review Quotes

A remarkably truthful book

A valuable, revealing, and read-at-a-gulp account of a premier American artist and the punishing winds that shaped her life and her craft.

In the tradition of the best jazz autobiographies...a fascinating travelogue through the jazz world, filled with vivid images of Gene Krupa, Stan Kenton, Roy Eldridge and Billie Holiday...Her prose is as hip as her music.

The record of [the] early years is like the story of the music itself; rich, exciting, innovative; featuring the primitive beauty of the twenties when one foot was still in showbiz; the thirties with hip sophistication and hard swinging for hard times; the explosive forties of pre-war big band bashes and post-war bop; and then the fifties, going off in a hundred directions with a needle in the arm...it is the best jazz autobiography I've ever read.

There's a pithy edge to Ms. Day's narrative, a certain comical 'give 'em hell' combativeness that shines through the book's many dark moments.

This no-holds-barred account of Anita's career ups and downs, drug fables, romantic interludes, and musical tales is fascinating reading.

About the Author

Anita O'Day (Anita Belle Colton) rose to fame with the Gene Krupa Big Band and the Stan Kenton Band in the 1940s before becoming a successful solo act in the 1950s with a series of popular albums and her memorable performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. O'Day's successes were interrupted by personal problems, including addiction and arrests for drug possession, but she went on to perform in clubs and festivals around the world and, in 1985, at a Carnegie Hall concert commemorating fifty years as a professional singer.

George Eells is an author and playwright. He began his career as a freelance reader for Hollywood film studios. He worked as an entertainment editor for Parade and later Theatre Arts, Signature, and Diners Club magazines. Eells wrote The Life That Late He Lead: A Biography of Cole Porter for which he received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. Ells proclaimed his favorite work was co-authoring High Times Hard Times.