[Dixielandjazz] Louis Prima-- by Will Friedwald WSJ-- Charlie Suhor writes

[Norman Vickers]

To:  DJML and Musicians and Jazzfans lists

From:  Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

Jazz historian Charlie Suhor, a New Orleans native now living in Montgomery,
AL, writes about Louis Prima and family.

See his comments about his personal experiences with the family.

 

Thanks, Charlie.  That's what makes this list fun, contributions such as
yours.  Keep those e-mails coming.

 

From: Charles Suhor [mailto:csuhor at zebra.net] 
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 12:45 PM



 



The Friedwald article on Louis Prima was wonderfully even-handed. I guess
ambivalence is the right attitude towards his contributions-he did indeed do
"many things at once, often in direct contradiction with one another." Some
highly subjective observations. I would like to have seen more about Prima's
less more jazzy, less "showmanly" early days in New Orleans and New York;
more also about the closeness of the shuffle rhythm in so many of his
Italian and other pop tunes to the shuffle of Louis Jordan's combo. (The
simple addition of a heavy backbeat to the shuffle in the late 40s was
seminal to blues and rock drumming.) To my ears, much of Prima's big band
work was thundering noise, working cliched call-response patterns to death.
His drummer, Jimmy Vincent, was a master of the shuffle but was often
leaden-footed and one of the worst Gene Krupa imitators ever. 

The Vegas group with Keely and Butera was great entertainment, and more.
Butera somehow mastered the art of improvising beautiful lines in a
gravel-tone sax style on pop material. And as Joe Delaney once said, Sam
could break your heart with a ballad. Butera had started out as a young
be-bopper in New Orleans and formed a fine R&B/pop/jazz group in the early
fifties. Delaney worked with him on developing a marketable style and a
sense of building the tunes in a set to a climax. 

On a personal note, I knew Prima's "benevolent but domineering mother"
through Louis's nephew Buddy, a brilliant pianist, whom she raised. Her
house on Canal Boulevard was the site of jam sessions where I played drums
with Buddy, Bill Huntington on guitar, Al Hermann on trombone, and others in
the late fifties. As often happens, Buddy adored the controlling matriarch
even as he fought to loosen the apron strings. He was a dear friend, I've
never been able to get straight info on what happened to him after the
1980s.

Charlie Suhor

 
--End--