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In her earliest recordings, Anita O'Day was the featured vocalist with the big bands of Gene Krupa (1941-1942 and 1945–1946) and Stan Kenton (1944). In the 1940s, Columbia and Capitol Records released the recordings of Krupa and Kenton, respectively, on 78 rpm disks with one song per side. In later decades the tracks were anthologized in albums in other media.
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In her first years as a solo act, O'Day recorded several dozen live and in-studio songs, including ten tracks produced by Bob Thiele in fall 1947 for the Signature label.
O'Day sang with small and large studio ensembles for the Clef and Norgran labels formed by Norman Granz. The 1956–64 period brought O'Day to the attention of the jazz world, making 14 records. She became the first artist to record for Granz's newly formed Verve Records.
Spending several years kicking her drug and alcohol habit, O'Day re-emerged onto the music scene in 1970 with an album recorded live in Berlin for the MPS label.
In 1975, O'Day founded Emily Records, named after her dog. [1] This time period would document her strong comeback, with her first studio recordings since leaving Verve in 1963. Most of her recordings in the 1970s would take place in Japan, as jazz became popular in that country.