LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS ON JAZZ
by Marshall Bowden

LOUIS PRIMA'S MAGNAGROOVE RECORDINGS:
More than Just 'The Wildest'

Louis Prima is sometimes seen as a musical novelty and an imitator of that other world famous New Orleans-born trumpet player and singer, Louis Armstrong. While Prima was a larger-than-life figure who injected a great deal of humor into his music, that did not mean that he wasn’t serious about it, and the greatest influences on his work are probably not Armstrong, but rather the musical atmosphere he inherited growing up in New Orleans as well as his Italian-American heritage. There are three distinct periods to Prima’s professional life. The first is his work that originated in New York with an outstanding band (featuring such musicians as Pee Wee Ellis) and a hard-swinging style infused with his humorous songs and outrageous scat singing. This period probably has received the most positive response from music writers and critics. The second is his revival as King of Las Vegas’ Sahara Lounge, working with singer and wife Keely Smith and faithful saxophonist Sam Butera and the Witnesses. It is this period that is most fondly remembered by many fans, and anyone who saw Prima performing then would likely never forget it. The last period comprises Prima’s work after his divorce from Smith, with fifth (and final) wife Gia Maione as his vocalist. During this period, Louis continued to work the Las Vegas circuit, and was as popular as ever, but his recordings (on his own Magnagroove label) acknowledged that times had changed dramatically in the popular music world with a band that included electric keyboards and guitars. This period has sometimes been decried and forgotten by those who acknowledge Prima’s musical legacy. It’s true that Prima was no longer innovating on these recordings, but they show the timelessness of Prima’s work by demonstrating that no amount of musical tinkering and stylistic change could strip his songs and delivery of their entertaining qualities.

Louis performs 'Bouna Sera' with Gia Maione

Las Vegas was good to Louis Prima, and he returned the favor by packing ‘em in year after year, throughout the 1960s. From 1963 until 1975, Magnagroove recordings were recorded in the studio Prima built in his own home, and sold largely at his shows. Prima’s strategy here is amazingly practical and became the model for many independent musicians in the internet age: record and release your own music, cutting out the middleman record company, and sell the recordings at your own shows. Live performances become your bread and butter, with recordings secondary. You lose a major record label’s promotional budget and national reach, but you gain control of your own music and, with lower overhead, show a profit much sooner. Prima took names and addresses of fans wherever he performed, and they joined a record club, receiving a copy of each new release.

The first Magnagroove release was Prima Show in the Casbar, released in 1963, and recorded live at the Sahara Hotel. In 1964, Prima released another live recording, King of Clubs, this time recorded at Harrah’s in Reno and Lake Tahoe. Both of these albums are live recordings done at the white-hot peak of Prima’s popularity, when Vegas was still an adult’s playground town. There is swing, R&B, humor, showtunes, vaudevillary, and more. The Casbar show features “Solitude,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” the Butera feature “Greenback Dollar,” and “I Love Paris.” King of Clubs features “Them There Eyes,” “Old Man River,” Butera’s sensational “Blues In the Night,” “Buona Sera,” and the Gia Maione vehicles “Goody Goody” and “I Want You to Be My Baby.” There’s even the nod to Dixieland, “South Rampart Street Parade.” These two are the best discs from Prima One Magnagroove for devotees of his Capitol years.

Next up is 1965’s This Is Gia, featuring Gia’s vocal stylings with an orchestra arranged and conducted by Louis and Alphonse D’Artega. D’artega wrote “In the Blue of Evening” and a number of arrangements for the all-girl band Gloria Parker and the Coquettes. Parker played marimba and, among other things, musical glasses. D’Artega’s arrangements here sometimes feature marimba, xylophone, and the like. They are solid settings for Mainone’s voice, and overall, she comes through well on this well-selected group of standards that includes “The Man I Love,” “Unforgettable,” “When Your Lover Has Gone,” My Funny Valentine,” and”Moonglow” as well as several others. There’s no Louis Prima to speak of on this album, so it is packaged as a twofer with Just a Gigolo, which is discussed later in this article.

