Read That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas Online

Authors: Tom Clavin

Tags: #Individual Composer & Musician, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Pop Vocal, #Music, #Biography & Autobiography, #Genres & Styles, #Composers & Musicians

That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (3 page)

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“[T]hey dressed in quasi-military apparel, with smart-looking caps, white shirts, and dark pants,” wrote Laurence Bergreen in his biography of the musician. “A traditional funeral always began the same way, with the band assembling in the morning, then beginning with stately slow numbers, a few hymns, and the inevitable ‘Free as a Bird’ to accompany the deceased to his grave; this was a soft, lilting lament mingling sadness and release from mortal cares. Although the New Orleans brass bands played their music soberly and respectfully at the start of a funeral, they soon allowed the rites to take wing and to become a dancing, singing celebration.”

Armstrong’s favorite performers were horn blowers Freddy Keppard, Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, and Sidney Bechet. He imitated them at first but had begun to improvise when at fourteen he was hired by the owner of a small honky-tonk to play late into the night. Armstrong dreamed of the day that he could be part of a band like his favorites were.

That day came after World War I ended. At seventeen, Armstrong had married a prostitute named Daisy Parker. During their frequent separations, Armstrong hung around a club owned by Tom Anderson, who invited him to play with the house band. Around this time he also was allowed to perform with the Tuxedo Brass Band. Armstrong quickly acquired a reputation as a horn player who never tired, who could almost instantly understand any kind of arrangement, and whom audiences took a shine to because of his crowd-pleasing manner—he invited people to be part of the fun he was having.

His first big break occurred one night while he was sitting in with the Kid Ory band at Co-operative Hall. He was observed by Fate Marable, a river-boat piano player. Marable invited the talented teenager to join his band on the steamer
Sydney,
which traveled up and down the Mississippi.

Audiences outside of New Orleans were exposed to Armstrong’s innovative horn playing and infectious laugh. His emerging reputation spread along the river. When not on the steamship, Armstrong played in the cabarets in the city. King Oliver and Kid Ory had formed a band together, and another break for Armstrong came when Oliver succumbed to the siren call of Chicago and Ory asked the young cornet player to replace him, which was a great honor.

By the time he turned twenty, in the summer of 1921, Armstrong was seen as perhaps the best musician in New Orleans, certainly the best horn player, though the singer in him kept trying to get out, as would happen with Prima. “From the beginning, Armstrong’s interest in singing and songs equaled his enthusiasm for the cornet and instrumental jazz, the music he more than anyone else would turn into a legitimate art form,” wrote Will Friedwald in
Jazz Singing.
“Shortly after leaving the orphanage, in fact, Armstrong composed what would later become the popular standard ‘I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.’ Still, for the next dozen or so years of his life, singing took a backseat to the trumpet.”

When the piano player Fletcher Henderson, a member of the band backing Ethel Waters, saw Armstrong perform, he urged the horn player to meet him back in New York so they could form a band. Armstrong said that he was not ready to leave New Orleans and his fellow musicians there, or his mother and sister. (Daisy was another matter—her husband lived in fear of the sharp razor she kept handy.) However, in 1922, when King Oliver invited him to join his band in Chicago, Armstrong packed a bag. Four days after his twenty-first birthday, he hopped an Illinois Central Railroad train and embarked on an unprecedented career as a jazz artist.

It could be considered odd that during their lives Armstrong and Prima rarely crossed paths. They were the most famous musicians of the two most musical minority groups in New Orleans, yet they ended up going their separate ways. That they were of different races didn’t matter, because Armstrong wasn’t prevented from performing with talented white musicians, and Prima played the Apollo Theater and other venues associated with black artists.

Still, Prima repeatedly cited Armstrong as his childhood hero. There is no indication that he ever met Armstrong during their young New Orleans years. Prima said that he gazed through the windows into clubs where Armstrong played, and he saw Armstrong wail away on outdoor bandstands and funerals at which the Tuxedo Jazz Band played.

