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the Authentic Italian issue

Seven recordings of the late 1920s. By the 1930s, with Armstrong’s rise as a soloist and distinctive singer, LaRocca suffered a nervous breakdown and went back home to New Orleans, abandoning his music career and becoming a homebuilder. Jazz critics considered the ODJB recordings an anomaly, the white band that “got there first,” recording the first songs called jazz. Coming a little later, black jazzmen poured a stream of blues and church songs into the sound that gave jazz is fundamental essence. Prima caught a break in 1934 when visiting bandleader Guy Lombardo saw him with his brother Leon’s band in New Orleans at Club Flim Flam, and Lombardo offered to help Louis find work in New York.The hardest part was not leaving his wife, but persuading Angelina, his mom, to let him go. Matrimony and Prima were not the smoothest fit: He pursued women relentlessly, married five times, and had six children. Lombardo steered him to the studio for the Brunswick label. Prima’s pulsing trumpet led his band, the New Orleans Gang, featuring George Brunis, a veteran of the ODJB, on trombone, and Sidney Arodin, another Crescent City transplant, on clarinet. In Prima’s version of the fabled Storyville song, “Basin Street Blues,”

O f all the New Orleans musicians who followed Louis Armstrong’s path to the bright lights of northern cities, none matched Louis Prima for sheer showmanship. A hot Dixieland trumpeter and flamboyant bandleader, Prima was a robust singer who plunged into scat singing, composed primarily of words with no discernable meaning, as if they’d been plucked from a foreign dictionary; he was also a ribald comic, charming club crowds with a high-octane style. Born in 1910 in an Italian enclave in the back of the French Quarter, Prima was the second of five children in a second-generation Sicilian LA MUSICA DE LOUIS PRIMA by Jason Berry

family; the family soon moved to the Tremé neighborhood, across Rampart Street, to a house on St. Peter Street amid Arabs, Jews, African Americans and Italians — a classic layer of the melting pot. One sister became a nun. His over-doting mother insisted the kids take music lessons. His older brother, Leon, became a trumpeter and bandleader who gave his brother a spotlight in 1928 when Louis dropped out of Warren Easton High School. Prima became the most celebrated Italian- American musician from New Orleans, though by the time he hit New York in the mid-1930s, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) had paved a trail. The ODJB, led by New Orleans cornet player Nick LaRocca, made the first jazz recording in New York in 1917, and the group became an overnight sensation, planting the word “jazz” in the American lexicon. The fortunes of LaRocca’s band lasted only a few years; they were surpassed by Armstrong’s legendary Hot Five and Hot

he supplants the lines alluding to bordellos, “where all the light and dark folks meet,” with a more innocuous, “where all the boys stand in line,” as if for ice cream. In those early cuts, his husky tenor swings easily into a warble of sweet scat phrasings. The writer Garry Boulard, author of Louis Prima (University of Illinois Press), captures an essence of his crowd appeal in a fascinating comparison: “Like a Southern evangelist who knew when to drop to his knees and rock the house with cries of salvation,Prima knew,by instinct,night after night, what songs could be used to build the audience into a state of exalted frenzy. His goal was mesmerizing entertainment.” As Prima sailed through the Big Band era, his band pulled into Virginia Beach in 1948, and it was there he discovered Keely Smith, a dark-haired beauty, all of 20 years old. Part Cherokee and part Irish, she joined the band as a singer as they traveled in a caravan of cars to gigs across the land. On stage, to

“ Prima became the most celebrated Italian-American musician from New Orleans, though by the time he hit New York in the mid-1930s, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) had paved a trail. The ODJB, led by New Orleans cornet player Nick LaRocca, made the first jazz recording in New York in 1917, and the group became an overnight sensation, planting the word ‘jazz’ in the American lexicon.”

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