That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas by Tom Clavin Read Free Book Online Page A

these hitherto unpublicized admirers and well-wishers be discussed for what they were and what they did,” wrote Ronald Morris in
Wait Until Dark,
his study of the nightclub scene in New York. “I am referring to that legion of underworld characters known in the Broadway vernacular as mobsters and racketeers. I am also referring to their sponsorship of jazz, an activity without which the artists themselves would have shriveled up and died.”
    Prima was an especially attractive draw for mobsters. He was of fully Sicilian descent, and looked it. He and his group were one of the hottest acts in town, and he was an entertainer on his way up. Yet there is nothing to indicate that Prima courted gangsters or wanted their approval or even attention. In fact, he had a few reported run-ins with mob tough guys, and this may have been a reason why he left New York abruptly for Los Angeles. One, according to Robert Sylvester, took place at the Famous Door when a hit man known as Pretty Boy Amberg slugged Prima because he didn’t play a requested tune. Most musicians, white as well as black, knew that Duke Ellington had been the victim of a kidnapping attempt in 1931 and that he carried a .38 revolver whenever he was not onstage.
    From his days of playing in clubs in Chicago, Russell was even more familiar with the underworld. He claimed to have repaired tommy guns for mobsters and disposed of pistols for them in Lake Michigan. There must have been some truth to his assertions about close ties to the mob. According to several accounts, Prima and Russell were confronted one night by a couple of men with knives who demanded protection money. Russell contacted Lucky Luciano, who dispatched Amberg and a chauffeur to drive the two musicians from their hotels to the Famous Door and back after the show. Prima and Russell were not approached again.
    Only a year after Prima was not hired to play at Leon and Eddie’s because of the belief that he was black, Prima’s skin color gave him an advantage over many other musicians in New York—he was welcome in both of the jazz hubs in the city. He had quickly become royalty on Fifty-second Street, but he and his band were embraced uptown, too. The area in and around Harlem boasted such jazz and dance music venues as the Plantation Club, Kit Kat Club, 101 Club, Hoofer’s Club, Bert Hall’s Rhythm Club, the Cave, Brandy Horse, and others. Ellington, Count Basie, and Cab Calloway were the bandleaders mixed audiences wanted to see.
    The publication
Billboard
even referred to Prima and his “jam band” as a smaller version of “a hot Negro orchestra.” As he had wanted to do as a young teen, Prima was now dancing to the sound he loved, and he was the one creating it with the best sidemen he’d ever had. He sang and blew his horn as he jumped and strutted around the stage, hot jive movements that no audience would see Benny Goodman or Guy Lombardo or any white bandleader do, but Cab Calloway would. As Mick Jagger would do thirty years later when the Rolling Stones burst on the scene, Louis Prima sang and moved like a black entertainer filled with the combined spirits of jazz, blues, and pop.
    One woman in particular set her cap for Prima; she apparently adored him. But what intrigued him was that she had a lot of talent and was already far from just a face in the crowd. Martha Raye (born Margy Reed, from Butte, Montana) would later become known for musical comedy, and in her TV years in the 1960s and ‘70s she adopted the persona of a big-mouthed, brassy broad. But in the mid-1930s she was an aspiring actress and talented jazz singer. She became infatuated with the act at the Famous Door and attended dozens of shows.
    “To me, Martha Raye was a great singer with a natural feel for improvisation,” Arnold Shaw quoted Prima in
The Street That Never Slept.
“If she had stuck to singing, she would have been a great one.”
    As it was, she was stuck on Prima, who, like Raye, would also be criticized