{"id":85,"date":"2010-01-31T22:53:33","date_gmt":"2010-01-31T22:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/?p=85"},"modified":"2010-02-01T05:53:07","modified_gmt":"2010-02-01T05:53:07","slug":"day-12-waiting-waiting-the-louis-prima","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/archives\/85","title":{"rendered":"Day 12. Waiting, waiting … then Louis Prima."},"content":{"rendered":"

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After letting the backup run overnight two nights ago (then into the day yesterday, then into last night) I finally got to pull the Capitol Series collection of Louis Prima (with lots of Keely Smith and Sam Butera as well!) onto the computer.<\/p>\n

I get my love for Louis Prima from my grandfather. He told me as a kid that while most Italians listen to Frank Sinatra, all REAL Italians listen to Louis Prima. My grandpa was also on a quest for a live album of Louis Prima live in Lake Tahoe that featured a performance of Tony Bennet’s ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’ that wasn’t really sung, but was spoken in a thick Italian accent with confused lyrics. And I think a performance like that really shows the difference between Ol’ Blue Eyes and The Lip… there was always a deep sense of humor that Prima brought to his show. Actually – Prima saw his performances (even on disc) as a show, filled with humor and sight-gags in addition to some great playing. The sight-gags often included Prima’s ‘straight-man’ (and wife) Keely Smith, or him and Sam Butera (his long time saxophone player) battling it out with musical jabs.<\/p>\n

The ‘Capitol Collector’s Series’ disc is a great one disc set of studio recordings mostly made in the 50s and 60s. There are songs about Sputnik. There are a number of standards that turn into the signature Prima Jumpin’ Jive (‘Lazy River’, ‘I’ve Got The World On A String’), remakes of some Prima standards from his earlier days as a swing band leader (most notable ‘Sing Sing Sing (With A Swing)’) and some early mash-ups (‘Just A Gigolo \/ I Ain’t Got Nobody’ and ‘Angelina \/ Zooma Zooma’).<\/p>\n

When Tamiko and I would throw dinner parties in our older apartment living days, I would throw Louis Prima on if we were making Italian food … while the red sauce was simmering and the bottle of wine had already been opened. And I finally did find a disc of the live Tahoe show for my grandpa… it was a riot to hear, and he had the biggest smile on his face while listening to ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’. I could tell he was remembering the performances he saw back in the 60s. Just hearing it was lots of fun for me… I can’t imagine what it would have been like to see this group play live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After letting the backup run overnight two nights ago (then into the day yesterday, then into last night) I finally got to pull the Capitol Series collection of Louis Prima (with lots of Keely Smith and Sam Butera as well!) onto the computer. I get my love for Louis Prima from my grandfather. He told […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[51,50,52],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jazz","category-tamiko","tag-keely-smith","tag-louis-prima","tag-sam-butera"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88,"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/88"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realizedsound.net\/dac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}