Prima did not equal Armstrong in musical artistry, but he adapted and developed his showmanship and vocal techniques from the older man. Prima, like Armstrong, was not a polished vocalist, but he was a brazen one who pressed on undaunted and seemed to reach out and hug his audience. Jazz critic Gary Giddins wrote, “ ‘I Surrender, Dear,’ which Rudy Vallee called his ‘recorded masterpiece,’ is one of the grandest examples of [Armstrong’s] vocal art, a glossary of expressive tricks. (You can project Louis Prima’s whole career from this performance.)” Indeed, Prima copied the master’s moves and singing style so well that this, combined with his dark Italian looks, caused him to be refused a job in a midtown nightclub in 1934, when he first arrived in New York City, because the owner thought he was a black performer.

Prima was a white Armstrong, with less artistic talent but more outright showmanship. And there can be no doubt that they both came from New Orleans.

4

             

 

During the 1870s, members of the Prima and Caravella families came to the United States from Sicily and settled in the section of the French Quarter known as Little Palermo. The early Primas and their children worked as laborers and operated fruit and vegetable stands. Anthony Prima was born in 1887 and became a big man in the community (literally, at close to three hundred pounds).

He was a gentle giant, a quiet man who was comfortable remaining in the background at social and family gatherings. He went to work every day—when he was twenty-six he became a distributor for Jumbo Soda Pop—and came home to his family. He was known as a soft touch for people in need and appeared not to have a temper.

Louis Caravella was a barber. In his extended family were oyster openers and sellers. His daughter Angelina met and married Anthony Prima while both were still teenagers. They moved into a house on St. Peter Street that over time became one of the more popular gathering spots in the neighborhood of Italians, African Americans, and Jews because of the food and the entertainment. Their first child was Leon, born in 1907.

“My mother-in-law was Angelina, but I called my father-in-law Pop,” said Leon’s wife, Madeline Prima, in an interview many years later. “He was big, like a Santa Claus, and very quiet. Leon took after his daddy. And Louis took after his mother. She did minstrel shows down at St. Mary’s Church, in the Quarter. She sang well. She did a lot of songs, and she loved doing it.”

In 1910, over 150,000 people living in the city could trace their family’s roots back to Italy. It was a good place to be for Italian American families. The mass lynchings were twenty years in the past, and the families were forming more organizations and making inroads into businesses. In the tight-knit communities much of the socializing revolved around the nearest church. In the Primas’ case, this was St. Ann’s, four blocks away.

Tony and Angelina’s second child, Louis Leo Prima, was born on December 7 of that year. Like Leon, he was baptized at St. Ann’s. Within the next few years he would have two sisters, Elizabeth and Marguerite.

The Prima household attracted a lot of visitors, especially on the one day of the week when, after church, neighbors looked for music and laughter. “On Sunday in an Italian home you listen to a lot of Enrico Caruso and a great deal of opera,” according to Joe Segreto, who grew up in New Orleans and became Louis Prima’s manager in 1961. “It goes well with the pasta and the wine.”

The soft-spoken Papa Anthony presided over what his wife provided to family and friends. She was a marvelous and enthusiastic cook, and relatives and friends appeared often at the dinner table. She also liked to sing and tell jokes, so visitors received the complete package.

Louis initially took after his father in being quiet and reserved, but he adored his mother and was fascinated by her showmanship. Though a thin woman, she seemed larger than life. Her opinions and directions were not to be challenged. She handled the family finances and doled out the allowances, even to her husband. Her energy and displays of emotion went beyond the house on St. Peter Street.

Her three children—Marguerite died at age three—were often part of her audience at shows she performed at St. Ann’s. Angelina sang and danced in minor productions that she created herself, among them a somewhat risqué one titled “Sadie Green: Vamp of New Orleans.” Her motto was “Always smile—people want to see you having a good time.” Louis soaked in every moment of her shows that he was allowed to watch.

Angelina had a serious side, too. She insisted that her children continue to attend school as they grew older, and not go to work full-time to help support their families as many Little Palermo children did. As someone who had taught herself to read and write, an education for her children was a priority—and not just for her sons, but for Elizabeth, too, who continued in school until she entered the convent.