Golden Hits of Louis Prima was originally recorded for Hanna Barbera Records in 1965. This album contains re-recordings of some of Louis’ biggest hits from all periods of his career. There are the early Italian numbers—“Angelina” “Josephina,” and “Buona Sera-Oh Marie”; the “Wildest!” hits like “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “That Old Black Magic” and a handful of other novelties like “Robin Hood,” “Oh Babe” and “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon.” It’s a crowd-pleasing album that no doubt was an attempt by Prima to control performances of some of his biggest hits—performances that were, in their orginal recorded versions, now owned by Capitol Records. While the performances of these standards are a bit updated, they aren’t that different. Prima didn’t change in any appreciable way other than to try to keep his sound a bit current. Otherwise his performances were all the epitome of lounge culture—a winning selection of songs, solid musicianship, and a great big bushel of humor.

'I Wanna Be Like You' from The Jungle Book

In 1967, Prima provided the voice of orangutan King Louis, ruler of all monkeys and apes in Walt Disney’s animated musical version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Louis hammed it up performing the number “I Wanna Be Like You,” and Disney never swung so hard. (see sidebar, The Jazziest Disney Joint). This gave Louis a new visibility that brought more people to see his Vegas shows and gave him an outstanding, crowd-pleasing hit to add to his live performances.

1969’s The New Sounds of the Louis Prima Show include a newly recorded version of “I Wanna Be Like You” as well as the uproarious R&B hit “Story ‘Bout a Dog.” Prima introduces ‘Little Richie’ Varola on Hammond B-3 organ, and Sam Butera works with an octave-splitter and some amplifier tricks to create a new sound for himself. The opening number “In a Little Spanish Town” show Prima to be in absolute top form with his vocals and ad-libs. Butera’s octave-splitter solo is next, and it’s easy to see that Butera was a vastly underrated talent, one of the great R&B sax honkers that hasn’t really gotten his due. Little “Richie” Varola takes a couple of swinging choruses on organ, and then takes it out in a manner that demonstrates why this was often a show opener for Prima at this time. “I’m Confdssin’” is a number that Prima had performed often throughout his career, here taken at a slow shuffle pace, allowing for plenty of Prima vocal pyrotechnics. Again, Butera is always there in the background to highlight his boss’ vocal work, the Kato to Prima’s Green Hornet. Gia duets with Louis on”I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and shows herself to have taken on a distinct vocal style of her own. Prima and Mainone never attempted to recreate the deadpan comedy style of vocal duet he had done during the years with Keely Smith. Instead, there was more of a sense of warm respect for each other’s space in each song. Butera wails again on the instrumental them from the film Exodus, playing pretty for the nice people. He also does vocal chores on “When a Man Loves a Woman,” delivering some Italian soul while Varola supports him on organ. The remake of “I Wanna Be Like You,” Louis’ feature song from Disney’s animated Jungle Book is fantastic, taking the piece from a Latin beat through the pumping “Just a Gigolo” shuffle that Louis had perfected, seemingly, while still in the cradle. Anyone who digs Prima in his prime is going to love this album.

1972’s The Prima Generation ’72 finds Louis in an amiable mixture of jazz, swing, and rock with some new musicians, including bassist/vocalist Rolly Di Iorio and guitar virtuoso Ronnie James. Gia isn’t heard on this album or on the next several that Louis recorded. She returned for the final release, The Wildest ’75. After a dynamic opening version of “As Time Goes By” with Prima singing and “The New Sorrento” featuring Sam Butera, DiIorio unleashes “Rose Garden” employing an exaggerated Italian accent that would surely raise eyebrows today. Lest you think perhaps it’s an anomolie, Rolly proves it’s not on “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.” Rolly was probably an interesting addition to Prima’s live performances at the time, but he isn’t back on subsequent recordings. Ronnie James is a real find, though, and he jacks up the hipster quotient considerably with his snazzy take on “Oh Happy Day” and the funky “What You Hear Is What You’ve Got,” written by James and Prima. Richie Varhola is back also, and features on “Love Story.” Perhaps oddest of all is the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil” here identified as “Symphony for the Devil” with an arrangement that includes a quote from “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Or maybe they did mean “Symphony.” Because although the writers are identified as ‘M. Jagger and K. Richards” on the sleeve, it’s hard to discern any motif from the actual song. But it’s a major, hot organ jam. Ultimately, Prima Generation ’72 is less fun and enjoyable than the later followup, The Wildest ’75.

