[Dixielandjazz] Louis Prima

[Robert Ringwald]

Louis Prima

Both Leading Man and Comic Relief
by Will Friedwald
Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2011
Close friends of the New Orleans-born trumpeter and singer Louis Prima, whose centennial
arrived in December, say that it was his benevolent but domineering mother who taught
him to "never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." It's easy to
see how that adage applied to his love life, but it even more readily describes Prima's
music. The man was always doing many things at once, often in direct contradiction
with one another.
"Felicia No Capicia" is a classic example of Prima showing this contradiction in
the most entertaining way possible. He introduced this Italian-American comedy song
in 1945, first recording it commercially and then, a few months later, singing it
on Frank Sinatra's radio show. Good as the original 78 rpm version is, the live performance
(which survives as an aircheck) captures an artist who is even more dynamic and supercharged
with Neapolitan magnetism.
He's swinging to a hard-driving beat here, big-band-era style, and showing that he
is a major jazz vocalist-instrumentalist to compete with his namesakes, Louis Armstrong
and Louis Jordan. Yet at the same time, there's more than a hint of the Italian tarantella
in the underlying rhythm. Somehow, he makes both work together. In the lyrics, Prima,
as he does in most of his "Italian" songs, presents himself as a gullible baciagaloop,
always letting his girlfriends -- beautiful, intelligent women -- wrap him around
their little fingers. (Felicia, for instance, spends all of his money, but every
time he tries to get a kiss, she pretends not to speak English.) Yet even though
he's playing a sexually frustrated fall guy, a Sicilian schlemiel, Prima's throaty
singing is amazingly erotic. If this tale were a movie, Prima would be both the leading
man and the comic relief.
Prima (1910-1978) was one of the great avatars of an era in pop music when comedy
was as important as romance, when even top stars like Sinatra and Doris Day were
expected to sing novelties as much as ballads. By the 1960s, pop began to take itself
increasingly seriously, and though it never completely lost its sense of humor, the
great musical clowns became gradually marginalized. It's no coincidence that Nat
King Cole started his career singing rhythmic novelties but gradually switched to
romantic love songs; Jimmy Durante, at the end of his career, was crooning ballads
rather than shouting "Umbriago!"
Prima kept current through the 1960s. Among other things, he created his most enduring
film role by supplying the voice and personality for King Louie in Disney's "The
Jungle Book." Yet there's a clip from a 1971 TV appearance in the newly released
DVD "Louis Prima in Person" where Prima has modernized as much as he can, having
added electric organ to his mix. His music is still swinging -- itself no longer
an asset by 1971 -- but Prima himself, dressed in a blue bell-bottom suit and sporting
a Beatle haircut, seems like a man who has outlived his moment.
Less than a decade after his death, Prima would be current again, beginning when
David Lee Roth cloned his signature medley of "Just a Gigolo" and "I Ain't Got Nobody."
A few years after that, Prima's own 1956 recording of "Jump, Jive, and Wail" would
become the soundtrack of a TV commercial and the national anthem of the retro swing
movement. His music is heard on innumerable soundtracks (the Internet Movie Database
lists a mere 118, mostly from the past 15 years), and other movies, like the 1996
comedy "Big Night," fetishize his very existence.
In addition to the new DVD, Prima's centennial brings with it a new CD, "Rarities
and Hits (1963-1975)," and a BBC documentary. And Prima is now highly regarded enough
to have been immortalized by a statue (in Legends Park, in the French Quarter), and
inspired an academic colloquium (at Tulane University) in which I participated. Also
in honor of the 100th anniversary, Prima's youngest child, Louis Prima Jr., is taking
his excellent tribute band into New York's Feinstein's at the Regency this week.
"Louis Prima in Person" could be a documentary in itself, since it covers virtually
the trumpeter's entire career, from his New Orleans Gang, which helped make New York's
52nd Street the main drag for jazz in the early swing era, to the Witnesses, which
co-starred singer Keely Smith (the leader's fourth wife) and tenor saxophonist Sam
Butera, and helped make Las Vegas into a national destination for the first time.
There's a glorious excerpt of the Prima-Smith-Butera combination at its apogee on
the "Ed Sullivan Show" in 1959. In the middle of "Gigolo-Nobody" (done with considerably
more musicality than Mr. Roth), the band's key soloists knock into each other like
the Three Stooges. Yet compared to Prima's antics (his dance moves anticipate the
Pogo), not only the delightfully deadpan Ms. Smith but everybody else on stage seems
like they're standing still. Butera is funny, Ms. Smith is funny, rubber-faced trombonist
Lou Sino is funny, yet when Prima is on stage, the best anyone else can be is a straight
man.
The "Rarities and Hits" collection is a valuable anthology of the entertainer in
his final decade, when he generally recorded for his own Prima1 label. It includes
five tracks that haven't been reissued before, among them a thoroughly Prima-fied
version of the 1968 pop hit "Little Green Apples" (with his own special lyrics).
Both the DVD and the CD also feature Prima's final musical and marital partner, the
underappreciated singer Gia Maione. Where Ms. Smith's stone-face persona accentuated
Prima's zaniness, Ms. Maione's wide-eyed, sweet-voiced innocence made Prima seem
even more like a lecherous old satyr, a faun still loaded with vitality and vitriol
well into his afternoon.
If Louis Armstrong remains the central figure in all of jazz, and Louis Jordan is
the first man of R&B (and, indirectly, rock), Louis Prima's legacy isn't as easy
to describe, yet it is everywhere. Generations of Italian-American and other rock
and pop stars have cited Prima as an inspiration, including Dion DiMucci, who said
"Prima would have been the first guy inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
if he didn't sing in Italian." Sinatra modeled the Rat Pack on Prima's act, and Elvis
Presley said that he "learned some of his best moves" from him. Sonny and Cher took
the Louis and Keely act and draped it in hippie drag. There are so many influences
running in and out of Prima's canon that it's harder than ever to fully fathom all
the things he was.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. 
Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.