Angelina was also determined that her children would make music. Given that they lived in New Orleans, where music was in the air they breathed and perhaps the water they drank, this might seem automatic. But her goal was that her children would learn to play classical music, which was more part of mainstream American culture and … well, it was high-class. Like many matriarchs in immigrant families, Angelina was determined that her offspring would be respected and do well financially. She happened to be more formidable than most, so whatever Anthony’s views might have been, she spent some of his earnings on piano lessons for Leon and Elizabeth and violin lessons for Louis. The dutiful son, Louis at seven made his first violin out of a cigar box.

They gave recitals. As Leon remembered in the documentary
Louis Prima: The Wildest!,
released in 1999, “When we were kids, I played the piano and Louis would play the violin, and Sister Maryann [Elizabeth] played the piano too.” Papa Anthony smiled benignly, but what mattered most to Louis was Angelina’s effusive approval. From an early age, he learned how to win love from his audience.

But Angelina’s vision of her children—or at least her sons, since Elizabeth found a different calling—going on to college and maybe playing with orchestras was derailed, ironically, by music. The lure of jazz and blues sweeping through the clubs and even some of the churches in New Orleans proved to be too strong for Louis and his brother.

“We used to listen to the black fellows that would play,” Leon said. “Trucks came along, and the bands on them would play.”

“We lived in what was called ‘Back-a-town,’ primarily a colored neighborhood,” Louis recalled in a 1970 interview for the New Orleans Jazz Museum. “We used to follow those colored bands on their trucks around. They would congregate in the neighborhood on Sunday afternoons. And we lived near a cemetery, so we watched all the funeral parades marching in and out.”

Louis was a little more adventurous than Leon. “Louis told me that as a child, he also went and stuck his head in the little black churches which were very near where he was raised, and see all of that excitement that was part of the worship,” said Segreto in the 1999 documentary.

Angelina didn’t stand a chance. Louis and his brother were adolescents in a musical environment that not only held a major city in its grip but was also changing the culture of the country.

“My brother Leon started it all,” Louis said in a 1974 interview. “He played piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around. I wasn’t making it with the violin because I was playing all of the ‘long hair’ stuff.”

For much of his life, Louis eschewed the “long hair” stuff and gave his audience the popular tunes they wanted. One of his slogans was “Play pretty for the people.” He was about to learn how to do so.

5

             

 

For much of its history, the music of New Orleans remained regional. That was about to change, and many of the major cities in the United States were going to experience what that hybrid music was all about. Television in most American homes was still decades away, but in the 1920s the New Orleans sound spread out because of radio and the native musicians who took their songs, performing styles, and stories on the road.

“If you look at Canal Street in the midst of a Zulu parade in the 1920s, what you’re going to see is white, black, colored, Latino, in other words, the entire spectrum of ethnicity right there on the street, waiting for King Zulu to come down, waiting for the music,” says Bruce Raeburn, head of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University in New Orleans. “The jazz bands are making music for themselves because in New Orleans music is not a luxury, like it is in most American cities. It’s a necessity. This is where New Orleans musicians excel.”

It was this spirit, or life force, as much as the brilliant music, that Louis Armstrong introduced to the rest of America. He was ready to be the messenger.

“Armstrong’s reach for urban sophistication in New Orleans had prepared him well for Chicago and New York,” wrote Thomas Brothers in
Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans.
“Was playing like this produced independently in any other southern city? It is highly unlikely. Oliver, Bechet, Armstrong, and their fellow New Orleanians sounded completely fresh when they traveled around the country because no place else had the same social and musical history, with all its layers of patronage and practice and its sequential development, the heyday of which coincided with the first twenty-one years of Armstrong’s life.”

Armstrong had played with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band for a year and then joined the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. He was also recording as a sideman to Clarence Williams and Bessie Smith as well as Oliver and Henderson. Then, for three years beginning in 1925, Armstrong made the “Hot Fives,” the nickname that has been given to a series of records with a small group that “are by general consensus the most influential of Armstrong’s accomplishments and quite likely the most significant body of work in all of jazz,” according to Will Friedwald in
Jazz Singing.
“Here he changes the face of jazz on every conceivable level. Even before 1928, Armstrong’s achievements begin to elevate from a purely musical plane to a social one, as he launches the shifts in the music that would enable it to become both a high-brow art form and an international pop entertainment.”

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