Angelina, recorded in 1973 and dedicated to Prima’s mother, is a collection of Prima’s many Italian novelty songs, something that had, curiously, never been done previously. Bringing these favorites together on a single record made this one a sure-fire hit both within the Italian community and among Prima’s older fans. Again, this gave Prima a product he could sell at his performances that would likely put more money directly into his pocket than sales of the original recordings. It also kept his great hits sounding fresh and undated and demonstrated that his performing skills were as sharp as ever. This disc includes performances of “Angelina,” “Please No Squeeza Da Bannana,” “Mari-Yootch,” “Josephina,” “Oh Marie,” “Buona Sera,” “Baciagaloop,” “Mama,” and “Che La Luna.”

Also from 1973 is Just a Gigolo, featuring not only that famous hit, but a series of songs dedicated to ladies: Hello Dolly, Cecilia, Joanna, etc. This one is packaged as a 2-CD set along with This Is Gia. “Just a Gigolo” opens the proceedings, performed as a complete song without it’s medley partner, “I Ain’t Got Nobody.” There’s a nice long trumpet solo from Louis, one of the best he’d committed to record in a while. These songs are good Prima vehicles, and the performances are straight ahead, prime lounge band material, with Prim, a very enthusiastic about his material, both vocally and instrumentally, and a simple band comprised of piano, bass, durms, and Butera’s sax work. You feel like you’re listening to Prima live, without all the novelty and sideshows, which is not to say there’s no showmanship. Butera is still using his octave-splitter, and it seems he was able to integrate it into a mainstream musical style better than most saxophonists I’ve heard experiment with it.
Prima does “Hello Dolly,” and while some stylistic elements are apparent in common with Louis Armstrong, one feels one could never confuse the two men’s approaches to the song. Prima makes the song his own, as he did with everything he ever sang, just as Louis Armstrong also did. Everything here is done at Prima Gleeby shuffle tempo, even Rod McKuen’s 1:56 chestnut “Joanna.” But ultimately Just a Gigolo is a refreshingly stripped-down and even restrained performance by Prima that is somewhat rare in his discography.

The Wildest ’75 is Prima’s last recording, and contains his last 45-RPM single, the poignant “I’m Leaving You.” The song was widely played by radio stations in Las Vegas and New Orleans during the three years Prima remained in a coma until his death in 1978. But there is much more here besides. The opener is a version of Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces” that features synthesizers and electric rhythm guitar. It’s sprightly, but seemingly has nothing in common with any previous sound or incarnation of Louis Prima’s bands. On the other hand, this is what pretty much all big bands were doing at the time: getting big band arrangements of hip modern pop and rock hits that featured the lead instrumentalist and featured rhythm sections stacked with electronic instruments. Jeez, the version of “Summer of ‘42” here featuring Tony Horowitz sounds a lot like something the Maynard Ferguson band might have done around this time. In fact, Ferguson did cover this tune with his band as well. Other pop music covered here includes George Harrison’s “Something” sung by Gia with a somewhat folksy delivery, “Ode to Billy Joe” features guitarist Greg Moore doing his Wes Montgomery thing with this top ten hit, and Sam Butera (of course!) get’s behind the Barry White standard “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love Baby.” But Prima doesn’t forget about his older audiences, throwing in the Italian novelty “Where Do You Work-a John?”and a reprise of his old classic “Sheik of Araby” with the famous refrain ‘with no pants on.’ He mock croons his way through “That’s How Much I Love You” before deadpanning it through the remainder of the song.

Going way back into his catalog, Prima puts “Sing Sing Sing” into a blender that eventually comes up semi-disco. If all this sounds like some madcap musical funhouse where you can never really get your bearings, remember that these records were primarily sold to Louis fans who would come to see him live in Vegas. Louis continued to perform at venues such as the Copacabana, the Sands Hotel, the Sahara Hotel, Chicago’s Palmer House, and New Orleans’ French Quarter until he went into a post-surgical coma during surgery on a benign brain tumor. Perhaps it’s unfortunate that this was Prima’s last recording because it is very much a product of its time and shows it. From the vantage point of 2008, though, it’s kind of comforting to hear that the Prima organization was still capable of putting on a hell of a show. If Prima were still alive today he’d be in his ‘90s, but I think he might well still be at it. And somehow, I don’t think he’d be playing Branson.